Welcome back to the breakdown. An everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW.

The breakdown is distributed by CoinDesk. Welcome back to the breakdown. It is Wednesday, April 22nd, and boy, oh boy, do we have a good one

today. We are all of us living in fast forward right now. Things that we thought unthinkable

just weeks or months ago are now normal and are now being preceded and followed by even more

unimaginable things. One of the goals of this show of the breakdown is to try to contextualize

these incredibly fast-moving events, right? To help you place them in a framework that makes them

make more sense, right? That isn't just random vagaries of

the universe and the economy and all that sort of stuff. This requires having guests who can speak

not only to Bitcoin and crypto, and not only to the larger markets in their current setup,

but the larger historical context, including the key

events that got us to where we are today. My guest absolutely crushes on that front.

Luke Graman is the founder of Forest from the Trees, which is a macro-thematic research firm.

He has decades of experience in macro research. He has been featured on

real vision, on macro voices, basically everywhere you'd expect to hear really interesting,

thoughtful, big picture macro thinkers. And in this epic episode, we go deep and give you a serious

70-year context on the dollar system, the role of the Fed.

Basically, everything that helps understand, helps explain how we got to where we are today

and what might come next. So we go through the Bretton Woods system and the decision to have

a U.S. global reserve currency system where the rest of the world's

currencies were pegged to the dollar and the dollar was pegged to gold. We move on to the rise of

the petro dollar in the 70s and why it was a product of losing or at that time feeling like we

were losing the Cold War. We talk about the financialization of commodities

...