In the mid 1400s, the head of the Byzantine Empire was a career politician with decades of experience who most people thought would be a capable leader.

Instead, through a series of hilariously terrible decisions, he managed to take his already weak empire off the cliff, and into the dustbin of history, in just a few short years.

And one of the ways he did that was by deliberately giving up the most strategic resource his empire possessed.

We’re seeing a similar story play out today-- the people with decades and decades of experience are doing all the wrong things to vanquish one of the most strategic resources in our modern world: energy.

Think about it-- the people in charge have demonized an entire industry. They punish oil companies with creative taxes and insane regulations. They refuse to follow the law and lease federal lands to oil and gas companies. They drag their feet in the permitting process.

They constantly antagonize energy companies and blame high fuel prices on the industry’s “greed”.

In short they do everything they can to destroy a critical resource that the nation depends on for growth and prosperity.

This is our topic for today’s podcast. We start off walking through the comical incompetence of Emperor Constantine XI from the Byzantine Empire… and then go through some key issues to know about in the oil and gas sector.

In short, supply is tight… and probably not getting better. Demand is increasing. It’s a really important trend to understand.

But we leave with some good news. This is fixable, both long-term and short-term. But the short-term fix is going to rely on a few surprising characters from our past that may become some of the most exciting economies in the world.



Open Podcast Transcription




[00:00:00.610]
Today we’re going to go back in time to January 6 and the year 1449 to the city of Mistress and the Peloponnesian Peninsula of Greece. Now, at the time, Greece was a pretty important part of the Byzantine Empire. Byzantine Empire, as you probably know, was really just the continuation of the the ancient Roman Empire that had been around for a really long time. And at its peak, the Roman Empire encompassed virtually the entire known Western world, from Hispania, North Africa, central and Eastern Europe, Britannia, all the way to the Dardanellesh and modern day Turkey. At a certain point in the third 4th century, there was a formal demarcation of the Roman Empire.
 
[00:00:40.510]
And they said, you know what? There’s going to be two empires are going to be an Eastern Empire that’s based in Constantinople, modern day Istanbul, and a Western Empire that’s going to remain in Italy. And the two empires were basically two different empires. They had two different emperors, imperial courts, imperial armies, their own palaces. Everything was totally separate and distinct.
 
[00:00:57.840]
The thing is that while the Western Empire was in decline, right, the original Rome was in serious, serious decline. With the barbarian invasions and the tax farmers and the desertions and everything that they were suffering there, the Eastern Empire was thriving. It was growing. It was getting better and more powerful. And even by the time the Western Empire collapsed in 476, the Eastern Empire was really just getting started.
 
[00:01:19.380]
It hadn’t even peaked yet. The Eastern Empire wouldn’t peak for more than a century after the fall of the west, and it stayed very powerful for a very, very, very long time. We can actually tell this because the Eastern Empire, they minted a special coin. It’s called the gold solidus solidst coin. And the solids gold coin was something like reserve currency.
 
[00:01:38.610]
It was like the US. Dollar. Today we’re in the same way. You might have a merchant in India doing business with somebody in New Zealand, and they’d conduct that transaction in US. Dollars.
 
[00:01:48.810]
It was the same way that a merchant in China in the n...