Latest / TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast / #710: Q4 2025 Monetary Base Update with Matthew Mežinskis

Transcript

#710: Q4 2025 Monetary Base Update with Matthew Mežinskis · TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast

• 0:00
  You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
• 0:10
  We talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
• 0:13
  All the central banks going nuts.
• 0:16
  So it's all acting like safe haven.
• 0:18
  I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins.
• 0:25
  In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
• 0:28
  I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
• 0:31
  If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
• 0:36
  Matthew Muzintius, years 2026, year seven of us doing a quarterly monetary base update.
• 0:44
  Welcome to year seven, sir.
• 0:46
  Thank you.
• 0:47
  Thank you, Marty.
• 0:49
  It's year eight for me on podcasting.
• 0:56
  No, actually, year nine, actually.
• 0:58
  yeah close to you so that's year nine right
• 1:03
  very exciting congrats to you and that's you as well happy new year hope all is well
• 1:12
  it's a crazy world these days lots to talk about but i figured we can start out with some nice
• 1:19
  charts on uh what's happening in the gold market silver market it's grabbing people's attention
• 1:25
  these days. The gold bugs were very angry
• 1:29
  for seven, eight years as Bitcoin was tearing.
• 1:34
  They were screaming suppression.
• 1:38
  The crypto bros were taking all of their gains,
• 1:41
  they said. But now,
• 1:46
  I don't know. Are your Bitcoin friends
• 1:49
  in the States crying or are people managing?
• 1:51
  my bitcoin friends are managing because we we know how to uh
• 1:59
  reinforce each other say hey it's a long-term game absolutely a little a little
• 2:06
  a little consolidation of price is nothing we haven't seen before but there are people freaking
• 2:10
  out there are people there's depression in the bitcoin price now gold and silver have taken the
• 2:16
  wind out of the sails. There's no bullish catalysts on the horizon. We are doomed. It's what many
• 2:22
  people think. The market manipulators are now coming out of the gold mines and the silver mines.
• 2:28
  Here's an interesting little bird's eye view. I like to keep a big picture, let people relax.
• 2:35
  This is the trailing 12-month mining revenue of the Bitcoin network.
• 2:40
  And a couple of things I'll say actually just right off the bat here is this is fairly bullish if you think that the cycle is possibly not over or, you know, the details of the four-year cycle we can get into.
• 3:00
  But basically, you know, if whatever the length of the cycle is, Bitcoin generally has multiples higher revenue.
• 3:09
  Okay, so here's the 2013 top, nearly had a billion dollars in miner revenue.
• 3:14
  Okay, this is just taking the trailing 365 days of the issuance, and then fees, which
• 3:21
  are very, very small proportion of that still to this day.
• 3:25
  Then you go six, seven, eight X higher here in 2018 on a trailing 12 month basis, right?
• 3:33
  Which includes all of 2017 gains, tops out at about $7 billion.
• 3:37
  dollars. There's a slow moving chart, right? It's a yearly trailing 12. Then we go to 2021,
• 3:45
  we're at about $17 billion for the Bitcoin mining revenue, total revenue for Bitcoin miners.
• 3:55
  And then, you know, we've had this long build now for three years with the ETFs and everything else
• 4:02
  from, well, let's say two full years, 2024, 2025.
• 4:12
  And even though, as most people know,
• 4:15
  November, December was supposed to be
• 4:16
  the four-year cycle again,
• 4:19
  we're still at $17 billion
• 4:21
  because of the halvings, right?
• 4:23
  The halvings play a big part here.
• 4:28
  But I would say this is actually fairly bullish.
• 4:31
  because, I mean, it's possible that, you know,
• 4:36
  however long the cycle lasts or whatever,
• 4:40
  that this is sort of topping and we go down.
• 4:44
  But if you think about the cyclicality of Bitcoin in the past,
• 4:48
  it's possible that this will keep going and we change.
• 4:52
  You know, maybe we're closer to the power law,
• 4:54
  which we can talk about.
• 4:55
  We didn't have a big boom,
• 4:57
  so maybe we won't have that big of a bust to use that word.
• 5:00
  But anyway, I think that this is actually fairly bullish, considering that.
• 5:05
  Interesting technical difficulties, Matthew's back.
• 5:07
  Okay, so yeah, so to the extent that we say that there are cycles and booms and busts with Bitcoin,
• 5:17
  I find it very interesting that this boom, which has lasted now, I mean, over three years, right?
• 5:27
  Or over two full years, for sure.
• 5:30
  is, you know, our annual mining revenue,
• 5:35
  even including the last halving
• 5:38
  or including the last halving
• 5:39
  is about the same as it was
• 5:42
  after the 2021 peak.
• 5:47
  So I'd actually say this is fairly bullish for Bitcoin,
• 5:51
  but time will tell, you know, how this cycle plays out.
• 5:55
  We could talk about that, whether, you know,
• 5:58
  since we didn't have a huge boom,
• 5:59
  We won't have a big bust. We could talk about that in a second. But anyway, this is Bitcoin mining revenue.
• 6:04
  All right. So it's 17 billion dollars at the moment. Trailing 12 months.
• 6:09
  Now, our silver friends are really loving life. I'll show you the price in a second.
• 6:15
  But let's just look at the silver that comes out of the ground, which is 800 to 900 million ounces a year.
• 6:22
  Let's put that in dollar terms trailing 12 months.
• 6:24
  it's always actually uh competed with bitcoin um
• 6:34
  remember a lot of silver we sort of discount because it's used in industry
• 6:41
  and bitcoin if you discount that silver bitcoin uh used to be more valuable than silver
• 6:48
  quite a long time ago actually like four years ago but now it's smaller again so
• 6:53
  So the silver bugs are a loving life because the mining industry as a whole is about double Bitcoins, $34 billion at the moment.
• 7:04
  They got $27 billion back in 2011 when price went to its prior all-time high of $56 or whatever it was.
• 7:12
  All right, now let's look at gold.
• 7:16
  Dwarfing Bitcoin and silver.
• 7:19
  All right, I mean, this is an all-time high.
• 7:23
  it was quite a christmas for the gold bugs 400 billion dollars over the course of a year for
• 7:31
  the gold bugs i was reading or just saw i actually didn't read it and can't be bothered with this
• 7:35
  stuff but you know at high prices gold mines that were completely unprofitable at lower prices all
• 7:43
  of a sudden become profitable or even theoretically profitable i was seeing a headline that one of the
• 7:48
  the main gold bugs in Canada, Eric Sprott, had some share in some mine that went up by billions
• 7:57
  in the last couple of months. And they haven't even started mining, right? So this is some of
• 8:01
  what markets do. Of course, we have some of these irrational expectations in the Bitcoin market too,
• 8:08
  but gold bugs are loving life for sure. So $400 billion, that's a record. And just for people that
• 8:13
  maybe listening or not watching the charts, in the last two years, that's doubled. And even then,
• 8:22
  two, three years ago, for example, February 2022, which is actually four years ago,
• 8:30
  was $200 billion. And that was an all-time high. So massive, massive boon, these prices for the
• 8:37
  gold and silver markets, all-time highs. But then just to see kind of where the oil markets
• 8:44
  come into this, which are obviously quite an important commodity, just throw this in here,
• 8:51
  roughly, you're looking at trillions of dollars. Okay, sorry, again,
• 8:55
  little connection issues here, a lot of snow. Just looking at oil for comparison, just to,
• 9:02
  You know, obviously a main commodity that the whole world needs, no matter what the tree huggers say.
• 9:13
  You know, $2 trillion revenue.
• 9:18
  And this, of course, can swing wildly on a trailing 12-month basis.
• 9:22
  Looks like $3 trillion or so has been the record ever per year during the madness that was COVID.
• 9:32
  it went you know when we had negative uh contango and futures in uh oil went down
• 9:38
  trends all month to about a trillion dollars but anyway we're at about two trillion dollars now
• 9:43
  on some fairly light oil prices which is not good for mr putin in russia anyway so that's a that's
• 9:51
  sort of a bird's eye view uh if you look at it right there you look at the tool tip
• 9:56
  two trillion for oil 400 billion for for gold which is a massive record like nothing normal
• 10:01
  but a massive record. $34 billion for silver, which again is a massive record. And then $17
• 10:08
  billion for Bitcoin, still a less than 20-year asset class, and certainly way less than that as
• 10:18
  far as being a mainstay, which it is, as we know. It's not going to come overnight.
• 10:25
  this is going to follow the power curve, network adoption,
• 10:30
  and it's just not going to be easy,
• 10:35
  but it should be a fun ride to enjoy,
• 10:38
  and this is sort of how I'm looking at where we are
• 10:41
  in the big picture of the markets.
• 10:45
  That's why I love you.
• 10:46
  You always bring the data in a credible context,
• 10:49
  and to build on what you just said,
• 10:50
  the fact that Bitcoin is only 17 years old
• 10:52
  and already has trailing 12-month mining revenues of $17 billion,
• 10:57
  half of silver's market cap, which is a...
• 11:00
  Revenue.
• 11:00
  Multi-level revenue.
• 11:02
  Yeah, silver's revenue.
• 11:03
  Yeah.
• 11:06
  Been around for thousands of years.
• 11:07
  I mean, it's pretty impressive, you know?
• 11:10
  Yeah.
• 11:12
  Let's take a look at silver price long-term.
• 11:16
  This is where the silver bugs...
• 11:18
  I'm just curious.
• 11:19
  I know they're very excited.
• 11:20
  They're very excited.
• 11:21
  but uh you can run these little percentiles as i like to do it's an exponential asset i just take
• 11:28
  off everything but the trend is it has evolved and where we are now so what you're looking at is the
• 11:36
  the dotted red line is a multiple over the exponential trend plotted as a percentile so
• 11:45
  it has never been ever in the modern era, which I'm counting as from 1971, which is obviously
• 11:52
  when gold started to float. It's never been more than 5x the trend price. And it actually hit that
• 11:59
  in 2011. So 2011 was 48 bucks. This is a monthly close number, April 2011. The trend itself was
• 12:06
  $10. So that's 4.8X, 5X rounded. That is a record. And we can see as long as we stay at this price
• 12:19
  or a little bit more, this is the current price, 112 bucks approximately. It's a possibility we
• 12:27
  can take that out this month, but actually not. Have four more days. And the comparable level
• 12:34
  is $118. So it's got a close above that. But then I just have to ask you, obviously,
• 12:41
  markets can go up, they can go down. How many silver mines, gold mines look very attractive
• 12:46
  right now at these prices, but might not be a few months from now or years from now.
• 12:52
  And you can just see how there's really only three spikes in the last 55 years, right? When
• 12:57
  The Hunt brothers tried to corner the market in the early 80s.
• 13:01
  The 2011 boom and then now.
• 13:05
  So look, I'm happy for them.
• 13:07
  I'm happy for you.
• 13:08
  I wish I had more silver to rotate into Bitcoin.
• 13:12
  I'm happy for the silver bugs.
• 13:13
  But I would advise caution right here if you're sitting on some silver gains.
• 13:21
  but matthew the industrial demand is going up exponentially with the ai and energy boom
• 13:28
  yes it is it is it's a great conductor silver is just a fantastic asset um
• 13:38
  you know maybe central banks will start buying silver none of them have any silver at the moment
• 13:45
  maybe they'll start buying many possibilities marty many possibilities in all seriousness though
• 13:50
  the demand elasticity
• 13:54
  or the supply elasticity being driven by demand
• 13:58
  in silver, how does it compare to gold and Bitcoin?
• 14:05
  Well, I don't have a
• 14:07
  good chart to actually completely
• 14:10
  play that out, but I will say if we just look
• 14:14
  at price, which again
• 14:16
  can certainly get ahead of itself
• 14:20
  but we can establish a trend. There's a, you know, there is an exponential trend that's going to fit
• 14:26
  everything. So here against dollars, all right, this trend is actually, take a guess, Marty,
• 14:32
  what do you think? I love when I ask you these questions, right? And I know you do too. What do
• 14:37
  you think the slope of this black line is, which is how you should measure your silver gains,
• 14:43
  even in a volatile market? What do you think it is? 50 years, got this. It's not a great R squared,
• 14:49
  at 54%, but you can see that it certainly fits the data.
• 14:53
  What do you think the slope of that curve is?
• 15:01
  Like what's the annual CAGR?
• 15:04
  Yeah.
• 15:07
  3.5%.
• 15:09
  Excellent.
• 15:11
  Nicely done.
• 15:12
  Slightly under that.
• 15:12
  Just a little over 3% per year.
• 15:14
  so again you can make tons of money catching the trend trend is always your friend i'm happy for
• 15:23
  the silver bugs but i would again advise caution and then to get back to your question about um
• 15:31
  so actually let's let's look at dollar first so let's go back to the to the power curve let's just
• 15:36
  look at bitcoin in terms of dollars and then we're going to look at bitcoins in terms of silver ounces
• 15:41
  and see the wild time.
