Morgan Housel

It's economic depression that causes the spark.

What's going on in Iran right now, I'm by no means an expert in the slightest in that.

I'm just a tourist who reads the headlines.

But what really sparked the recent protests is when their currency collapsed versus the dollar.

Most people can put up with a lot of bullshit in government as long as they are gainfully employed and have full bellies.

Once you take that away, there's a great quote from a Russian poet who's talking about people in the gulags.

And he said, you can turn any saint into a monster in two weeks.

If you deprive them of food and shelter and warmth and whatnot, anybody turns into a monster in two weeks.

And so I think a lot of that was in Germany.

How do you take one of the most peaceful, civilized countries of Germany in the early 20th century

and turn them into the absolute monsters that they became in the 1930s and 40s.

Well, a lot of it is very, very complicated, but a lot of it is their economy completely collapsed, utterly collapsed in the 1920s.

Hyperinflation, everything went to hell in the 1920s.

And there's a lot of evidence that in that situation, when you completely deprive people of any semblance of normalcy or even food in a lot of these situations, they say, what else you got?

Let's try something else.

Who's this guy, Adolph over here?

He's saying, let's give him a shot.

And I think there's actually many scenarios in which it came damn close to that in the United States.

The fact that FDR was elected and we got FDR, who was a flawed man and it was very unpopular at the time.

He's become less popular or less unpopular over time.