Wait, hold the phone. We do have an episode coming, but first we have a very important announcement. Paul, can we get like one of those breaking news sort of sound cues. Perfect. The secret project that we have been mentioning for years, decades, centuries is finally available everyone. If it is possible, I ask you to stand up at your desk while you're listening to this, stand up from your couch, stand up and listen. You guys like to read? Right? Do you like cool pictures? We got you covered on both fronts with stuff they don't want you to know. That's true. That was like I love how you did that, Nold. That was like a I was like the part in the last Avengers film where Captain America goes Avengers a symbol. Yes, it is true. As people who are paid to talk, we had such a time no talking about this. Fellow conspiracy realist, we wrote a book for you, and uh, no fooling. We have been working in secret, in concert with some great folks yours, your fellow conspiracy realists included. 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We're joined as always with our super producer Paul. Mission controlled dec ands most important. You are you, You are here and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. I would like to begin today's episode, part two in a series by giving a special shout out to our fellow conspiracy realist Scott and Erica, who actually get this, Matt, no we'll know we're there. Get this. They showed up at our local chicken wing spot, which is the local that's true. Yeah, you met him, nol I did it. It was a lovely evening. It was really cool to meet them and uh this chat, and they came all the way in from Baltimore. I've never been to Atlanta before, and I think they ended up hanging with our buddy Nick Benson after you and I took off and going to a secondary location. Hopefully they had really nice time. Yeah. Well, shout out to you all and thanks for dropping by again. You are the most important part of the show, specifically you and we are especially eightful for every conspiracy realist in these troubled times. This is an episode where we answer a question. I went on Twitter earlier to check about this. This is an episode where we answer the question what is swift? What is the swift banking system? I mean, let's be honest. Money makes the world go round. Right. As the conflict in Eastern Europe continues, Uh, collectively, we saw actions that we have predicted would come to pass in earlier episodes. And this is the kind of show where it's not always good news when we're correct. We were right about sanctions and we were so far correct about context. Look, NATO, the US and other forces went pretty hard on the sanction paint. They drove Russia's already struggling domestic economy into a tailspin. Not a lot of people are investing in rubles. Recently, the global public learned of this other type of economic warfare, and it's something people outside of the world of geopolitics and finance hadn't really heard of. It's swift. It's an acronym. It's a big, big deal, long story, short, and retaliation for the invasion of Ukraine. Russia just got kicked out of this thing called swift. But what is it, why does it matter, and perhaps more importantly, why were some European countries so hesitant to pull the plug? Here are the facts. If we want to talk about swift, we have to talk about international banking. Everybody drinks some coffee. We gotta stay awake for this one. So a lot of people, including ourselves, heard about sanctions against Russia. Like anything in geopolitics, sanctions are not particularly new and they are very much not easily lifted. Uncle Sam for instance, is still salty at Cuba and has had embargoes and sanctions on that island nation for many decades. Now. What happened with sanctions recently is that the West was deploying further sanctions against Russia because they had already done so under previous world leadership, but they started describing something as a nuclear option quote unquote uh, And the nuclear option was the sanction that is very difficult to walk back, which was kicking them out of the sphere of international banking. Globally connected finance networks are, in a very real way, love it or hate it, the backbone of modern civilization. Maybe not the best term to just throw around the nuclear option, being that there is in fact an actual nuclear option. Um, just putting that which is also being mentioned back on that enormous table or one of the enormous tables that left the massive, boring table with a hundred feet separating Poutin from his shivering Toady's right. And to be candid, uh, this is still hopefully a distant possibility. I think, if I had to guess, I think the first for a would be something like a quote unquote nuclear test. Um. But but Russian forces have acquired, invaded, and they are occupying Chernobyl as we speak. So yeah, so yeah. The global West and the innocent people of Ukraine, and honestly the innocent citizens of Russia are very worried about this. Stuff. But let's go back to the banking things. So it's boring and it's kind of a feature, not a bug. You know. It's it's good to those in power for banking to be a snooze fest. But it's weird if you think about it. Imagine, out of all the things that countries always fight about throughout history to the present day, there's one thing they could all finally agree on, and it was so it was so lame. They all got together and said, we need ways to move money. Al Right, ideology aside, guys, you know, cultural what knots and what about is ms aside? We gotta we got tabs to pay, right, Uh? That is that is what swift comes from. Like, think about this, Like Matt noll Win's the last time any of us sent a physical check. I bet we remember, because I bet it's rare. I mean it was so rare that I think I had to go to the bank and get a counter check because I don't have a checkbook to my name. Um, I just don't. Well, I actually have several checkbooks in here. Guys, whoever they spoke, they're not No, it's just the old accounts that I've had I've had the same account and it's just changed banks as bigger banks keep consuming the smallest um. But I did use one not long ago, and it was just to pay a company that came over the house to help me with some repairs. And it's it's a weird thing because then you have to wait for everything to occur before you get