• 15:45
  Okay, so as you know,
• 15:47
  I've been showing your listeners this
• 15:48
  and viewers for many years.
• 15:51
  I've been tracking this myself since like 2018.
• 15:54
  Bitcoin generally follows a power curve,
• 15:55
  which is unique.
• 15:56
  Most financial assets follow an exponential curve,
• 15:58
  straight line on log scale.
• 15:59
  This is not straight.
• 16:00
  Simply means it's proportional,
• 16:02
  more general growth
• 16:03
  that is proportional to itself,
• 16:06
  not constant growth like exponential growth,
• 16:08
  which is, as long as it holds, it's probably a good thing.
• 16:13
  It's about 42% per year at the moment, but that's falling.
• 16:18
  And so the power curve itself is a little over 125K.
• 16:22
  It's 127K dollars, dollars, all right, for one Bitcoin.
• 16:27
  Obviously, as we know, we're a little bit light on that.
• 16:30
  That last pull in into the model here, I got 88K.
• 16:33
  No, 80, zoom in.
• 16:38
  I got 87.6K.
• 16:43
  And that is like the 45th percentile.
• 16:48
  All right, so the median would be the 50th percentile.
• 16:51
  I mean, you could say it's right on track, right?
• 16:54
  Of course, the big question is what's going to happen at the end of this year.
• 16:57
  We can talk about that later.
• 16:58
  Like, if we didn't have a huge boom, maybe we won't have a huge bust, as I said earlier.
• 17:03
  We'll see.
• 17:03
  But at least as of right now, with massive institutional adoption, Bitcoin only gaining traction, much better utility than gold or silver, in our opinion, I'm sure.
• 17:17
  It's still looking right on track, okay?
• 17:21
  That's in dollar terms.
• 17:22
  Now, let's do this power curve in silver ounces.
• 17:27
  And this is just pretty wild.
• 17:28
  so this is let's just go back let's pick a date like somewhere end of 2015
• 17:38
  end of 2015 okay so bitcoin had never hit uh it only hit a thousand bucks once in 2013 wouldn't
• 17:46
  hit it again until the start of 2017 uh i actually can't remember 2015 price so probably like 400
• 17:53
  bucks here, $350, whatever it is. We can see it in a second. The Bitcoin price in silver ounces
• 18:03
  is 30, 31, 31 silver ounces to buy one Bitcoin back in 2015, not even 10 years ago. Now, let's
• 18:14
  go to the worst days of Bitcoin in the last cycle, which were after the SPF debacle. All right.
• 18:20
  he said he had a bunch of bitcoin didn't have one end of 2022 708 ounces of silver to buy one bitcoin
• 18:30
  any comments just from that statement pretty impressive pretty impressive all right pretty
• 18:40
  impressive now silver's been on a tear as gold but silver's been on a on a wild tear so 700
• 18:47
  roughly low 700s even high 600s uh because bitcoin was doing very bad relative to silver
• 18:55
  all right now bitcoin's still been doing fine in the last couple years the silver's been doing
• 18:59
  better so what you see is this chart bitcoin goes up but then bitcoin goes back down
• 19:03
  we're right about where we were interestingly a little bit higher 785 ounces
• 19:11
  but you know ask yourself like what's happened to the silver market in the last three years versus
• 19:19
  what's happened to the bitcoin market i understand silver is a good conductor you'll be part of data
• 19:24
  centers you know now we're taking it uh we used to say that uh gold was better because it had no
• 19:32
  real industrial use it was more still a store value now i guess it's good that silver has
• 19:36
  industrial use, but putting that aside, 785 ounces of silver per Bitcoin. And if you look at this on
• 19:46
  a percentile basis, which is a multiple over or under the trend, and the trend is 5,800 ounces,
• 19:54
  all right, the power trend. So 96% R squared. We go with the bands, the bands, we're setting
• 20:00
  new lows for Bitcoin in terms of silver.
• 20:04
  So relative to the trend.
• 20:05
  So the silver bug's literally at 785 ounces for one Bitcoin.
• 20:15
  Relative to the trend, this is actually the cheapest it's ever been.
• 20:18
  So this is the question I would put to you is,
• 20:21
  for how much longer are silver bugs going to get this deal on Bitcoin?
• 20:26
  Or are we just going to keep blowing this chart up?
• 20:30
  it's a great question it's a rhetorical question did you uh did you see our friend uh james
• 20:37
  checks tweet yesterday i didn but he great obviously what uh what do you say he sold he he been on this show talking about hey i diversify into precious metals gold silver platinum But he sent a tweet out yesterday They went to the silver dealer to sell some bullion
• 20:56
  And he was getting toppy signals, a long line of people waiting to buy,
• 21:01
  talking about how much they were up from their buys a few weeks ago.
• 21:06
  And so there are some social signals out there that we may be.
• 21:08
  I mean, if you've got lines at silver shops, yes, I would say that's a very, very much of a toppy signal.
• 21:14
  I mean, you could just look at the old,
• 21:19
  God, I have too many charts.
• 21:22
  Where did I just put it?
• 21:23
  Lost it.
• 21:24
  You can look at the old dollar price
• 21:28
  and see that we're literally at the top.
• 21:30
  Of course, I mean, it can double from here.
• 21:32
  You know, you can go from 5X the trend to 10X,
• 21:35
  but it's just always a question of how sustainable
• 21:37
  that is going to be for the market down the road.
• 21:41
  But anyway, to sort of finish the thought,
• 21:42
  Yeah, I would say, and this chart looks wild for gold as well, by the way, but not as insane as silver.
• 21:50
  So silver, literally every day that sort of it stays at its level and Bitcoin stays at its level or even goes a little bit lower.
• 21:57
  This is the best trend-wise that the price has ever been.
• 22:03
  Not the best in raw ounces size, as we clearly showed.
• 22:09
  If you go back only less than 10 years ago, it is only 30 ounces of silver per Bitcoin.
• 22:15
  So, yeah, I don't see this lasting much longer, but I'm happy for our silver book friends,
• 22:20
  because I'm sure there's even some overlap with our Bitcoin friends for their gains.
• 22:25
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  it out. There is. And I think a lot of the discussion over the last few months as gold
• 24:18
  and silver have gone on this historic tear is, is this the big one? Is it happening?
• 24:24
  I just had Josh Farron who runs the Scottsdale Mint in the Wyoming Gold Reserve.
• 24:32
  And so he's in the middle of the physical markets and he had some interesting anecdotes of what he's seen behind the scenes in the physical bullion space for gold and silver.
• 24:43
  It seems like this push towards a multipolar world is forcing the hands of sovereigns like China for gold specifically to buy physical indiscriminately.
• 24:55
  Yeah, but I'm not seeing much of a change.
• 24:58
  I mean, he might – I mean, obviously, I'm not in the industry.
• 25:00
  I just chart the general public data.
• 25:02
  But if you look at – I'll show you a chart right here.
• 25:05
  But if you look at the amount of ounces that central banks buy relative to the trend, which turned around literally after the GFC, it's like half a percent a year and it's not going up.
• 25:20
  Yes, China's buying more.
• 25:23
  Yes, even Poland is buying more.
• 25:26
  But the old world countries, they're not selling.
• 25:30
  Of course, Britain sold, Canada sold, the geniuses like 20 years ago.
• 25:35
  but it's not really changing.
• 25:38
  So I'll show you what I mean here in a second.
• 25:44
  So I find that argument also kind of interesting.
• 25:49
  So here's the big picture.
• 25:52
  All right.
• 25:52
  If the largest gold holders in the world,
• 25:56
  which are central banks, are going to move the market,
• 25:59
  you'd think you'd see it in the data.
• 26:01
  And this goes until September, right?
• 26:05
  Um, and this is actually, I need to actually take off Euro area. Cause I cut us, I'm taking,
• 26:12
  uh, hold on. It's like this roughly. So it's, it's, it's something like 1.2 billion ounces
• 26:19
  central banks have. And that's, that's, yeah, that's steadily increased since 2008,
• 26:25
  but the rate of growth there is less than a percent a year compounded. So if you ask yourself
• 26:30
  less than a percent of the year compounded for central banks buying gold, 42 percent compounded
• 26:36
  per year price, which has been the case for the last two plus years, almost three years for the
• 26:43
  gold and silver markets. Is that justified? We'll see. If it's the big one, meaning, you know,
• 26:53
  fiat issuers, central banks start to see that there might not be a way out and that they need
• 27:02
  to revalue their currencies in gold. Regardless, it's good if you hold Bitcoin, gold, or silver,
• 27:06
  because it is true. I mean, you know, I remember we interviewed Tyler Jenks, rest in peace,
• 27:15
  many years ago. And he said, you know, it's always possible if the main sovereigns want to revalue,
• 27:20
  like in that sort of once in 100 year event,
• 27:22
  then if you're holding the physical,
• 27:24
  it's much better than holding like an ETF
• 27:26
  where they could rip you off.
• 27:28
  But if you're holding the actual physical,
• 27:29
  whatever the revaluation is,
• 27:31
  you will accrete that full value.
• 27:35
  So from that side, yeah, it's good to have some gold,
• 27:38
  good to have some silver.
• 27:40
  Let me show you a competing chart,
• 27:42
  which would show that there's actually plenty of room left,
• 27:45
  at least in the case of the United States,
• 27:48
  and that chart is going to be right here.
• 27:59
  I show this chart a lot.
• 28:01
  I know you've seen it before,
• 28:03
  but this is the old long-term view of what the Fed holds
• 28:07
  versus how much debt the United States has issued.
• 28:11
  So the peak was nearly 30%
• 28:14
  back with the major inflation of COVID times.
• 28:18
  Right. The Fed stopped printing. The U.S. kept borrowing. Now.
• 28:27
  We can talk all the time about, you know, this is unsustainable. It's not going to work. And I know that that's a, you know, that's a big, big theme in newsletter industry.
• 28:37
  But the fact is, the central bank now only holds 16% of the US's debt. And that leaves room for the bazooka when the new Fed share comes in, which Trump, we know what Trump wants to do, right? Especially with the midterms coming, wants to keep interest rates low, keep people happy, the affordability word.
• 28:59
  So again, I'm not defending any of this.
• 29:03
  I'm just saying these are charts to me that show like, yes, we know that the past 20 years
• 29:09
  have been historically sort of insane for central banks.
• 29:12
  You can see that here, just the goofy asset purchases and the way this line just looks
• 29:16
  really weird.
• 29:18
  But it's lower relative to where it's been at any time, basically, in the last 18 years,
• 29:26
  17, 18 years.
• 29:27
  So yeah.
• 29:29
  There's room.
• 29:30
  They have room.
• 29:32
  It's pretty impressive they've been able to do that.
• 29:34
  I mean, because in 2019, last time we were at these levels,
• 29:37
  that's when you had the repo spasm.
• 29:39
  Yep, exactly.
• 29:41
  And it had to turn around.
• 29:42
  And probably, you know, we actually saw it did.
• 29:46
  Look at how it did turn around.
• 29:48
  So kind of the nice hidden signal here is you see that the repo spasm happened,
• 29:52
  and then they started to buy more.
• 29:54
  And that was before all the madness, which happened in February, March 2020.
• 29:58
  So, and you can see even here from the last point of data I have, it's like a little bit turning around in December, which we knew was going to happen, but still plenty of room.
• 30:11
  And so that's how I see it.
• 30:13
  I don't necessarily see it as that the big one, the five alarm fire yet.
• 30:21
  But I think we're going to, I mean, in the next 10 years for sure with what Bitcoin can do, and I'll show you some more charts with that.
• 30:26
  But we're going to see wild levels for Bitcoin, for central bank balance sheets.
• 30:33
  It's going to be pretty wild.
• 30:35
  But I don't see it, honestly, with gold.
• 30:38
  You correct me.
• 30:42
  I know you've been talking to gold experts, and I'm not one.
• 30:46
  But there are no, except for like China and even Russia, right, with their horrible genocidal war in Ukraine.
• 30:55
  they haven't been buying in the last few years they're completely bankrupt they have no money
• 30:59
  they haven't bought in five years uh poland is buying i would advise what did poland announce
• 31:07
  they want to become like a top five holder or something like that uh i don't know if that's
• 31:13
  what they said but that seems far off at 15 million ounces but um they definitely said they were gonna
• 31:19
  keep buying and they might maybe a top five buyer um maybe that was it yeah right but i mean like
• 31:25
  All the other big central banks, they're not doing anything.
• 31:28
  They have it.
• 31:29
  Of course, we don't know if the U.S. actually has it.
• 31:32
  It hasn't been audited since the Eisenhower administration,
• 31:34
  but it is there, theoretically.
• 31:38
  It's really only China.
• 31:41
  It's China and Poland are the biggest countries that are buying,
• 31:46
  which is kind of funny.
• 31:47
  Not even Russia.
• 31:50
  So, yes, that adds to the speculation,
• 31:54
  But does this much buying of gold from one country mean that gold should be going up 42% per year in the last three years?
• 32:03
  Something tells me this might end badly for some people that might be over-levering this situation.
• 32:10
  It could be the big one, but there's a lot of other data here that shows in the fiat world they have left themselves some space.
• 32:21
  I mean, like you were saying earlier, I'm very happy for silver and gold bugs.
• 32:24
  And I do get some joy when I see the tweets.
• 32:28
  We're going to $150,000.
• 32:29
  We're going to $200,000 for silver.
• 32:30
  Gold's going to $10,000 immediately.
• 32:33
  But then I just have PTSD flashbacks to December 2017
• 32:37
  when we thought we were going to $100,000 Bitcoin.
• 32:43
  Quickly got humbled.
• 32:46
  Yeah.
• 32:46
  And I've talked about this many times with the old stock-to-flow nonsense.
• 32:50
  nonsense, but you know how people say one of the common tropes is that gold, the gold-silver
• 32:58
  ratio at the moment, whatever it is, I don't know, 100x, it's less than 100x now because
• 33:01
  of silver.
• 33:04
  What's gold-silver ratio at the moment?
• 33:06
  It's just 50.
• 33:07
  Say it exactly.
• 33:09
  Is it even 50?
• 33:09
  No, 50.
• 33:10
  Which is?
• 33:11
  I think gold's at 5,000, silver's at 100.
• 33:14
  Right.
• 33:15
  So.
• 33:15
  Red round.
• 33:15
  um if that number used to be like a hundred right used to be a hundred so it's already compressed
• 33:27
  right when people say oh it needs to compress more to go to say 15x which is the old gold
• 33:33
  silver ratio that's way not the right way to look at it because the actual ounces
• 33:39
  in the ground right now, the mining ratio, both in the ground and that come out of the ground,
• 33:47
  is already something like 8x. So actually, there's too much silver coming. If 15 to 1,
• 33:54
  here's the point, if 15 to 1 is your benchmark of the gold to silver ratio, and so like silver
• 34:01
  bucks saying, this is going to compress that old ratio for the past 20 years of gold being 100
• 34:07
  times more valuable as far as price goes. Now it's only 50. That's going to compress all the
• 34:12
  way to 15. First of all, it's not going to last. Secondly, the mining ratio right now is already
• 34:19
  too aggressive beyond that. It's like eight. So there's 56, 57 billion ounces of silver,
• 34:30
  seven billion ounces of gold due to the math. I mean, it's about eight, nine is that. So we've
• 34:36
  already actually gone relative to the old ratio of 15 to one, if that's your benchmark,
• 34:41
  the mining ratio shows it points to too much silver mining. So the point is that all these
• 34:50
  little ratios people come up with are these ideas that it's going to go, like you're saying, 200
• 34:54
  bucks, 500 bucks. So the ratio is going to go back to 15 to one. It doesn't hold up.
• 35:00
  Number one, over the long term, when you look at the statistical multiples that we're talking
• 35:04
  about here, nor in the sort of mining world, because the mining world would tell us that
• 35:12
  actually silver has been overproduced relative to gold for a long time.
• 35:18
  And you're going to say it's going to be even more produced now because of data centers,
• 35:22
  whatever, and the price is going to go up.
• 35:23
  I mean, maybe.
• 35:24
  People are making a lot of wild claims about data centers as it is.
• 35:28
  We're going to have to see how all this plays out.
• 35:29
  But I have a very hard time seeing gold's going to go back, or sorry, silver's going to go back, take all of those gains from gold, get back to 15 to 1, and then stay there.
• 35:41
  That's the point.
• 35:42
  And then stay there.
• 35:43
  It's just, as you see here, it doesn't work like that.
• 35:48
  And then if you think of the incremental market cap increases that would need to get there, like where are those trillions going to flow from is one of the first questions I would have.
• 35:59
  precisely you go back to this chart um you know yeah there's probably some gold silver bugs like
• 36:06
  i said the sprit article that i saw i mean just loving life making paper billions right now
• 36:10
  from unprofitable prior unprofitable speculative mining investments but now
• 36:17
  at these prices those ounces theoretically are profitable even though they haven't been mined
• 36:22
  there's a lot to play out here a lot to play out and the beautiful thing about bitcoin is
• 36:27
  Bitcoin does not have these problems, right? Because as they say, the cure for high prices
• 36:34
  is high prices if you want to buy more, right? Because price just stays up too long.
• 36:39
  People come in, over-speculate, over-produce. Mines, which people think are really, really great,
• 36:46
  all of a sudden aren't. When you realize that people don't want to pay these prices,
• 36:49
  a few months down the line, price falls with all the competition. Equilibrium is restored.
• 36:56
  Bitcoin doesn't have that problem because of the difficulty adjustment.
• 37:00
  It's actually the less Bitcoins, as we know, that comes out every 10 minutes, every four years.
• 37:04
  Totally different asset class, in my opinion.
• 37:08
  As we know, everybody knows our opinions as far as the general directionality of bullishness.
• 37:14
  There's much more upside that you can see from Bitcoin than even the wild and silver markets.
• 37:20
  But I have to admit, they're pretty wild right now.
• 37:22
  Pretty amazing.
• 37:24
  I know they all had a great Christmas.
• 37:25
  I'm happy for them, but be careful.
• 37:30
  It is fun to watch.
• 37:32
  At the very least, it's incredibly fun to watch.
• 37:35
  It is.
• 37:35
  I mean, and again, really digging into the relative
• 37:42
  sort of undervaluation of Bitcoin right now.
• 37:47
  Like, I mean, we saw it earlier on the Bitcoin to silver
• 37:51
  power trend chart, but just to articulate to people
• 37:55
  who are fearful out there that they're missing out on all the gold and silver gains.
• 38:00
  Bitcoin's doing nothing.
• 38:02
  We're poking it with a stick saying, do something.
• 38:04
  And it's not responding.
• 38:07
  Why should they not be worried?
• 38:10
  Because the trend is your friend.
• 38:13
  And just because we're at sort of record levels here of,
• 38:22
  record levels of cheap, if you're a gold holder,
• 38:24
  if you're a silver order and you're looking at Bitcoin.
• 38:27
  By the way, I haven't showed gold.
• 38:29
  Here's gold.
• 38:32
  So gold, interestingly, is not as cheap.
• 38:37
  Remember how with silver, we're literally at the bottom,
• 38:40
  like the cheapest it's ever been, 0.1x.
• 38:44
  Gold is not there yet, but it is under the 10th percentile.
• 38:47
  And I just asked the same question.
• 38:49
  I mean, how cheap are we going to give gold bugs
• 38:53
  who have been so angry for the last 15 years,
• 38:55
  how cheap are we going to give them Bitcoin?
• 38:57
  When Bitcoin is such a liquid asset,
• 38:59
  more and more people know about it every day.
• 39:03
  It's growing from a network effect way faster
• 39:06
  than the gold or silver markets,
• 39:08
  which are, even though they're exponential growth,
• 39:10
  they only grow 1% or 2% a year.
• 39:12
  Way different, way different with Bitcoin.
• 39:15
  In all levels, Bitcoin,
• 39:16
  when you're looking at hash rate or price or addresses,
• 39:20
  It's growing way, way faster from a network effect.
• 39:25
  You just got to ask yourself, at what point are we going to give gold bugs, you know, 17 ounce Bitcoin prices when, you know, statistically that is a 8 percentile event, meaning 92% of the prices relative to the trend in history have been more expensive than that.
• 39:46
  But what I really think is very interesting is it is a, you know, the gold and silver markets are kind of a good governor on the Bitcoin price.
• 39:55
  And they're, you know, they're showing how stretched we can do this, right?
• 40:00
  Because the dollar chart in power curve terms looks pretty normal.
• 40:04
  Okay, we're a little bit below that $127K power trend, right?
• 40:09
  but you know how cheap are we going to give gold and silver bucks uh this bitcoin this these bitcoin
• 40:17
  prices for how much longer that's the that's that's why you know i i stream every day almost
• 40:23
  every day now and this is the chart that i just keep revisiting every day another interesting
• 40:27
  thing with gold right okay so it's a 17 ounce 17 and a half ounce price right now okay the trend is
• 40:35
  65, 65 ounces of gold.
• 40:37
  So we're trading well below trend,
• 40:40
  all right, below the 10th percentile,
• 40:41
  which is below 0.3x the trend.
• 40:45
  If you only went back to that,
• 40:47
  you know, sad days, SPF days,
• 40:51
  scam, bankman fraud,
• 40:53
  and all the other TradFi,
• 40:56
  or not TradFi, what was it called?
• 40:57
  DeFi nonsense of that year.
• 40:59
  What was the gold price?
• 41:01
  Sorry, what was the Bitcoin price in terms of gold?
• 41:03
  It was actually still cheaper than now.
• 41:05
  So this is where silver even looks more wild because it's about the same price.
• 41:10
  But do I see Bitcoin gold going to 10 ounces again?
• 41:18
  Just have to look at the statistics.
• 41:19
  Anything is possible.
• 41:21
  Anything is possible.
• 41:21
  But I see it very, very unlikely that we go back and test these levels again.
• 41:27
  Even if you look at the zero-th percentile, that would be 0.1x the trend.
• 41:32
  That's eight ounces of gold right now.
• 41:35
  Could we hit eight ounces of gold Well every day that passes the power curve goes up Still it not like it broken or anything It just gets stretched at these levels
• 41:48
  I have a hard time.
• 41:49
  Statistically, it would be a very, very rare event for gold bugs to get less than 10 ounces per one BTC.
• 42:00
  That's the question.
• 42:01
  I've got a bet out there with the other Matthew in my life.
• 42:04
  Matthew Odell. He's very bullish on Bitcoin this year. I am as well.
• 42:09
  But looking at these charts, the gold and silver to Bitcoin,
• 42:13
  Bitcoin to gold, Bitcoin to silver ratio, we have a bet out there.
• 42:17
  He thinks that Bitcoin will hit an all-time high
• 42:20
  in gold and silver terms at one point
• 42:24
  this year, at least. I said, listen, I'm bullish
• 42:28
  on Bitcoin. I think the Bitcoin price is going to go up. The question is, do gold and silver
• 42:31
  either not rise fast enough or fall to a point where we sort of intersect with the Bitcoin price.
• 42:38
  And we hit new Bitcoin all-time highs priced in these precious metals.
• 42:45
  Am I crazy for saying I don't think they're going to hit an all-time high this year?
• 42:48
  No, I mean, I would probably be on your side there.
• 42:51
  So what was his catalyst to make the gold and silver price sort of crash and Bitcoin explode?
• 42:57
  I don't think he has anything in his mind.
• 42:59
  He's just super bullish on Bitcoin.
• 43:00
  He's a staunch believer in what we're doing here.
• 43:03
  Here's the thing.
• 43:04
  Here's the thing.
• 43:04
  Even if it goes back to the trend in gold, that's already back to the 90th percentile in dollar terms.
• 43:14
  Okay?
• 43:14
  You follow me?
• 43:16
  Yeah.
• 43:16
  So if I – too many charts here, but look, we're only at a 20% discount.
• 43:28
  well, let's say 30%.
• 43:31
  We're at a 30% discount of the trend right now, right?
• 43:35
  In dollar terms.
• 43:36
  But in, let's just stick with gold, right?
• 43:40
  We're getting, we're at a 90% discount.
• 43:42
  So if we go back to even the trend,
• 43:47
  which is 6,000, sorry, this is silver, isn't it?
• 43:51
  If we go back to 65 ounces of gold,
• 43:58
  of gold per one Bitcoin, that's 3x, which would mean, I mean, from there, just multiply it,
• 44:07
  that's, you're in the, you know, $270,000 price range, which would put us back in the 90th
• 44:14
  percentile. That's just how the simple math works. Do I think that's going to happen? I have no idea.
• 44:19
  But I would say, even getting to the gold and silver highs, that would, that's a pretty,
• 44:25
  wild bet. I mean, what did you guys bet?
• 44:30
  I gave him two to one odds, 100,000
• 44:32
  sats. Yeah, I got to be with you on that one. But regardless,
• 44:37
  even if it goes back to the trend and we don't make new all-time highs in gold and silver, it still
• 44:41
  looks great for Bitcoin in dollar terms. You'd be back at this level.
• 44:44
  You'd be back at the nine.
• 44:48
  Yeah. So we'll see. That's another, you know, we didn't really talk about it. I sort of danced around
• 44:52
  the issue. I'm still leaving. I was always kind of a cycle guy. I was really thinking that on my
• 45:00
  podcast, I'd be just enjoying counting how many days would be above this nine this last fall.