confirmation from your own bank that money has actually changed hands, and I don't know it. It It becomes a strange thing. We're so used to having immediate transfers when we're banking online in some way or just using you know, an app or something we as consumers, but banks have also become very much accustomed to that. You know, who does use check still is Uncle Sam. You know, I think the most often I handle a check is when I get a refund um from the government. But now those obviously those can be done direct deposit as well. But it's interesting, like, you know, checks seems so antiquated, but like there are machines at grocery stores for example, where I think still some older folks do use checks where they scan them through and and it scans that barcode and it does happen more quickly, almost almost the same rate. I believe as a debit transaction the global consumer from the individual to the state level actor. Uh is pretty much on on board with the old jay Z line. I got no passion, I got no patience, and I hate waiting. So yeah, Like, imagine living your life without electronic access to money. It is possible, but it is increasingly impractical in the modern day. I mean think about it, and a lot of people do. Think about this. What if you would only handle those physical representations of money in specific amounts. You can only write the check, you have to wait for the check to clear. You can only use cold, hard cash or back in earlier days, you can only use whatever weird thing is the physical currency of your community, right, like people talk about gold and the gold standard. Um. You know, humans have been using crazy stuff as currency as representations of wealth for such a long time. Peppercorns, big rocks, That's a true story. There was a community that like, use big rocks as money. And I'm only laughing at that because I also laugh at the idea of the dollar. And now as we're increasingly moving toward abstract representations of value and wealth. Money, by the way, is only um only an equation of labor over time basically, and that's an a political observation. What what we see is like when when I'm asking when's the last time we touched the physical check, it sounds like for most people it is not necessarily a normal occurrence, right. The most normal occurrence is to at least in the US, is to receive a check, like you said, NOL from maybe a state or federal entity. Um, it's over payment on a credit card or something like that. They'll issue you a check for like eight dollars since and you guys, you guys know, I love culture jamming and I love being a problem I have. I have at least one credit card that I just I continually have a zero balance, and every so often I just pay them five dollars because as I know, eventually they're going to have to waste time and effort sending me that five dollars back. It's weird. It's not saying any good person. I'm not saying I'm a good person by any means. But I like the culture jamming. I like the asymmetric warfare of it. So for a lot of folks, especially our younger conspiracy realists, it may be difficult to remember the last time you wrote a physical check. You may be thinking of one of your elders in your family, or you may be thinking of your parents making a big purchase right like a house or a car, etcetera. Surprise, surprise, the system is not that different at the top. People don't like waiting. They have no passion, they have no patience. You know. This is where something called the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication comes into play. Street name SWIFT, cool name, what is it? It talks with so much money on planet money put it really well uh MPR podcast where they called it WhatsApp or as you pointed out, off airmat a signal uh communication platform for banks. It's going to surprise a lot of people to realize that SWIFT itself is not a government entity. It is not, you know, a body of the United Nations, nor is it a body of NATO, nor is it a body of the European Union. It's essentially a ton of countries and private banks that got together in May of ninety three and said we got a team up, and they rose in response two problems before they before SWIFT came into play. And we'll explain a little bit more about what swift is. Before it came into play, international financial transactions from individuals, from institutions, from countries, any any of those entities communicating together, those usually took place over a thing called tell X and talk about feeling old Telex is a precursor to something that's also antiquated nowadays, the facts machine. Remember, guys, in our old office, we had a fact machine and it was just the most It was such a paying in the key star to use it. Well, not only that, just occasionally I'll just make that crazy modem sound. It's a little jarring, you know, Paul, can we get the modem sound? There? It is? There, it is. It's interesting, Ben, you and I were having last night and talking about just the the very interesting history of data transfer and like how ultimately we still use a lot of technologies that are very low fi, like like in co did within that sound is is the data that is the sound of the data like going from through the lines being interpreted by the other side. It's all in a sound um and that's essentially what telex was doing, but again even more low fi. It was a precursor to the fact machine. If we can imagine what that would be like, as antiquated as the fax machine seems. Yeah, so telex is essentially communicating via telephone lines, you know what I mean. It's a descendant in some ways of the telegraph, right, it's in the name. But the issue with telex was that it was controlled in a way, uh, such that European countries and banks were increasingly concerned that a private entity heaven forfenned, God forbid, an American private entity might control the global flow of money. This was based in the actions of an outfit called First National City Bank, you know it today as City Bank with spelled C I T I. So it sounds dangerous, Yeah, it's quirky. And the Europeans, the old money thought that this bank was getting a little too big for its Yankee bridges. Uh. They also, I don't want to ding the Europeans here. They also had a really valid point with this concern, and it's a fascinating thing. So telex senders had to transcribe every