• 45:07
  I thought it would happen. We would make it there. And obviously, we didn't. There's all
• 45:12
  sorts of people theorizing why. Is it institutional adoption? Not using the chain as much? All sorts
• 45:22
  of reasons. It's quantum. Yes, quantum risk, of course. We got to remember that one. Nothing to
• 45:31
  take too light of, of course. There are people working on that, but this is something that I've
• 45:35
  heard as long as I've been in Bitcoin with the quantum risk. I still think the cyclicality of
• 45:43
  Bitcoin is in play here, but we're going to have to see. So I'm thinking it's, I would still
• 45:51
  brace yourself for a soft year. Might not be as soft or as bad as, you know, prior cycles every
• 46:00
  four years, but I would, I would, I would hold on a little bit before calling the cycles completely
• 46:08
  dead. But that's just me. So freaks, when you take Bitcoin seriously, you start with custody.
• 46:12
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• 46:16
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• 47:17
  What's up, freaks?
• 47:18
  Been seeing a lot of YouTube comments.
• 47:20
  Marty, your skin looks so good.
• 47:21
  You're looking fit these days.
• 47:24
  How are you doing it?
• 47:25
  Well, number one, I'm going to the gym more.
• 47:27
  Trying to get my swell on.
• 47:29
  Trying to be a good example for my young son.
• 47:32
  It's a fit, healthy dad.
• 47:34
  But part of that is having a good regimen,
• 47:36
  particularly staying hydrated,
• 47:37
  making sure I have the right electrolytes
• 47:40
  and salts in my body.
• 47:41
  That is why I use salt of the earth.
• 47:42
  I drink probably three of these a day with one packet of salt of the earth.
• 47:48
  I'm liking the pink lemonade right now.
• 47:50
  It's my flavor of choice.
• 47:52
  This is their creatine.
• 47:53
  I've added this to my regiment.
• 47:54
  They have it in these packets as well.
• 47:57
  Makes it extremely convenient if you're traveling.
• 47:59
  You want to work out while you're traveling, but you don't want to be carrying a white bag of powder going through TSA.
• 48:05
  It's very, very nerve wracking at times.
• 48:07
  You have to explain hates.
• 48:08
  It's not what you think it is.
• 48:10
  It's creatine.
• 48:10
  I'm trying to get my swell on.
• 48:12
  Make sure you're staying hydrated.
• 48:15
  I have become addicted to these.
• 48:17
  It's made my life a lot better.
• 48:20
  I can supplement this for coffee in the morning and be energized right away.
• 48:25
  I can supplement.
• 48:26
  I can bring the koreatine wherever I need to.
• 48:28
  Just put a couple packets in here before I head to the gym.
• 48:31
  Bring this to the gym, drink it out of a glass bottle.
• 48:33
  Make sure I'm not injecting any microplastics into my body.
• 48:37
  Go to drinkssauté.com, use the code TFTC, and you'll get 15% off anything in the store.
• 48:43
  That's drinkssauté.com, code TFTC.
• 48:46
  You're a big believer in that McQuinton adoption,
• 48:51
  and therefore its price appreciation is uncorrelated from any external variables and factors.
• 48:58
  This is a power trend adoption curve, network adoption.
• 49:03
  But you got to ask.
• 49:04
  going back to that Fed chart that you posted
• 49:07
  and starting to tilt up
• 49:08
  how much could
• 49:09
  do you think the animal spirits are just
• 49:13
  waiting for liquidity bazooka to
• 49:14
  basically ride a
• 49:17
  wave
• 49:17
  so here is
• 49:19
  a little
• 49:23
  sneak peek on
• 49:23
  I'm going to get some people have been asking
• 49:27
  all the time you know when can I get
• 49:29
  my charts and stuff and I'm going to have
• 49:31
  a good app coming out in the next
• 49:33
  couple of months. A little sneak peek of what I'm getting to. It's a little bit different setup than
• 49:37
  my current charts. You know, I've been following this monetary-based stuff for eight years. And
• 49:45
  if I would admit it, if I thought that there was a direct correlation between the money supply
• 49:52
  and the Bitcoin price, I just don't see it. I think the better way to look at the Bitcoin price
• 49:57
  precisely is taking these percentiles around the power curve, which is clearly a great R-square
• 50:03
  network adoption. It doesn't tell you when they will hit. It just tells you when you reach an
• 50:07
  extreme, that's an extreme level of risk relative to the trend. So you might want to pay attention
• 50:12
  if you believe in the trend. So we're hitting that extreme level of risk right now for silver bugs.
• 50:19
  Like you might not get an opportunity to buy Bitcoin this cheap again relative to the trend.
• 50:26
  786 ounces of silver for Bitcoin. You know, 10 years ago is 30 ounces. Do you really want to,
• 50:31
  you know, keep playing that game. Okay. So back to the point, this is the world's base money.
• 50:37
  I have it like going way back even for the federal reserve, but let's not focus on that. So
• 50:43
  let's go from here. And here we have bitcoins. So I have two different things here. I'm showing
• 50:55
  the the us right in the light green and the rest of the world in the darker green this is
• 51:03
  us dollar equivalent although of course you can't really see when some people are pumping or not
• 51:07
  because there's dollar exchange rates as well so i mean when they're printing a lot but this
• 51:11
  you'll generally get the idea okay so it's safe to say in 2013 bitcoin wasn't on the radar of
• 51:17
  of anybody's, you know, on anybody's radar.
• 51:22
  But both central, both the United States and the world was printing money.
• 51:27
  Okay, this is it now, this is the world's printing press, what you see here in green.
• 51:31
  So you see the Bitcoin price in 2013 did go up.
• 51:33
  Okay, but then of course it went down.
• 51:36
  While it went down, the world kept printing.
• 51:39
  Notice the Federal Reserve actually stopped about a year later, mid-2014, and then did
• 51:44
  not print.
• 51:45
  So now I'm looking at the Federal Reserve, that line they're not printing at all.
• 51:48
  And then 2017, the price pops, December, Federal Reserve still hasn't printed money.
• 51:53
  But worldwide, they were printing money.
• 51:56
  So it actually lined up quite nicely worldwide.
• 51:59
  And even we're just a few months off, the world tapered off a lot in 2018, all the way
• 52:08
  started following the Fed's lead to taper down the money supply, because the Fed was
• 52:12
  taper even before this until we had that repo spike, which you talked about in September.
• 52:18
  And then, of course, we had the big spike, which masked all of the problems with massive
• 52:23
  money printing in 2021.
• 52:24
  Okay, so here, indeed, again, Bitcoin's price pumped with a massive amount of money supply.
• 52:32
  And then the price went down, and the money supply also went down.
• 52:37
  But then here's where the rub is.
• 52:38
  Bitcoin price has been going back up for the last three years.
• 52:42
  But what has the global money supply been doing?
• 52:44
  What is the US money supply been doing?
• 52:46
  Hasn't been doing anything.
• 52:49
  And so this is, again, where I caution people to sort of time the markets with this money
• 52:56
  supply stuff.
• 52:57
  I think it's very interesting.
• 52:58
  I think, yes, directionally, we're always going to have more money printed from central
• 53:03
  banks.
• 53:03
  That's all they know how to do.
• 53:04
  And Bitcoin correspondingly will rise.
• 53:07
  but timing that is very difficult okay so this data i have uh as of september only this is
• 53:14
  actually the third quarter update marty i'm gonna explain that as well in a second here it's actually
• 53:19
  it's gonna become even that no no we didn't it was second it's gonna become even less uh so so
• 53:27
  this is i'll explain in a second the reason why this is uh it's because of the federal reserve
• 53:31
  of itself. So as you see here, from the third quarter, from what we have globally, and nothing
• 53:39
  really changed in the Fed for sure, and other central banks, Bitcoin price went down as well
• 53:44
  during here. So I would really caution people to think that they could time the Bitcoin price based
• 53:50
  on the money supply. A lot of people do USM2 a lot. That has nothing to do with anything. USM2 is just
• 53:56
  retail deposits that are not checking accounts, you know, demand deposits. But you have M3 money,
• 54:06
  you have institutional money, there's a lot of different money here. This is just base money,
• 54:09
  which is analogous to Bitcoin, the printing press. And of course, there is like a correlation.
• 54:13
  But it's not just lockstep. I mean, Bitcoin screamed in 2017, the Federal Reserve wasn't
• 54:20
  doing anything. And no one was paying attention to the world money supply here, except for me.
• 54:24
  You know, I just started to build it at this time.
• 54:28
  But you can't just say that there's a great correlation, especially when you go to this time after the 2021 print, 2020, 2021 print, when they started to lighten off that Bitcoin still went up.
• 54:41
  So the bottom line is the power curve is going to give you a better guide to where Bitcoin should be.
• 54:49
  But I would just caution about trying to time the markets based on where M2 goes and where Bitcoin's price is going to go.
• 54:57
  Because the money supply could go up.
• 55:00
  Bitcoin could also go up.
• 55:01
  Money supply could go down.
• 55:02
  Bitcoin could also go up.
• 55:04
  That's what I would say.
• 55:06
  Uncorrelated asset, depending on.
• 55:08
  it's over the long term, they're both going to go up. They're both going to go up and Bitcoin
• 55:13
  eventually will take over, which as we talked about, if this, you know, when we get to the big
• 55:17
  one, when we start to revalue into Bitcoin, that's going to be great. But that time is not now.
• 55:22
  And I don't even think it's now for gold, as I showed with the size of the Federal Reserve's
• 55:27
  balance sheet compared to the total US national debt. They don't own as much as they, you know,
• 55:32
  They own about half of what they did four years ago.
• 55:35
  So anyway, that's that point.
• 55:38
  Now, on to so many things to show you here.
• 55:44
  Why did it take me so long now to release the Q3 numbers is because I want to start to incorporate broad money into this as well.
• 55:54
  So broad money has these things like M2, M3.
• 55:56
  But the Federal Reserve, they don't publish broad money anymore.
• 56:02
  So you have to back into it.
• 56:04
  You have to look at different exhibits that they publish.
• 56:08
  And they're so slow now.
• 56:09
  They've gotten even worse.
• 56:11
  I don't know if it's like a Trump thing or whatever.
• 56:12
  Like it's way slow.
• 56:15
  And to get all the data that I needed for Q3,
• 56:19
  I had to wait until just like two weeks ago, January.
• 56:23
  So I actually, you know,
• 56:26
  people like following my stuff for the money supply.
• 56:28
  I want to get it even sort of more locked down.
• 56:30
  I think it'll be even more insightful, actually, if you look further back with sort of a clear view of what was the total money supply and then maybe see what Bitcoin did or what gold did after that.
• 56:44
  So anyway, that's kind of the main reason why I held off.
• 56:48
  But over $37 trillion.
• 56:53
  Yeah.
• 56:54
  I was going to say, how are you backing into these M2, M3 metrics?
• 56:58
  Right.
• 56:59
  So there are various accounts of the United States the Federal Reserve still publishes.
• 57:06
  Those include things that were typically in M3, like the value of repurchase agreements,
• 57:12
  the value of institutional money market funds, and institutional time deposits.
• 57:18
  But they're all in different ways.
• 57:20
  Some are monthly, some are quarterly.
• 57:22
  You have to sort of just sort through it all.
• 57:23
  Uh, and then there, of course, there is a caveat here that the, there's another traditional
• 57:30
  component of M3, which is the Euro dollar, which is offshore dollars, which could be
• 57:36
  huge on top of that.
• 57:37
  I don't have that at all.
• 57:38
  So the Federal Reserve stopped publishing M3 here in February, 2006.
• 57:44
  And even the number that they published in February, 2006 did not match my number.
• 57:49
  Uh, you know, mine is higher.
• 57:51
  theirs is like something like 10 billion this is higher than 10 billion i should have actually
• 57:56
  the full title it's full total here but it's whatever call it uh 11 and a half or 12 billion
• 58:04
  at the time all right now we're over 37 sorry uh 11 and a half trillion at the time in 2006
• 58:12
  not billion now we're at over 37 trillion and all i'll say about this chart is first of all again
• 58:19
  understand there is an M3 money supply, even though the Federal Reserve doesn't publish it,
• 58:23
  even though all you see are these wild M2 charts, which a lot of people don't know they revalued.
• 58:30
  For legal reasons, they're not even comparable with the old ones. You'll see like this M1 and
• 58:35
  M2 chart in 2020, like shoot way up. It's not more money printing. It's them just,
• 58:39
  they're so stupid. I don't know why they don't like make this more clear, but they're just
• 58:44
  reclassifying certain things that were in M1 before, now in M2. It's a complete mess.
• 58:52
  So to make everything backwards compatible, you have to work through it. So I have this for you.
• 58:56
  This will be available as well when I get my new data engine running for folks.
• 59:04
  Can you explain to us why bank reserves and bulk cash are negative $3 trillion right now?
• 59:09
  Yeah, so I should just take that off.
• 59:13
  That's the reason it's negative is just to show it's part of the money supply, but that's stuff that we can't hold.
• 59:18
  It's banks, banks holding.
• 59:20
  I'll get to it.
• 59:21
  I should just take that off and look here.
• 59:24
  So, yeah, thanks.
• 59:26
  That's a good point.
• 59:27
  So the one thing I just want to say about the supply is, yes, it's growing.
• 59:30
  This is how it looks.
• 59:32
  There's euro dollars on top of it.
• 59:33
  So we have to think about that.
• 59:35
  money market funds
• 59:38
  they're kind of like a stable coin
• 59:39
  so that's not a huge
• 59:41
  balance in the crypto
• 59:44
  world today only like $300 billion
• 59:46
  it'll share the yield with you though
• 59:46
  they will share the yield
• 59:49
  they will share the yield
• 59:50
  caution
• 59:55
  caution
• 59:56
  that's all I can say
• 59:57
  well no I mean dive in it
• 59:59
  it is pretty topical right now
• 1:00:01
  it's a big battle here in the United States
• 1:00:02
  It's about being able to share stable coin yield between the banks and Coinbase and others.
• 1:00:09
  Yeah.
• 1:00:10
  I heard Novogratz talking to Scaramucci about that.
• 1:00:13
  I mean, obviously, Novogratz is a big shit coiner, but he's also lobbying in pretty in-depth in the process.
• 1:00:20
  And as he was saying, he said, generally, it's a bipartisan issue and people are going to be on board with it.
• 1:00:29
  But at the end of the day, look, it's just another revenue.
• 1:00:33
  Or sorry, it's another product that banks could use.
• 1:00:39
  They're worried about like capital flight or whatever from their demand deposits.
• 1:00:43
  But if it's a stable coin and they can offer that product, there are plenty of ways to
• 1:00:48
  generate loans or capital on top of that.
• 1:00:52
  So I don't see it as being a very different thing.
• 1:00:54
  If the CBDC was really taking off, that would cause concern.
• 1:00:59
  which is why it's not being launched because then that could be direct capital
• 1:01:02
  flight competition with your checking deposit,
• 1:01:05
  which banks wouldn't have an opportunity to,
• 1:01:08
  you know,
• 1:01:09
  to partake in because it was CBDC,
• 1:01:11
  which is why all the socialists want to do a CBDC.
• 1:01:14
  And this is why also why the United States is not doing it.
• 1:01:17
  So it's going to grow.
• 1:01:20
  It's going to grow for sure.
• 1:01:22
  You see all the debt that the United States has,
• 1:01:25
  it's stable coins could take part in that,
• 1:01:28
  but,
• 1:01:29
  it's going to be unsustainable at some point.
• 1:01:34
  I do think it's going to be an unsustainable system.
• 1:01:38
  And as Bitcoin,
• 1:01:40
  but I think we're going to start really start to see the effects of that like
• 1:01:42
  10 years from now,
• 1:01:43
  10,
• 1:01:43
  15 years from now,
• 1:01:44
  because Bitcoin is going to grow way faster than those asset classes are.
• 1:01:49
  Like even as insane as this chart looks right here,
• 1:01:51
  you know,
• 1:01:52
  it grows in less than 10% a year,
• 1:01:54
  you know,
• 1:01:55
  closer to seven,
• 1:01:56
  8% a year.
• 1:01:56
  Why do you think it's going to be unsustainable stablecoin markets?
• 1:02:01
  Because they're exponential.
• 1:02:05
  Stablecoins take yield.
• 1:02:06
  Yield is a compounding asset.
• 1:02:09
  Compounding assets are exponential.
• 1:02:11
  Exponential assets are typically unsustainable.
• 1:02:13
  It goes back to the power curve.
• 1:02:15
  Even just take the silver price.
• 1:02:16
  As you saw here, right?
• 1:02:19
  As you correctly pointed out, not a great overall trend line.
• 1:02:24
  3 per year a little bit more 3 per year When you have an exponentially growing asset and all financial assets are exponentially growing all financial assets are exponentially growing you get a straight line on log scale
• 1:02:41
  I mean, I don't know what an unsustainable market looks like other than this chart.
• 1:02:48
  I mean, it goes to, you know, silver being $1 in 1971, goes, you know, to $42 in 1980.
• 1:02:58
  Hunt Brothers trying to corner the market, completely fails, going to a 20-year bear.
• 1:03:02
  Not exactly correlating with gold, but pretty close.
• 1:03:05
  Goes down to $5, even $4 in 2001, then goes up to $50 again in April 2011.
• 1:03:14
  Down again, and then here we are.
• 1:03:16
  over $100 people calling for $200, $500 silver. There's a lot of speculation. There's a lot of
• 1:03:24
  talk about revaluing other underlying assets that use this, right? Like silver mines or silver
• 1:03:32
  companies. And it's just the nature of compound interest and debt is that you get these booms and
• 1:03:40
  busts. But here's the really interesting thing is that Bitcoin does not follow that, whether you
• 1:03:46
  price it in silver, whether you price it in gold, or you price it in dollars. So Bitcoin, this is
• 1:03:57
  actually a really good thing. People always wonder about the power curve, or they don't sort of
• 1:04:01
  exactly understand what it means. It just means that for Bitcoin will still continue to do things
• 1:04:08
  like double according to a formula, but it would just take longer to double, which actually is a
• 1:04:15
  good thing. That's how networks scale. So like the 2080 rule is kind of, is a part of this. And
• 1:04:22
  I've used the example, I'm sure on your podcast before is, you know, a network. If you just look
• 1:04:28
  at networks like nodes and traffic, you would have a power law is something where you have a few large
• 1:04:35
  nodes with many connections, and then you have many, many small nodes with few connections.
• 1:04:40
  That's a power law. That's power law relationship. And that's how Bitcoin scales as well. But the
• 1:04:45
  wild thing is it does that even in time. It does that with its price. And so I would say Bitcoin
• 1:04:51
  is a way better bet over the long run because it exhibits this sustainable growth. Technically,
• 1:04:59
  yeah, exponential curves are faster. They grow faster, but they're also very unsustainable.
• 1:05:05
  And they tend to be below 10% per year in their booms.
• 1:05:12
  Of course, if actual price inflation gets more than 10%
• 1:05:15
  a year, gets galloping, then that's a bad thing.
• 1:05:18
  And you also see busts happen even quicker there.
• 1:05:21
  But it's actually just the nature of the thing.
• 1:05:24
  So stocks, gold, bonds, everything,
• 1:05:27
  everything that has a compound return, stablecoin yield,
• 1:05:30
  which is just tying itself to a sovereign yield.
• 1:05:35
  it's unsustainable. I mean, it's, it can go on for a long time, but, and you can get,
• 1:05:42
  even after the bus, you can continue the trend. But the, I guess the better word is to say,
• 1:05:48
  not necessarily always unsustainable, but it's just extremely volatile, right? Which is ironic,
• 1:05:53
  because people say Bitcoin is volatile, but looking at this 96% R squared power trend line,
• 1:06:02
  which I've been tracking since the end of 2018.
• 1:06:05
  All right.
• 1:06:06
  It is incredible.
• 1:06:08
  I mean, you could look at, I can show you a chart
• 1:06:10
  where you plot the same power trend
• 1:06:14
  with only up to 2016 data.
• 1:06:16
  And you're only like a couple thousand dollars off
• 1:06:18
  what this trend line would show
• 1:06:20
  after 10 more years of data.
• 1:06:24
  It's madness.
• 1:06:25
  It's really wild.
• 1:06:27
  And the number, by the way, just to show you,
• 1:06:29
  you have to run and calculate these things,
• 1:06:31
  but basically it's every 12 to 13% increase in the life of Bitcoin will double the price.
• 1:06:38
  That's what Bitcoin currently runs at.
• 1:06:39
  So it's about over 6,000 days of Bitcoin right now.
• 1:06:45
  So 700 days more, roughly two years, price doubles.
• 1:06:50
  And as Bitcoin gets older, the doubling time will take longer,
• 1:06:54
  but that should sound like a more sustainable base for growing things than the other curves.
• 1:07:00
  that we've been talking about.
• 1:07:02
  Does that make sense?
• 1:07:03
  Yes, it does.
• 1:07:04
  And I think, as you're describing this,
• 1:07:07
  obviously we talked about power curve,
• 1:07:09
  network adoption, comparing it to things like the internet.
• 1:07:11
  But I don't think we've ever actually keyed in
• 1:07:13
  on this insight, which is like,
• 1:07:14
  it's so incredibly cool that with this
• 1:07:17
  sort of network adoption that we're observing
• 1:07:19
  within Bitcoin, it has a price attached to it
• 1:07:22
  to express the state of that network adoption,
• 1:07:26
  which is unique in a sense, correct?
• 1:07:29
  I think so. I mean, the internet, right? People were attaching a lot of valuations to it,
• 1:07:36
  usually in an unsustainable way. We saw that with the dot-com boom and bust. And
• 1:07:43
  yeah, I mean, I think people have probably made that observation, but
• 1:07:48
  you know, that this is the first time in history you can actually own a piece of,
• 1:07:52
  you know, a network like globally decentralized where no one had to gatekeep you.
• 1:07:56
  and I think it's incredible.
• 1:07:59
  I mean, like you, man,
• 1:08:03
  I mean, I'm more and more bullish every day.
• 1:08:04
  Keep, you know, not financial advice,
• 1:08:06
  keep some powder dry.
• 1:08:07
  You never know what can happen in the next year.
• 1:08:09
  But this trend is an amazing trend
• 1:08:13
  and it's going to work.
• 1:08:14
  It works across all currencies.
• 1:08:15
  So here's one I wanted to show you.
• 1:08:17
  Let's look at Turkey.
• 1:08:18
  Now let's start with Iran.
• 1:08:20
  I have Iran.
• 1:08:21
  Let's look at Bitcoin priced in Iranian reals.
• 1:08:23
  Pretty poignant topic these days, okay?
• 1:08:26
  so the iranian central bank balance sheet is about 12
• 1:08:32
  quadrillion reals 12 quadrillion that is the iranian and by the way that's like from
• 1:08:41
  seven months ago they you know not only the fact that they cut off the internet but i can never get
• 1:08:47
  on the central bank of iran's website it's like they probably you know they probably mark everyone
• 1:08:52
  is a terrorist or whatever, but I got to use VPNs. But you actually can't get on the website at the
• 1:08:58
  moment, obviously. But this is a rough number. And so this is Bitcoin's value. And if we take
• 1:09:06
  that off, right, that's the value of their balance sheet. And Bitcoin is just towering over it.
• 1:09:12
  And you can do a percentage, run a regression on that percentage. And lo and behold, it's a power
• 1:09:19
  curve as well. So Bitcoin will dominate whatever it, this is your quote right here, Bitcoin will
• 1:09:26
  dominate whatever you compare it to, and the power curve will dominate. So if it's, you know,
• 1:09:31
  the Iranian central bank grows at a very fast exponential rate, a very quickly depreciating
• 1:09:37
  exponential rate. But if you put the Bitcoin market cap against it, it will turn it into a
• 1:09:43
  power curve. So Bitcoin actually dominates the comparison. And look, it's an even better,
• 1:09:48
  It's a better R-squared than the USD price.
• 1:09:52
  It's way tighter.
• 1:09:52
  Yep.
• 1:09:53
  You can look at Turkey.
• 1:09:55
  All right, this one's kind of fun because Erdogan put in a new central.
• 1:10:02
  This is very Trump-like.
• 1:10:03
  He put in a new central bank manager governor right here in 2021 who had the good idea of fighting inflation by dropping interest rates.
• 1:10:12
  This is the balance sheet of the Central Bank of Turkey, or really the monetary base.
• 1:10:17
  So they went from 383 billion lira back in 2021.
• 1:10:23
  Now they have 4.5 trillion.
• 1:10:26
  Bitcoin is worth that much in Turkish lira.
• 1:10:31
  And you look at that, it's a nice 96% R-square powered curve.
• 1:10:35
  Interesting, like I haven't quite looked at this detail.
• 1:10:38
  It's a little bit behind schedule.
• 1:10:41
  Interestingly, somehow the Turkish lira is holding a little bit of value here,
• 1:10:45
  but I'm not worried about it.
• 1:10:47
  It'll pop back up.
• 1:10:51
  Sterling.
• 1:10:53
  Bitcoin, you can actually see when Bitcoin passes the value of sterling right there.
• 1:10:58
  Last year.
• 1:11:00
  No, two years ago at this time, roughly.
• 1:11:04
  We passed the value of the good old Bank of England, the oldest fiat currency still in existence.
• 1:11:11
  That is the cross.
• 1:11:14
  Put it on log scale.
• 1:11:15
  Nice power curve.
• 1:11:17
  so all of these other things if you put them on log scale uh they look like straight lines so let's
• 1:11:27
  take off i should put this the you could draw a curve through that which would be exponential
• 1:11:33
  it'd be a straight line bitcoin does not look like that and it looks like that nice sort of
• 1:11:39
  gentle sloping power curve. And it's actually, I would argue, more sustainable in the long run,
• 1:11:48
  if it takes a little bit longer to get there. So just as an example, we are at 2.5. Well,
• 1:11:55
  let me do this with Europe. I have Europe, I think right here. So here's one where we have
• 1:11:59
  yet to cross ECB's balance sheet. Notice how this is another thing where you have to always
• 1:12:06
  adjust the September levels with current levels. So you see the ECB, just like the Fed,
• 1:12:11
  is starting to pump just a little bit, just a little bit, right, from the low back in August.