transaction. They had to write it out in sentences by hand, and then those sentences had to be interpreted and then executed by the person on the other end of the you know, the can and string line that is telex. What this meant is that it led to this so interes state. I think I'm supposed to say it led to a lot of errors and it had slower processing time. But when we're talking about errors, what we're really talking about is corruption, often on the part of the powerful people who are powerful enough to get away with one of those old Dave Chappelle, I'm sorry, officer, I didn't know. I couldn't do that kind of things in court. So a lot. So it is I am certain that several financial shenanigans that were premeditated and purposeful executed via tl X, where later uh sort of dropped down to just Bob Ross happy accidents, right, and those people didn't go to jail anyhow. So the Europeans have real concerns. Swift winds the day. It is a co op, it is not a government body. It is, as we speak, the current global standard for financial messaging. We don't have to get two into the weeds, but we should describe a bit about how this mechanism works. What do we say, what what do we mean when we say it's like signal or telegram or WhatsApp for banks, What do we mean? What does that all mean? It's a messaging system, but it's not just going between you know, different countries, different languages. It's going between currencies. You can make exchanges of all different sorts. Really, think of one you can exchange it through Swift if you are a member financial institution. It's kind of odd to think about. If you imagine all of the transactions that occur, maybe automated payments that happen from your bank account or credit card payments, little things you buy during a day, if you're gonna get lunch or something, You've got a certain number of transactions that are that are occurring. Now imagine that on like a countrywide sale or an entire bank scale. Think about a bank like Bank of America. Let's just say how many transactions are actually occurring throughout the day for that one bank, or just think about any bank, whichever one you use. There are billions of transactions occurring across the world that go through Swift. And it's a single day. Yeah, every day, every moment, it's just happening. Money is just transferring all over the planet, and Swift is the thing that's carrying that. It's the jet stream that all of those transactions are flying through across the world. Yeah. Yeah, think about this, like, have you ever wired money to someone overseas or someone in a different country. For many of us in the audience today, the answer is yes, and some of us have had money wired to us for one reason or another. It's pretty easy nowadays in many parts of the world. And that's all due to Swift. Right now, there are more than eleven thousand global Swift member institutions M minus eight that's you know, eight Russian bigs. Uh. They sent an average of forty two million messages per day through this network alone in one which actually is uh a little over an eleven percent increase in frequency from Yeah. Fine, okay, throwing a lot of numbers out there, but what the hell is swift exactly. It's not a financial institution, is the thing. It's not like you know, your Bank of America or what have you. It's not like the Federal Reserve. It is a messaging network that all these institutions Matt Noel and I are describing used to securely transmit information and then instructions about a bank transaction through a standardized system of codes. So like if you ever look on the back of a book. Uh, you see an I, S B N, Right, that's a standardized coding system describing a specific book. Or if you are in a grocery store in many parts of the world, if you look at a mass produced food product, you turn it around and then you'll usually see a barcode a U P C. Swift is sort of like that, but is much more secure. It Also Swift also doesn't hold or transfer money itself, and it has no clients accounts. It just facilitates the movement of money, and that's incredibly important to the world's most important and powerful groups of people, all of them, all of them? Or what's like area oldman meme everyone, He's like screaming everyone everything whatever. Uh, I think of Ron Swanson when the all of your bacon and eggs. Yes, yes, So just like the reason we're citing these memes and these pop culture moments is because it's not hyperbole. All of these institutions, all of these countries would be crippled without access to Swift, including the United States. Uh. They're earlier examples by the way of people getting kicked off Swift, the most notably Iran. We'll get to that in a second. So what they do we can blaze through this part. Swift gives each and every financial organization its own unique code. It has like eight characters or leven characters. You can find uh, pretty approachable and accurate breakdown on how to read those codes if you go to places like Investipedia. We don't have to go into it right now, but let's just look just so you know, if you want to, if you want to be the code whisperer of Swift, if that is important to you, you can figure out how to read the things. The best way to explain why Swift is important is probably through example. Let's say you're Let's say you're you're Matt Frederick. You're in New York. Matt, You're in New York and you have to send money to Noel and Noel is in Italy and Matt, yeah nice, and Matt you are. Just so we can spin out this thought experiment, Matt, you are you are sending money to knowl because he needs to put down a deposit on the place that you guys are staying for your Italy adventure. Right, uh, And so you go to your Bank of America, your Wells Fargo your chase whatever, and you just walk into New York and you want to you wanna get this money to our guy. But our guy, being based in Italy, now uses a different bank. He doesn't use Bank of America, he doesn't use Wells Fargo or Waukovia I think was the older version of that. I just like the name Wacovia because it sounds like a weird cough kvia. But I'm also not. I'm also not I'm sending him US dollars. You're saying US dollars, Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So how do we make those US dollars from Pacovia turn into euro in an Italian bank? It's because the Swift. You walk into your