• 1:12:18
  Way lower than it was in 2022, just like the Fed. Okay. Six trillion euros is a monetary base of
• 1:12:27
  Europe, Bitcoin in, of the Eurozone, I should say. Bitcoin in Europe, in euro terms is 1.5 trillion.
• 1:12:34
  Bitcoin dominates it, turns into a power law. Like most things, a little bit behind schedule,
• 1:12:42
  not like all currencies, but like a lot of them, it's a little bit behind schedule at the moment.
• 1:12:47
  And here's something to keep in mind. So look at how the curve is 0.38x, right? So we are
• 1:12:56
  at 0.2x. I should take that to two decimals, but we're roughly 20% of the balance sheet at the
• 1:13:01
  moment, the curve is 40%. So we actually should be higher a little bit behind schedule. But look
• 1:13:08
  at how it just sort of nice gradual growth. And we get to 100% by the end of the decade.
• 1:13:13
  Sounds reasonable, could be faster, who knows. But it just has this nice growth. But notice how
• 1:13:21
  the power curve will be way quicker. If it's just a much shittier balance sheet. So like with with
• 1:13:29
  the RON, for example, where it's already at, you actually have better to look at this on linear
• 1:13:35
  scale. See it, we're at 192 times the central bank of the RON's balance sheet. We actually had a
• 1:13:47
  schedule 165x would be the trend. And, you know, by the end of the decade, the trend is going to be
• 1:13:56
  700 times the central bank of Iran's balance sheet. What I'm trying to show you is that
• 1:14:02
  you got to look at this thing through different lenses. Like we always look at it as far as the
• 1:14:06
  dollar goes. Like you said, you hit it with a stick, do more. It is doing a lot. You're just
• 1:14:11
  not looking at the right lens. Like in a weak currency, Bitcoin is just destroying it,
• 1:14:16
  absolutely dominating. And yeah, with the larger currencies, the growth will be slower,
• 1:14:21
  It would be slower, but it's still close to double the Sterling balance sheet.
• 1:14:30
  And by the end of the decade, it's going to be 10 times the size of Sterling.
• 1:14:34
  That's how it works.
• 1:14:36
  That's what I was going to say is going through this exercise and pulling up all these different power curves in different currencies, different metals.
• 1:14:44
  really highlights the comparative advantages and disadvantages
• 1:14:51
  that the different fiat currencies have.
• 1:14:55
  Like the fact that the Bitcoin power curve and sterling
• 1:14:59
  and Iranian real and Turkish lira is as tight as it is.
• 1:15:03
  If you were to just look at the U.S. dollar power curve,
• 1:15:07
  you'd be like, oh, what's going on?
• 1:15:08
  And funnily enough, it does sort of give a hat tip to Brent Johnson
• 1:15:13
  in his dollar milkshake theory a bit,
• 1:15:16
  sort of being expressed in these Bitcoin power curve charts.
• 1:15:22
  Wasn't that Snyder?
• 1:15:25
  It was Brent Jones.
• 1:15:26
  Originally Campbell Snyder.
• 1:15:26
  Jeff Snyder, I always interchanged the two.
• 1:15:29
  Okay, gotcha.
• 1:15:32
  Yeah, so yeah, it's going to take time,
• 1:15:37
  but there's a lot happening behind the scenes,
• 1:15:40
  And the fact that it keeps growing like this wonderful sort of network theory, I'd say, is a really, really good thing.
• 1:15:46
  And like you said, first time we can own, really, truly own a network.
• 1:15:49
  Here's an interesting one, in my opinion.
• 1:15:52
  I wanted to show you sort of, I would take this as an optimistic thing.
• 1:15:57
  I know people in the United States, it's pretty polarized right now, to say the least from what I see on Twitter.
• 1:16:05
  Everything's great over here.
• 1:16:07
  Yeah, sure, sure.
• 1:16:07
  assuming assuming the united states stays free and i really hope it does and i think that it will uh
• 1:16:17
  we're you know it would have been bad we were really worried over here about greenland if
• 1:16:22
  you're taking greenland that would have been a problem for uh for for international peace of
• 1:16:28
  accords but you know it's tenuous time don't think for a minute you know the trolls in the
• 1:16:37
  russian uh disinformation farms the chinese disinformation farms don't want to stir dissent
• 1:16:43
  in the free world but here is this is not the total monetary base a little bit less right
• 1:16:48
  because we got up to actually 30 trillion here you see we're at like 27 and a half
• 1:16:52
  and again i need a total column but um you can just see it in the axis
• 1:16:58
  To me, this is actually optimistic, right?
• 1:17:04
  So Syria, Venezuela, we're going to see, but it's like dictator bingo going to Moscow or being extradited in one way or another these days.
• 1:17:16
  It's very, very good.
• 1:17:18
  And Iran is a wild card.
• 1:17:21
  We'll see.
• 1:17:22
  I mean, there might still be something happening there with the aircraft carriers moving towards the region, I guess, as we speak, but we'll see.
• 1:17:28
  even with the old shitty fiat money barometer,
• 1:17:39
  the free world has a large share.
• 1:17:44
  Okay.
• 1:17:44
  So as you see here, we got the United States down here.
• 1:17:47
  We got all NATO members that are not the United States here.
• 1:17:51
  Got Japan.
• 1:17:52
  And then you got a bunch of, as I would say,
• 1:17:56
  important countries in Asia, you know, Oceania, we got Australia, Korea, Taiwan, and then of course,
• 1:18:01
  Ukraine, I got to put on there. And then you have on the other side, you have China, Russia, Iran.
• 1:18:07
  So another one I wanted to show you is let's look at that's the same chart, but now this is a
• 1:18:12
  percentage. All right. So let's even zoom in, because I don't have the Soviet Union data. So
• 1:18:18
  it's going to be a little bit better to just zoom in.
• 1:18:21
  really the best that they were looking was just before the gfc it's for the global financial
• 1:18:33
  crisis and something to keep in mind even here you know russia was exporting a lot and doing a lot of
• 1:18:39
  deals weaponizing energy which they've been doing all the time even the soviet union
• 1:18:44
  as a share of their central bank money, it went from 4%, even actually 4.8% in 2007.
• 1:18:53
  By 2009, they had shrunk to under 2%.
• 1:18:56
  And okay, that might not seem like a lot.
• 1:18:58
  Whatever China's growing during this period, other people are suffering too.
• 1:19:03
  But I think this is kind of an interesting way to look at it, you know, as sort of we go through
• 1:19:09
  the wild Twitter headlines or tweets that come up every day and sort of divide us.
• 1:19:20
  I am all for a free and democratic world. I think that Bitcoin is going to be a part of that.
• 1:19:26
  But even here, just look at how small Iran and Russia are, literally. I mean,
• 1:19:32
  I showed you the chart against Bitcoin, but monetarily. And by the way, this Iran thing
• 1:19:36
  is even way inflated because I'm using official numbers.
• 1:19:39
  The other chart I was showing you
• 1:19:40
  before was black market, so I got to update
• 1:19:42
  that. Iran is even less. It's under
• 1:19:44
  well under a percent
• 1:19:46
  here, probably like half a percent
• 1:19:48
  of this total.
• 1:19:52
  It's really just China. I'm keeping
• 1:19:54
  India off here because
• 1:19:55
  they're kind of gray. They could go
• 1:19:58
  either way, let's say, but if you just sort of look at
• 1:20:00
  the total free world,
• 1:20:03
  even after
• 1:20:04
  all the madness that happened with
• 1:20:06
  COVID and a little bit on a decline now.
• 1:20:09
  You know, it's less than a third of this makeup.
• 1:20:14
  And I hope the U.S. can stay free.
• 1:20:17
  Looks pretty wild at the moment.
• 1:20:18
  I don't know.
• 1:20:19
  You tell me if you think elections are going to happen in the fall or not.
• 1:20:22
  But I generally think the world wants more freedom.
• 1:20:30
  We should always support it.
• 1:20:32
  There's a lot of people that want to make Americans mad with platforms,
• 1:20:35
  by the way, that are completely banned in China and Russia. I mean, if that doesn't make you laugh,
• 1:20:40
  that Twitter is banned in Russia. And there are like propagandists on, you know, from Russia,
• 1:20:47
  tweeting, like, you know, state run media people. I don't know what will make you laugh. But
• 1:20:52
  there's, there's something to be said here this even if you're measuring, you know, a sort of
• 1:20:59
  deprecated fiat currency unit in this chart, the free world is holding on here. I'm installed,
• 1:21:05
  but the madness.
• 1:21:08
  Obviously, the United States is the biggest player here,
• 1:21:12
  and obviously we both believe and hope that it stays free.
• 1:21:17
  I truly believe it will, and I know that it should.
• 1:21:20
  My bigger worry is the European Union.
• 1:21:21
  It doesn't seem like the European Parliament is really on board
• 1:21:28
  with freedom in the 21st century.
• 1:21:30
  so I'm more worried about
• 1:21:32
  the European Parliament
• 1:21:34
  fucking things up for
• 1:21:36
  your continent
• 1:21:37
  you're reading Russian tweets
• 1:21:41
  my friend
• 1:21:41
  oh my gosh
• 1:21:43
  I mean look what's happening
• 1:21:45
  like free speech laws
• 1:21:46
  and
• 1:21:47
  if they're
• 1:21:50
  I think the UK has the worst
• 1:21:53
  of that
• 1:21:53
  and
• 1:21:55
  nothing like the UK
• 1:22:00
  Okay. And even, I mean, whatever, anybody can chat GPT it.
• 1:22:06
  Say it's a thousand people were illegally detained.
• 1:22:08
  I've heard of anybody that's actually, I mean, it is insane.
• 1:22:11
  The UK law about tweeting like hate speech and stuff, that's insane.
• 1:22:16
  But say it's, I don't know, a thousand people.
• 1:22:20
  The entire nation of Russia is firebombing Ukraine and Twitter is blocked.
• 1:22:27
  What about China? It's blocked.
• 1:22:29
  Like it's not even, it's not even, you can't even access it.
• 1:22:33
  So again, I'm not, I don't want to get into a deep rabbit hole of comparing there, but
• 1:22:38
  people need to understand that you're being gaslit by three countries, Russia, Iran, and
• 1:22:43
  China.
• 1:22:44
  Like why does Khamenei even have a Twitter account?
• 1:22:48
  Is that free speech?
• 1:22:50
  I mean, like they're murdering thousands and thousands of people right now.
• 1:22:55
  And he has a Twitter account?
• 1:22:57
  Is that free speech?
• 1:22:59
  Yeah.
• 1:22:59
  This, it's actually, information is most weaponized, I would say, in the United States. And small European countries, particularly Eastern European countries, who, by the way, have dealt with deportations, the gulag, we've actually dealt with this shit, we've had it in our history.
• 1:23:17
  There, we recognize that.
• 1:23:19
  Russia, China, and Iran are weaponizing social media.
• 1:23:24
  I'm not saying I know the answer.
• 1:23:26
  I'm not saying censorship.
• 1:23:28
  I'm not saying any of that.
• 1:23:29
  I don't even follow the topic, really.
• 1:23:30
  It seems like you're following it more.
• 1:23:31
  But I can guarantee you that as bad as you might think you see on some tweet that it is in Europe or something, look at Russia, look at Iran, look at China.
• 1:23:41
  You can't even get on the platform.
• 1:23:43
  Yeah.
• 1:23:44
  And I don't think these things are mutually exclusive.
• 1:23:46
  I completely agree with you.
• 1:23:47
  You'd be naive to think that external forces, Russia and China specifically, are trying to meddle in U.S. politics and the sort of conversation and the rhetoric that exists.
• 1:24:03
  I actually recorded with a journalist from Maine yesterday
• 1:24:08
  who did a lot of research on the Medicaid fraud abuse in Maine specifically.
• 1:24:14
  And before that, was really focused on the Chinese national marijuana grow-ups
• 1:24:23
  that popped up in Maine.
• 1:24:24
  And he made a very compelling case that what we're seeing now in the U.S.,
• 1:24:29
  particularly as it pertains to the conversations around Somali immigrants and Medicaid fraud,
• 1:24:34
  like China had a hand in that.
• 1:24:37
  There's some sort of loose connections between the CCP and what's happening in Somalia,
• 1:24:44
  I think via the Belt and Road Initiative.
• 1:24:46
  And there are some actors that are associated with each other on the China and Somalia side in Somalia
• 1:24:58
  that are actually doing things in the United States too
• 1:25:01
  around this Medicaid fraud.
• 1:25:02
  So I completely agree.
• 1:25:05
  I think...
• 1:25:06
  I mean, the tenant media,
• 1:25:07
  you know about the tenant media scandal, right?
• 1:25:10
  T-E-N-E-T.
• 1:25:11
  Yeah, what was that again?
• 1:25:12
  Yeah, so that was when the Russian government...
• 1:25:15
  Oh, yeah, they were paying influencers, right?
• 1:25:18
  Canadian influencers, right?
• 1:25:20
  Yeah.
• 1:25:20
  No, American.
• 1:25:21
  Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson.
• 1:25:25
  I'm sure you know those names.
• 1:25:27
  Those assholes.
• 1:25:27
  They were getting paid like $150,000 an episode by the Russian government.
• 1:25:35
  I'll start pumping the propaganda out Putin.
• 1:25:39
  Check your DMs, man.
• 1:25:43
  Make sure you know where your sponsorship money is coming from.
• 1:25:47
  The tenant media scandal, again, should have a lot more views.
• 1:25:53
  Yeah.
• 1:25:54
  No, I mean, all I'm saying is it's a battle.
• 1:25:57
  This is the new frontier.
• 1:25:59
  I'm a big Yuri Bezmenov.
• 1:26:06
  Yeah.
• 1:26:07
  I think he worked in the 80s.
• 1:26:10
  Why don't you explain to the listeners exactly who that was,
• 1:26:12
  exactly where he came from?
• 1:26:15
  He was an ex-Soviet that defected, came to the United States,
• 1:26:19
  and basically warned us in the 80s through a series of interviews
• 1:26:23
  that we have a long-term cultural revolution
• 1:26:28
  being waged against us, the United States.
• 1:26:32
  I'm sure many of you have seen it, but he basically called it out.
• 1:26:35
  You have this process of infiltration, normalization, demoralization,
• 1:26:39
  and takeover.
• 1:26:42
  During the COVID era, many people were convinced
• 1:26:47
  that we were in the demoralization phase.
• 1:26:49
  But essentially, he was saying the Russians are doing this,
• 1:26:54
  but I would add the Chinese into it as well.
• 1:26:56
  I think they want to destabilize the United States.
• 1:26:58
  And that's the weird thing is that you have...
• 1:27:00
  I mean, well, the fact that it even came from there
• 1:27:02
  and we couldn't even say anything about it
• 1:27:04
  and couldn't say anything about a lab leak or anything.
• 1:27:08
  I mean, this is a disaster.
• 1:27:11
  Look, there's nothing to think that that might be not the worst of it, right?
• 1:27:14
  Like knock on wood, but it is full-on information warfare there.
• 1:27:19
  But here's the thing. They quickly toppled. Like how quick did Assad's buddy topple? Now, look, I'm not saying a lot of people say there's like a Berlin Wall movement or whatever. I mean, the guy was the current president used to be in ISIS or Al Qaeda. So let's not let's not get ahead of ourselves here.
• 1:27:34
  But the fact that that government toppled so quickly is fantastic.
• 1:27:41
  And there's only a few more left, at least with major, major, let's say, clout still on the international arena.
• 1:27:50
  And I think the spotlight should still shine.
• 1:27:53
  The light should be shown there.
• 1:27:54
  Of course, Trump invited them all onto his peace board.
• 1:27:57
  So I don't know what you think about that.
• 1:27:58
  But the moral clarity might not be the clearest coming from the current admin.
• 1:28:05
  So we don't have to go too deep down that rabbit hole.
• 1:28:09
  Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I'm not paying as close attention to the peace thing.
• 1:28:18
  It seemed like some sort of bullshit.
• 1:28:20
  But better not.
• 1:28:22
  Better not.
• 1:28:22
  Yeah.
• 1:28:24
  If you don't have a billion dollars, you can be on there for three years.
• 1:28:26
  If you do have a billion dollars, no one really knows where it's going.
• 1:28:30
  But yeah.
• 1:28:33
  Yeah.
• 1:28:33
  And then you have like the whole city of London theory as well.
• 1:28:36
  So holding a bunch of these different theories.
• 1:28:39
  What's the city of London theory?
• 1:28:41
  Is that we haven't, we never truly broke free from British royal influence on the United States.
• 1:28:51
  And there's a, there's a theory that's like all the old families.
• 1:28:55
  and they've essentially been controlling the U.S. and Europe by extension
• 1:29:03
  via financial markets for 20 centuries.
• 1:29:06
  Well, their currency has been already destroyed by Bitcoin.
• 1:29:09
  Again, when I say the city of London is not the city of London,
• 1:29:12
  it's the way the theory is described.
• 1:29:18
  That is really the puppet master behind Davos and all that.
• 1:29:23
  Yeah.
• 1:29:25
  Well, I mean, look, we should all agree that we want freedom.
• 1:29:32
  Yeah.
• 1:29:33
  I live in Europe.
• 1:29:36
  I can tell you, living in a place where you had the deportations,
• 1:29:39
  you had the gulags, you had the executions,
• 1:29:42
  it's not something you want to flirt with, even repeat.
• 1:29:45
  I saw a very good interview with Stephen Kotkin, by the way.
• 1:29:51
  It was recent.
• 1:29:52
  I could pull it up, whatever.
• 1:29:53
  It was like last weekend.
• 1:29:54
  And it's very optimistic.
• 1:29:55
  Very good.
• 1:29:56
  I mean this is the guy who he on his third volume of Stalin life All right So he a preeminent one of the preeminent historians today from the Hoover Institute Stephen Kotkin If you don know him I highly recommend you know people read him or you can listen to him on YouTube And his takeaway was actually very
• 1:30:12
  very positive. Like I'm trying to say here, right? I mean, like it is bad and there have been
• 1:30:20
  like, there have been governments that are never going to, let's say, play by the rules and like,
• 1:30:27
  No one should be naive to think that there's some true international law, right?
• 1:30:30
  But everybody should want to be free.
• 1:30:32
  Like the Baltics, where I live right now, was part of the former Soviet Union.
• 1:30:35
  We hate the fact that we even have to say that.
• 1:30:38
  Like we were never Soviet.
• 1:30:39
  We had free societies, free countries before 1940, when we were occupied three times, twice
• 1:30:46
  by the Soviets, once by the Nazis.
• 1:30:48
  And that is just not going to change.
• 1:30:51
  I mean, we absolutely appreciate freedom and a free sort of united Europe is way better than anything that anybody from, you know, Putinist Russia, communist China could ever throw at us.
• 1:31:08
  And we're never, you know, we're never going back.
• 1:31:11
  So I just use that as an example.
• 1:31:13
  It's like a lot of people have different definitions of what, you know, freedom might mean or something.
• 1:31:17
  But every country should be able to choose their alliances.
• 1:31:19
  Every country should be able to be free.
• 1:31:22
  And I think with the US, as big as it is,
• 1:31:24
  you get very polarized maybe views of the world there.
• 1:31:29
  We've talked about a lot of this stuff,
• 1:31:31
  but I know that we all agree on freedom.
• 1:31:33
  I would just say, be very careful.
• 1:31:36
  The disinformation is massive now.
• 1:31:38
  I mean, and it's only growing and it's really,
• 1:31:43
  okay, maybe it comes from like Indian click farms
• 1:31:45
  or Indonesian or Pakistan or something as well.
• 1:31:48
  But the big funders, the big funders are China and then Russia, which thank God has no money anymore and is being exhausted.
• 1:31:56
  I mean, Russia, three in five Russians only have a toilet.
• 1:32:01
  Two in five Russians don't even have a toilet.
• 1:32:03
  That is how bad that system still is from being so behind from 100 years of communism.
• 1:32:10
  Like any way we want to describe it, like that is where that is where they are.
• 1:32:14
  and they're never going to play by our rules, whatever.
• 1:32:19
  They've shown that as a fact, right?
• 1:32:21
  They've murdered people with polonium in Britain,
• 1:32:25
  in London, city of London, back to the London theory.
• 1:32:29
  So there are places in this world
• 1:32:31
  who will never play by our rules, whatever, that's fine.
• 1:32:33
  We all agree invading Iraq was terrible,
• 1:32:37
  but not everything that the United States does
• 1:32:39
  is, I would say, bad.
• 1:32:41
  So I would just keep that in mind
• 1:32:43
  when you look at like this chart where you say, okay, it's rough. Bitcoin's great. It's a great
• 1:32:48
  escape hatch. It's going to be a great escape hatch, but losing anyway, back to the Stephen
• 1:32:54
  Kotkin interview, his was also very optimistic. And he's like, even with what you might see as a
• 1:32:59
  lot of the provocation, a lot of bad stuff, I know the left is their hair is on fire and, you know,
• 1:33:04
  it's been some tragedies with these protests, but, um, you still don't see in the United States,
• 1:33:11
  It's like you don't see a Gulag system.
• 1:33:13
  You don't even see a concentration camp system like we had with the Japanese.
• 1:33:18
  Of course, we do have growing internment, you know, sort of facilities, however you
• 1:33:24
  wanted to say that, with what ICE is doing.
• 1:33:26
  But, you know, people generally just want controlled immigration, so I understand all
• 1:33:31
  that.
• 1:33:32
  But it's not as, it's definitely not like, you know, 1930s Europe.
• 1:33:37
  But if it would, you know, there was an event in Nazi Germany in the early 1930s.
• 1:33:41
  It was called Night of the Long Knives, where basically the new people in power,
• 1:33:44
  they just went completely rogue.
• 1:33:46
  They killed a bunch of former politicians.
• 1:33:49
  This was early, like this was 1932 or 1933.
• 1:33:52
  I mentioned a lot on my show because, you know,
• 1:33:55
  I don't think the U.S. is going to lose democracy, lose freedom.
• 1:34:00
  You know, you can't go unchecked.
• 1:34:03
  You can't just like, you can't have like people murdered on the street and then say,
• 1:34:06
  these people are domestic terrorists or whatever
• 1:34:09
  and then keep going and keep going and keep going
• 1:34:11
  and then all of a sudden you're having extra
• 1:34:13
  judicial killings
• 1:34:15
  sort of in mass but like I said
• 1:34:17
  we're nowhere near that actually
• 1:34:19
  and I think all of that is
• 1:34:22
  is
• 1:34:23
  reasons to have some hope
• 1:34:25
  that's where I feel
• 1:34:28
  like the influence whether it's China
• 1:34:29
  Russia a combination of the two is really
• 1:34:31
  shining in because I mean
• 1:34:33
  for the immigration stuff specifically
• 1:34:35
  like Tom Homan, who's the head of Border Patrol.
• 1:34:43
  In 2012, Obama gave him a medal for deporting twice as many people as he did in 2025,
• 1:34:49
  for some reason or another, even though an insane amount of fraud has been unearthed.
• 1:34:56
  Well, he also took $50,000 out of paper bag to hire supposed border agents in the Trump admin.
• 1:35:03
  well but separate from that like it's very clear i i agree with you and obama deported uh even more
• 1:35:12
  the the system is being exploited by quote-unquote asylum seekers to the tune of
• 1:35:19
  half a trillion dollars a year yeah and like i've said this multiple times like i wish we weren't in
• 1:35:29
  this situation. We wouldn't be in this situation if Biden hadn't
• 1:35:34
  completely opened up the border and literally
• 1:35:37
  held up barbed wire fences so that people could flood into the country.
• 1:35:42
  And then
• 1:35:43
  these people, ICE is going to deport
• 1:35:49
  illegal criminal immigrants. They're still in the criminal
• 1:35:53
  level of this deportation phase. And you have these
• 1:35:58
  you have these groups that I think stem from the weather underground
• 1:36:05
  and that Marxist influence that existed in the 60s
• 1:36:08
  that Yuri Bezmenov warned us about really creating chaos,
• 1:36:14
  like going there blowing whistles
• 1:36:15
  and trying to physically stop federal agents
• 1:36:19
  from deporting criminal illegal aliens
• 1:36:22
  and you basically incite a confrontation
• 1:36:26
  then yes it's terrible i've said this multiple times i wish nobody died but like again if you're
• 1:36:33
  just like observing the the layout of the situation like they're inciting every action
• 1:36:40
  and they creating chaos and they blowing whistles and all that and a lot of these people aren even from Minneapolis They sort of I think there a lot of evidence coming to the surface that these
• 1:36:56
  people are like coordinated by like sort of Marxist groups that want to sow this chaos
• 1:37:02
  and paint a media narrative that Trump is a fascist, the ISIS Gestapo.