local branch there in the big Apple, and then you say, I need to send blah blah blah blah blah blah, and then the banks make it so easy. They use Swift to communicate. So via this messaging platform, you're like, we got this guy Matt, and he's with us, and there's this other system that this guy Nola's with, and we need to make this money. Makes sense in this regard, you could kind of say that Swift is like a secret language for banks. It works because pretty much every bank speaks it. It's a common financial tongue. At this point, it's very fair and we we might need to break for an ad soon. But at this point there's a good question, why should I care? Why? Why why are you guys telling me about banking? Uh? Well, imagine your own daily expenses. Imagine that while Matt and Noel are planning their new life in Italy, I am walking up to an A t M and I find out it's out of order. That's happened to everyone in the West at some point, right you, You just want to draw out a couple of bucks in cold hard cash and the A t M is out of service. But imagine that happens to you everywhere, Just like with our case DA example in the sanctions episode, your card doesn't work, no one will accept it. You have been removed from the ability to send or receive anything at all. This is the state of a country without swift access. You can have all the resources in the world, it doesn't matter what they are. It could be gas, it could be lumber, it could be tin, it could be titanium, it could be wheat. You won't be able to move it outside of your border, without physical transactions, without writing a check, right, and when's the last time countries trusted each other without you know, sending over gold or a massive peppercorns or whatever happens to be invoked. To be fair, there are some competitors out there, but swift is by far top in its class. That's what all the hubbub is about. The global international order has, in retaliation for the Ukraine invasion, removed Russia's ability to speak the common tongue of global money. And there is a phrase for this that is much more familiar than the kind of arcane ins and outs that we just discussed, and phrases economic warfare. When a pause for a moment, we'll be back after a word from our sponsors. Here's where it gets crazy. Economic warfare. Uh uh, that's a little more exciting than just saying swift. Right now, if you turn on your television, if you turn on your radio, if you look on Reddit, if you go to any major new his source, you will probably notice that the world is currently engaging in economic warfare. And there is a real hot land war occurring in Eastern Europe right now. It's the biggest land war that has happened in that area in decades, and it really, uh sucks. It sucks for everybody, and it's scary, and I mean, really think about it. Russia is engaging with Ukraine right now. It's a nuclear power. Many of the NATO countries have nuclear capability. Everybody is on high alert. And the lever that's being pulled right now by the West, by NATO, by all, well it's not necessarily NATO, but by the West and by the United States is is economic attacking the wallets, attacking the banks. Um, I'm scared. This sucks. Let's talk about it. There, go. Yeah, it's true. It's a it's a dangerous balancing act. What you're seeing right now as we are recording on March four two is everybody trying not to be the first person to push the button on the bomb. Right It's it's a tremendously insanely high stakes game of chicken. And the innocent people of Ukraine, of Russia, of the entire region are caught in between these world powers. So the question is, how do we stop an invasion without sending in NATO? How do you stop the nukes from launching? The calculus that NATO countries eventually arrived at after a lot of dithering, was to cut off Russia's military ambitions at the source. We don't need to, they thought, We don't need to um bother with testing mutually assured destruction. If we can just remove Russia's ability to pay for war. The inability to use this messaging platform Swift to communicate with other banks outside of Russia's border will severely hinder Russia's ability to access the money they need to continue the assault in Ukraine. It's an interesting strategy. It is not a new one by any means, and the way it's being reported in the US bears a little bit, a little bit more scrutiny. I would say only a certain number of Russian banks have been given the boot. I think they're about seven or eight. We're talking um banks that would be unfamiliar to a lot of people, not in Europe, a lot of people in the UI US. You're gonna you're gonna hear like a cavalcade of names. You know what, let's do it. Who's got the best Russian, who's got the best Russian voice? Um? You bro ah um. I did not mean to volunteer myself for the front line. I'll give you a couple of these. There's a TV which is it may actually be recognizable to you. I've seen images of that before Russia. There's a two creety no of him, no of it, humbank. Sure, there's a bunch of those that I'm not gonna be able to pronounce correctly. You can find a list of these banks all over the place. UH recommend you checking it out. I mean, you know, look, here's the thing. I mean, we know from our last episode and just from paying attention and just knowing what we know about Putin in general, that dude's pretty calculated character and he is, you know, been planning this invasion for a long time. Um, we have seen they're likely some setbacks and that he may be overplayed his hand little bit, but he is maintaining the line that everything is going on schedule and everything's going exactly as by his planned. Um don't you think he would have seen these sanctions coming and had a contingency plan, you know, I mean like it just seems to me like it's just gonna piss him off rather than actually hinder his advance. And really it's just trickling down to screwing over the average Russian citizens. Well yeah, and also we're going to talk about blowback here because economic warfare is more unpredictable than the policy walks in the boffins would have the average person believe. So okay, here's here's the myth busting. Right, Only a certain proportion of Russian banks were excluded from SWIFT as of March second, two days ago. As we record, the banks that Matt mentioned are given ten days to wind down their SWIFT operations. And you can read this, this is not scuttle butt, it's not rumor. The exceptions to that rule are banks that handle energy payments, are banks that help facilitate the movement of gas and oil and fossil fuels. So why is this dangerous? Well, the issue is that revoking SWIFT access does not just hurt Russia. It hurts the Russian economy most immediately and most severely. But China leans heavy on Russia for trade goods. As we mentioned at the top of the show, it's important to remember that Russia itself is a massive resource exporter, right, and there are a lot of countries in the African continent in the Middle East that depends upon wheat in particular cereal grains. The UK and the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, I should say the United Kingdom in the Netherlands also depend on Russia for a lot of trade goods. The world is interconnected now in ways that are almost impossible for one person alone to envision, to fully comprehend. And in a world of interconnected trade, bleep me here, Paul rolls downhill. There is a domino effect. This means that Europe and the US may also be adversely affected. If you live in the US, you may remember that a lot of the domestic opposition two conflict in the Middle East, US involvement in the Middle Eastern conflicts came about when people started seeing gas prices rise. That's what it took. It wasn't it wasn't acknowledging the tax dollars are paying for weapons of war. It wasn't acknowledging the innocent people are dying. It's that moment where someone goes, what four dollars Well, that's the line, you know what I mean? Because because now it's me, it's different because it's me, and it's about to go a lot higher than four dollars. Um. Yeah, it's it's it's pretty scary because if you think about how much oil Russia produces and exports two countries across the world, in countries like Germany who are attempting to take steps to mitigate that issue, uh of like cutting off the oil that they get from Russia. But it's it's gonna get rough. And again we're talking about green, We're talking about all kinds of commodities. If you cut them out of the game, there's gonna be more. I mean, there is demand. There's a huge demand for things like green, you know, food, and the ability to drive vehicle is around. Um, it's gonna call it's gonna raise prices across the board and it already is. And we drive, drive to go get gas right now, try it. See what you're You're gonna come away spending quite a bit of money. Um. And the scary thing for me is that we just talked about this. I don't even remember which episode it was, but we just discussed how inflation is happening all around us, especially here in the US, that we we notice it most most immediately because at the grocery store, right it is at the gas station, Um, consumer prices. Listen to this rose seven point five percent in the past twelve months. Yeah, yeah, up to January. And I love the point you're making their matt because the the fossil fuel rise, right, the rise in demand for fossil fuel. Ultimately, we'll fall on anything you buy that is in any way of fact by fossil fuel. So we're talking about trucking, we're talking about cargo ships, we're talking about keeping the lights on your house. You know, your energy bills, et cetera. This this hits globally. That's that's the thing. Russia produces about ten million barrels of oil every day. That's about ten of current global consumption. And analysts like people who spend their lives studying the fossil fuel industry are concerned that oil prices could surge to and twenty dollars of barrel thanks to this conflict. And again, when we talk about resources, we have to emphasize people's lives are more important. Right. You can replace the resource, you cannot replace a human life. They are individual, distinct and unique. But people like Patrick de Haan, who is the head of petroleum analysis at a place I love the name of this place, gas Buddy said, Gas buddy. So so our gas buddies are saying that a move to per barrel of oil, and listen to our previous episodes on big oil to figure out what a barrel means. Uh, This rise to could increase US gas prices to four dollars a gallon or an excess of four dollars a gallon. We mentioned Rush is also the biggest wheat exporter. It's a huge producer of precious metals like palladium, aluminum, nickel. We also said Ukraine has a lot of uranium, titanium steel. What we're saying is when those operations of resource movement and allocation are disrupted, it hits everyone. There's not there you can aim uh something like economic warfare. You can aim it at an initial country, but especially now, it's gonna be like um saying you want to poison one part of the ocean, because the ocean is its own inextricably connected thing. So that's part of why that's part of why Russia is only partially removed from swift because the people of Western Europe need to not freeze, honestly, and that's also part of why the US called it a nuclear option. If we're gonna wax poetic. Let's just say the quiet part out loud. A long long time ago, Uncle Sam figured out that there are times where you can use US dollars the same way you would use bullets or missiles. You can weaponize the dollar. We talked about this in our petro dollar episode. Right like the global reserve currency, the swift is the common tongue or the the WhatsApp or the signal for banks. But when it comes to currency, the US dollar is the most widely accepted currency in the world. If you have ten bucks, you have, like uh, an old school ten dollar bill from the United States, your odds of someone letting you use that to pay for something or buy something are much higher than almost any other currency. You know. That's that's just the reality. It is economic dominance. It is an economic hedgemon, and the US has tremendous privilege as the sole issuer of the world's de facto reserve currency. They use it as a carrot stick tool in global policy all the time. Pretty much every place on Earth excepts cash, even even countries that are um fundamentally opposed to the United States. We'll say, okay, burn the US to the ground. But we will we will accept dollars if you have dollars, no checks, So back ineen Um. The Obama administration blocked UH several Russian banks from swift um as the relationship between our country and Russia began to deteriorate. UM. Trump, on the other hand, threatened to lock China out of the dollar system who failed to follow UN sanctions on North Korea. We know that Trump was very vocal and his opposition into China and UH a little bit on the cozy side when it came to Russia. Yeah, shout out to the comproment. I still wonder what's in that steal dossier? You know, Well that's that's the rumor, but it hasn't been confirmed. You know. Also, we are in the midst of a new kind of war. You know, it's very much a war of information. It's taken place on two separate fronts every war now. So the these sanctions do affect the economy. In Prime Minister Medyev said that sanctions resulted in a loss of tens of billions of dollars of value. So it hits hard. But we have to talk a little bit more about future and past concerns. What swift means to Russia, what Swift means to Ukraine, what Swift means to Europe, and ultimately what Swift means to you and what these what the fallout of this will be, because just like a bomb, there is fallout. It's on the way we returned. Make no mistake, we're not being hyperbolic. Uh. Economic warfare is not a missile or a bomb. But this removal from swift, even though it's it's partial, it does remain a weapon of war and it functions as one. In fact, you can make the argument that it's more dangerous in some ways because it's less easy to control, which makes it therefore less predictable. So if this is such a powerful weapon, why did some European countries hesitate to make this move? I mean, I love what you pointed out earlier. All yes, Russia was well aware of the fallout. Nobody in this conversation is particularly thick or dunderheaded. Russia has been con like attempting to mitigate the possible damage of this economic warfare for quite some time, and as we discussed in our previous episode, they're the ones with their hands on the faucet for much of Europe's energy supply, so members of Russia, members of Russian Parliament, I should say, I even said as much. They said, Look, if Russia is taken off of swift, then you Europe, I'll have to find your gas somewhere else, and that could spell disaster for millions of innocent people. As a matter of fact, as we're recording now, the you, the United States is actively selling energy fossil fuels to Europe at a lower rate to try to get in front of the idea of Europe without energy. And we also know that this has inspired further pushes toward alternative energy in Europe because they don't want to be hooked on the gas, right, they don't want to be addicted to gas the same way that in the in Iran, or in North Korea or in Russia. Their perspective is they don't want to be addicted to the US dollar. Russia. Russia has taken some some pretty proactive steps to try to get in front of this. Everybody is trying to predict the next move and everybody is trying to sort of indemnify themselves against the consequences. Does that make sense? It does, And Russia is no stranger to sanctions. They know what happened in you know, around two thousand and eight with Georgia, in two thousand fourteen with Crimea, and they actually started making moves, probably thinking in long game terms as they tend to do, that this stuff might happen again. We might end up being kicked out of Swift at some point. So they started I you know, I guess you can call it a homegrown Swift. They got Swift e with it and created this thing called spfs UM. It's the system for Transfer of Financial Messages, a very similar thing to use, and they've got several hundred members of that thing already, I just internally within Russia that they and a couple other member states outside. So they've got something they can use that isn't Swift. While it isn't the same number of connections and the same level of power, it's still functions, right. So it means that you can, if you are Russia, you can say, uh, you know, Swift's not really popping for us right now, but have you heard of spf S. That's the new kid on the block. They also purchased a lot of gold Wait. I can't say a ton for non Americans. It's really common for us to say a ton when we mean a lot of something. But it is very much not an accurate expression. I think if you look at it, when you say a ton of people. We pointed this out on air earlier, a ton of people is like twelve to thirteen people. It's not a lot of people. But depend the other way. Oh, Matt, I see you look at it up, all right, So I was gonna look. I was gonna look it up. It was any just like, what is two thousand pounds to kilograms and then we could convert that anyway. Don't know, we should do it. It's just a lot. It's a lot, that's what we mean. So there's a old school analog solution to moving away from the dollar, which is you accumulate treasure, just like a dragon in a fantasy novel. You get a horde of gold and you sit on it, and then when people say, hey, we want this thing, or you say hey I want this thing, you just pay them in something shiny and metallic before ending their purchase program. At the onset of the COVID pandemic, Russia was the world's largest central bank buyer of gold. The Central Bank of Russia. Think of it like the government's bank. Essentially, the Central Bank of Russia bought four point three billion dollars worth of gold in just over the year of June, did June alone, And it turns out they've been buying tons of gold way way before that. They would put smiled to shame and mass mass quantities, mass quantities therapist. That's way better than a ton. Nailed it. So at the same time they're doing this, they have been aggressively selling off their US debt holding um. As we discussed earlier, debt for a country is way different than debt for regular folks, you know what I mean. At times it is quite beneficial for a country to have some sort of international debt, like other countries buying up United States debt actually shores up and strengthens the status of the US dollar. But this this leads so we're getting in the weeds. But this leads us to something really important. Need to know. We need to be aware that everything is a precedent in the world of geopolitics. Very very very few things are one offs. The weaponization of swift does have a press. In earlier years, it has been applied Iran for instance, um and and other similar financial sanctions. So it comes from a precedent, but it also sets a precedent for future conflicts. We say it all the time. Now, nothing happens in a vacuum, experts economic analysts again, people who spend their lives studying this. Folks like Peter Schiff are well aware of this. They are warning that other countries are watching how the US handles its economic power during this conflict. And I wanted to pull a quotation from him at the tenth Amendment Center dot com where he notes the importance of the other countries watching. Quote, China is looking on thinking, well, Russia's doing something America doesn't want. They're getting sanctioned. What if we do something with a ket doesn't want as well? Uh, we get sanctioned. They pull the dollar out from under us. Let's go out from under the dollar on our own. Let's not leave this weapon in the hands of the US that can be turned against us at any time. And this, of course can create, you know, the potential for future economic standoffs in which the United States does not have nearly as much of the upper hand as in past exchanges. China, of course, is one of the largest foreign holders of US debt, and if China were to dump a significant amount of m U S treasuries, it could potentially have a catastrophic effect on the bond market and make it very, very difficult for United States to finance this massive debt. We always hear about, you know what if China calls in instead. I mean, it's not as simple as that. It's not as cut cut and dry as that. Or if they like flood the market with you know, um, with with the U S currency, it could like cause you know, drastic fluctuations and in the value of the dollar. They do have a significant amount of power and leverage in this, But some of these scenarios are you know, there's there's just only a seed of truth to some of these more like extreme how scenarios of how China could play this card. Yeah, well, said man, because the the issue here is that tanking Russia's economy has clear repercussions for other connected economies, and ultimately the majority of world economies are connected in some way, some much more than others. Sure, but ultimately there are ripple effects, there are unforeseen consequences, and the future right now is yet to be seen. As we said, as we said in a previous episode, not even DARPA can predict it yet. But this sort of warfare does come with an unavoidable, inescapable tragic costs, and it's one that goes far past bank king codes. It goes past like piles of dragon gold and piles of printed cash or whatever. It's this people in power, and this is true. People in power can often circumvent sanctions, they can preserve their own personal quality of life. But people living in those punished countries, living in those affected countries already typically are already not going to have a voice in the policy or decisions of their government. I think that gets you a one way ticket to a Russian prison these days. But they are going to have to bear the burden of skyrocketing prices, widespread shortages, and economic chaos. And you have to be aware again, like if you if you have any contacts in Russia, uh, you are well aware of just how profound the propaganda game is there. Like they're very good at it. There is no alternative to their Fox News, just to be clear, right and right now, there isn't because the last independent, one of the very last independent Russian TV stations just went off the air, and you can actually watch a video right now of the last broadcast where the last things said we're no war. Yeah exactly. That's a great point, Matt, because again, these are innocent people working with the information they have right and the world is watching. We have not one thing I want us to get to in a future episode is something that Noel Matter I think we're all fascinated by, is the viability of cryptocurrency in this regard, right in terms of getting around some of these uh these sanctions, at the very least in terms of the way the military and the government might be able to kind of keep running without some of these foreign um go betweens in terms of moving money just so, just so. And crypto is not quite the wild West it was back in the day several years ago, but there's still there's still a flexibility and liquidity that doesn't it doesn't quite occur with your hordes of gold or with your hordes of currency. Still in the meantime, the clock is ticking, giants are fighting on the chessboard. Want to give a shout out to our fellow conspiracy realist uh Steph, who just wrote to us about our episode on the Great Game and about the importance to world powers of controlling this part of the globe while these giants fight in their Great Game, innocent people with no influence on that game, our pain and blood and treasure for every single move made. So when you hear of things like swift banking system right, oh, nuclear option on a sanction, there's more to the story, more to these headlines. As we record today. The situation is ongoing and we're not sure what the future will hold. But we do know, Matt, We do know that, we do know that apparently Russia's op set is pretty sloppy. They got compromised, wasn't it just earlier this week, some some classified Russian intel was discovered. It was abandoned, and it was like the war will last fifteen days? Oh yeah. Some There are a couple of things like that that I've seen online. I haven't been able to fully verify any of it, but documents and statements that were published early, or or published at a time when maybe they were like scheduled or something when Russia believed that they were going to be able to clear victory or some thing, you know, kind of like the banner on the battleship. Um. And then that last one was very weird. It was like an outline. Yeah, here it'll be fifteen days. This, this is what's going to happen. This is our plan. Um. And like I said earlier too, I mean he has come out saying no no setbacks here, all on military operation, right. That's how he refers to everything's on schedules, accomplished. It was I was trying to keep his subtle. Um, everything we've set out to accomplish has thus far been accomplished on schedule. Uh. And I think that fifteen days is still what he's kind of thinking about. What are we eight days in now again? Mark four two? Uh? Yeah. So we want to hear from you, folks, especially if you are in country, if you're in Ukraine, if you are in Russia, if you are in Belotus, if you are anywhere in the area, if you have family in the area. We also want to hear about your conversations with your family members, with your friends, with your loved ones. Please be safe and help us share this story with the world and let us know what more people need to know about the context, about the specifics the rabbit holes regarding this stuff. We want to dive in. We want to dive in with you. And speaking of rabbit holes, there are several we didn't go down. We we mentioned Crypto, but we haven't examined it yet. That may be a future episode. There's something else that we need to talk about, at least briefly. Well, something called Cybos. Yeah, Cybos. You may not know this. Ben and Ol and I go to a thing called podcast Movement every year. We've mentioned it before in the show. It's a conference, right, their conferences for many things, many industries. Cybos is the SWIFT Conference that occurs every year, and it has been occurring since n D eight and every year a a except for I believe in maybe every year they pick a city and a bunch of the SWIFT member banks and organizations and associates get together and they talk about the future of international banking, of banking technology, and all different sorts of innovations that are occurring within the sector. To me, it feels very much like a I don't want to use the term Illuminati, but it's definitely an elite group of the world's most powerful financial institutions and individuals that run those institutions where they get together and they share knowledge, and to me, it's just feels I don't know, like maybe the closest I've seen to an illuminati specifically, because it's the it's the money, it's the people who control the money. It doesn't matter how powerful you are. If you can't move money and buy things or sell things, then what are you gonna do? You just have a bunch of it, just have, like you said, a pile of treasure that just sits there that can't be converted into weapons or hypersonic missiles. Well said, let's email them. Let's email and let's see what they say about two in Amsterdam. And I love what you're saying there, because we're talking about the important the importance of gate keeping. Right like Facebook with the metaverse, they know that this next iteration or this next evolution of online experiences occurring, and they said, why don't we We don't have to buy the house, why don't we own the door? Right? And Swift, in a very real way doesn't own the house, but they do own the door. And I think there's a compelling argument that owning the door is more important at some point. Oh, we also should mention Swift is a for profit entity. This is not an altruistic thing. They get a vague, They get a vague off of all those you know, millions of transactions. But to me, Ben, in my mind, Swift is Swift is the private club. It's the Piedmont Driving Club. It's the um you know, the placement, It's the placement, it's war Warse investments. It's where people get together. They pay they pay money to get in to become a member, and then they all get to talk to each other. Right, to me, it's an equivalent. Swift is a private country club kind of thing, or a golf club where just the biggest banking institutions get to chill and know each other's families and send each other presence in the form of billion dollar transactions. Yes, yeah, it's a different world, you know, to paraphrase the old sitcom here in the States, we do need to collectively be more aware of these things that happened, right, of these things that happened regularly, because you may not know the ins and outs of it, but they affect you. You know. I'd be very interested, Matt to hear about someone's experience visiting, uh, visiting this conference, this podcast movement for swift What are you? I know, but we didn't get to go. What were you even doing in two thousand and four, that's before the three of us met, you know, so if he goes out of the country, actually that at that time. But uh, but um, I say, we email it, maybe just request like their press packet or something like that. It's got to be interesting to read now. And with that with an adventure ahead, with sincere um concern and well wishes where the innocent people are being affected by the largest land war in Europe in quite some time. Um, we wanted to end with just just a little thing to make this not so depressing. I thought it was funny. I found it on our Facebook group. Here's where it gets crazy. And someone get this. Someone got me. Someone pointed out something dumb I did, which you know, the three of us know each other very well. It's not hard to point out dumb things I do at least four Nolan Matt. But but this, this guy got me, all right, Tom h says quote. Ben seemed to think the phrase private social club was ironic. In today's Listener Mail episode, Ben Bullin guess a private social club much like any Facebook group that requires permission to join, and only members can see the post of well done, Tom, you got me. I thought I thought about that too, I got got a good job top. I just thought that would give us a chuckle. And I think it's okay for me to point it out because I'm the one who is wrong. But we do have a Facebook group. We try to be easy to find online. You can find us on Instagram as well. You should tune in, I think, to our social media because we have some pretty cool stuff on the way. We do indeed, and you can hear all about it, as Ben said, on Instagram or on Facebook, or on Twitter or on YouTube. You can find us on those under the handle of conspiracy Stuff and Instagram is conspiracy Stuff Show. But wait, there's more. You want to give us a telephone call, leave us a tale of some sort and audio message admissive. Well you can do that too, Yes, call us. Our number is one eight three three std w y t K. When you leave a message, please give yourself a cool nickname. You've got three minutes say whatever you'd like in that three minutes. Please and lude whether or not you give us permission to use your name and voicemail on the air. If you've got more to say than can fit in that three minutes. Instead, why not consider sending us a good old evolution of the telex and email. We are conspiracy at i heart radio dot com. Stuff they don't want you to know is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.