• 1:37:07
  and to me just literally looking at the facts
• 1:37:12
  and look at what's happening
• 1:37:14
  it's like this
• 1:37:15
  when I think about Yuri Besmanov
• 1:37:16
  having an influence on how I view America
• 1:37:19
  in the 21st century
• 1:37:21
  like I look at that and I'm like
• 1:37:22
  oh this is what Yuri warned us about
• 1:37:24
  yeah
• 1:37:25
  I think that there's both
• 1:37:28
  you know
• 1:37:29
  it's going to come from the left
• 1:37:31
  it's going to come from the right
• 1:37:32
  people just need to
• 1:37:36
  you know
• 1:37:37
  be cautious and obviously the situations where these people did die I mean it's tragic but
• 1:37:47
  obviously if you you know get caught up in there there could be situations where they become out
• 1:37:55
  of control and they did but you know again I don't want to sort of go down that rabbit hole too much
• 1:37:59
  but the point is there's a lot there's just a lot so much that's getting spewed from from China
• 1:38:07
  and russia and look russia is weak man i mean two and five two and five russians uh don't have a
• 1:38:14
  toilet they're freezing through the winter they're they think that if they can just make ukrainians
• 1:38:19
  lives miserable by bombing all of their energy infrastructure which they're doing and it's getting
• 1:38:23
  very very bad right now in ukraine like you probably haven't seen it because it's not on
• 1:38:27
  your feed but it's getting very very bad um do do they think that ukrainians are gonna you know
• 1:38:34
  say, oh, well, we want, we, Russia's lives, Russians' lives are such shit, you know, under
• 1:38:40
  their autocratic 25-year dictator that, yes, we're actually going to go back to this old,
• 1:38:46
  you know, sort of shitty oligarchy run by Putin.
• 1:38:49
  That's going to be a good thing.
• 1:38:50
  That's a strategy.
• 1:38:51
  That is the Russian strategy is make them as miserable as they possibly can to break
• 1:38:54
  them.
• 1:38:55
  And that is something that we in Eastern Europe, for sure, are just never going to stand for.
• 1:39:00
  Never.
• 1:39:01
  Doesn't matter.
• 1:39:01
  Like whatever someone says about the UK internet censorship laws or whatever.
• 1:39:06
  I only bring that up not directed as you, but that's just, these are misdirections on what is really, really happening right now.
• 1:39:12
  And, you know, I mean, Iran, what's going on in Iran should be absolutely top of mind for everybody, US politicians alike.
• 1:39:21
  Absolutely everybody.
• 1:39:23
  It's going to be rough.
• 1:39:24
  It's going to be rough there.
• 1:39:25
  But this is what happens when a regime becomes totally entrenched.
• 1:39:28
  And yes, I don't think we're anywhere near that in the United States.
• 1:39:30
  So that's, again, room for optimism.
• 1:39:33
  I would say room for optimism.
• 1:39:34
  But it's dangerous.
• 1:39:35
  It's really, I'd say it's really dangerous.
• 1:39:39
  You know, Russia does not in over 12, well, it's almost going to be 12 years since they
• 1:39:47
  first invaded Ukraine.
• 1:39:48
  They still do not control a single oblast or these regions in the east of Ukraine.
• 1:39:57
  They don't, not one, not one.
• 1:39:59
  they control this Crimea, which is one that they invaded. And again, these are talking points for
• 1:40:05
  normal, sovereign, free-thinking Republicans. Like who was president when Putin went in and took a
• 1:40:12
  piece of Ukrainian territory? It was Obama who was president when Ukraine was invaded on the full
• 1:40:17
  scale. It was Biden. These guys are never going to play by our rules, but when they smell weakness,
• 1:40:24
  when they know that they can sow dissent, they go for it. That's what they've been doing. They've
• 1:40:28
  been going for it so i mean it's a lot more look i i uh i have a lot of sympathy for for uh americans
• 1:40:37
  i think there's a lot of there's a lot of division in america right now but i can tell you as far as
• 1:40:42
  freedom goes and like true uh autocratic regimes like eastern europe is actually more united
• 1:40:48
  uh than ever against that and hopefully western europe will join usually the uk is actually on
• 1:40:54
  the right side there i mean you just saw what happened in china right you saw that the
• 1:40:57
  um they were talking they were calling second or third what were they called the night of the
• 1:41:05
  long night yeah they were comparing it to that right yeah i wouldn't necessarily do that because
• 1:41:10
  that was uh i mean it's not dead yet but yeah they're definitely being smoked out i mean g
• 1:41:16
  is as paranoid as they come in autocracy there's another thing that stephen kotkin interview i
• 1:41:21
  definitely mean when you study dictatorships you can start to understand it's like there's nothing
• 1:41:25
  paranoia for these guys. For Putin, Putin has like four doubles. By the way, if anyone doesn't know,
• 1:41:31
  the Putin that met Trump in Alaska was not the real Putin. Sorry to burst your bubble there.
• 1:41:37
  But I mean, it's just embarrassing. It's absolutely embarrassing that these
• 1:41:42
  autocracks, these oligarchs can take such collective air out of the West, and then you
• 1:41:50
  start fighting amongst yourselves. So that's the bigger, for me, that's the bigger picture. And
• 1:41:54
  And that's why I would, again, highlight this.
• 1:41:56
  It's like, yeah, China is sort of the energy,
• 1:41:58
  it was a manufacturing powerhouse of the world
• 1:42:03
  and something we got to deal with.
• 1:42:05
  And we are trying to deal with it, right?
• 1:42:07
  Trump's trying to deal with it.
• 1:42:08
  But all the other stuff is like,
• 1:42:12
  it's so not important compared to actually losing your freedom.
• 1:42:19
  And I mean, these guys, they have not,
• 1:42:22
  they got to they got from stalingrad to berlin quicker than they can get through a few villages
• 1:42:28
  in ukraine ukraine ukrainians are fucking heroes for what they've been doing and uh mostly i just
• 1:42:35
  see you know that people they're getting paid by russians like this tenant media goons
• 1:42:39
  just trying to stir shit and saying like somehow they support putin like tucker tucker supports
• 1:42:44
  putin i know you've been on tucker's show but you know i feel about this fox news 92nd bit
• 1:42:50
  telling people how to use Bitcoin wallets.
• 1:42:52
  You know how I feel about this.
• 1:42:54
  I don't want to get too into it.
• 1:42:55
  That's what I say.
• 1:42:56
  I would say more than ever,
• 1:42:58
  we need to fight for freedom.
• 1:42:59
  Besmanov is a great example, by the way.
• 1:43:03
  Across the decades, across the cultures,
• 1:43:07
  across anybody who hasn't seen his YouTube videos,
• 1:43:12
  explanations of how they sow dissent,
• 1:43:14
  absolutely huge, absolutely important.
• 1:43:16
  But that's the best export that the Russians have,
• 1:43:19
  is chaos.
• 1:43:20
  and they're going to, it's coming more and more and more.
• 1:43:23
  If you're not aware to it,
• 1:43:24
  like I would strongly suggest you would tune your antennas Yeah No again like I said earlier you be naive to think stuff isn happening
• 1:43:34
  We're in an information war, an info war, if you will, sir.
• 1:43:39
  Yeah, yeah, it is to that extent.
• 1:43:43
  Anyway, I'm more optimistic.
• 1:43:45
  The fact that Ukrainians are such heroes holding these guys back in Iran,
• 1:43:50
  I really would love for them to be free, but that looks really rough.
• 1:43:53
  and it looks hairy
• 1:43:55
  we're going to see
• 1:43:57
  how the US chooses to deal with it
• 1:43:59
  but you know
• 1:44:01
  I don't know I think
• 1:44:03
  I mean to your point
• 1:44:05
  I think
• 1:44:06
  put aside
• 1:44:09
  Trump and Putin's relationship which I think we would
• 1:44:11
  both acknowledge is a bit special and a bit weird
• 1:44:13
  to an extent
• 1:44:14
  like I think
• 1:44:16
  this the national security
• 1:44:19
  strategy that we laid out last year
• 1:44:21
  was really like hey
• 1:44:22
  China and Russia are coming in our backyard
• 1:44:25
  and they're trying to influence neighboring countries.
• 1:44:29
  They didn't say that about Russia.
• 1:44:31
  They didn't say that about Russia.
• 1:44:33
  They've mentioned Russia just a few times.
• 1:44:35
  And more talks about Europe.
• 1:44:37
  This is a Russian line, by the way.
• 1:44:39
  It's like Europe is like gay-rup, they call it.
• 1:44:40
  Gay-Europe or something.
• 1:44:41
  It's all trannies and just madness.
• 1:44:46
  It's just not true.
• 1:44:48
  That's a terrible one.
• 1:44:49
  That's what the Russians say.
• 1:44:52
  But look, you know how many times Greenland was mentioned in that national security memorandum?
• 1:44:58
  Quite a few.
• 1:44:59
  Zero.
• 1:45:00
  Zero times.
• 1:45:01
  Zero times.
• 1:45:02
  They published it in like November, December.
• 1:45:04
  Zero times.
• 1:45:05
  And then Trump goes on this tirade that he's going to take over Greenland.
• 1:45:08
  That would have been disastrous.
• 1:45:09
  That would have been disastrous for the U.S., by the way.
• 1:45:10
  I mean, forget coming to Italy for holidays.
• 1:45:13
  Like, that would have been, you would have had, you know, I know Americans who hate NATO
• 1:45:18
  thought like, oh, they got a twofer, like got out of NATO and got Greenland.
• 1:45:21
  but they don't even speak English in Greenland.
• 1:45:25
  You know that, right?
• 1:45:25
  Like, it's not, I mean, it is true.
• 1:45:28
  The United States does not have an official language.
• 1:45:30
  That's true.
• 1:45:31
  But that would have been such a disaster
• 1:45:35
  for the free world to have that wedge,
• 1:45:38
  and China and Russia would have been absolutely loving it.
• 1:45:43
  And I'm very glad that he taco'd there.
• 1:45:45
  I wasn't sure he would, but at least for now, he taco'd.
• 1:45:48
  well i mean that's this is trump's art of the deal right he's gonna anchor it to some extreme
• 1:45:55
  like we're gonna take greenland i'm just like okay everybody cool down
• 1:45:58
  yeah at least for my observation well it was i think another like venezuela like the fact that
• 1:46:05
  who knows what the deal with maduro was to extract him from there yeah no i think i think taco is
• 1:46:13
  definitely tacos the mo right so it's like bomb iran easy actually go in and make around free
• 1:46:19
  there might be a taco i'm not sure that i'm not saying that for sure we might see still what's
• 1:46:23
  going to happen there but same thing like take amaduro easy okay i know it's not purely easy but
• 1:46:29
  actually make venezuela free sounds like a taco but i thought that greenland was on the table i
• 1:46:36
  I mean, like they, what's the word?
• 1:46:41
  They mobilized.
• 1:46:41
  It was the 101st or only Arctic Brigade out in Alaska.
• 1:46:45
  They told him to go to Minnesota.
• 1:46:48
  But it wasn't until his little Davos globalist speech where he said he was not going to use force that it was at least clear.
• 1:46:55
  But it's sad.
• 1:46:57
  I mean, you know, there's a lot of, there's like a kernel of everything that Trump goes for that I totally agree with, right?
• 1:47:03
  It's like, we've been saying in Eastern Europe for 30 years,
• 1:47:06
  you need to take Russia seriously, for 30 years.
• 1:47:08
  And when Trump got up in front of the Germans,
• 1:47:11
  remember the Germans were laughing at him in the UN
• 1:47:13
  in like 2017 or something.
• 1:47:15
  And he was saying, you got to stop buying Russian gas.
• 1:47:17
  Very true.
• 1:47:18
  Very true.
• 1:47:19
  No argument for me.
• 1:47:22
  But then he just goes a little bit crazy
• 1:47:23
  with the taco negotiations.
• 1:47:25
  So we're going to see.
• 1:47:27
  And the Putin bromance is very strange, like you said.
• 1:47:33
  yeah maybe that's like a taco tactic though it's like keep your friends close but your enemies
• 1:47:38
  closer type thing maybe maybe i mean it's been about five times now where we said you know i'm
• 1:47:44
  gonna give putin a month i got a list of all the times we said i would get putin a month and we're
• 1:47:49
  really gonna go hard on him the only the only way to end that is is for the us to go hard uh it's
• 1:47:55
  very easy to sanction i mean the shadow fleet all this stuff anyway i don't want to i don't
• 1:47:59
  want to go on too long we've had a lot a big show here but if people are interested in that stuff
• 1:48:02
  if you can check my stream out.
• 1:48:05
  And I talk more about that stuff
• 1:48:06
  and sort of macro issues like this
• 1:48:08
  because we have different views in,
• 1:48:11
  let's just say in Eastern Europe
• 1:48:12
  compared to say whatever you might be seeing
• 1:48:15
  about freedom being lost in, I don't know,
• 1:48:17
  in the UK or something.
• 1:48:19
  And as you know, I'm highly appreciative
• 1:48:21
  of your perspective in Eastern Europe and the Baltics.
• 1:48:25
  You know I love the Baltics,
• 1:48:26
  having been to Latvia four times now.
• 1:48:29
  It's a beautiful part of the world.
• 1:48:30
  Yeah, you're always welcome to Honey Badger, everybody listening.
• 1:48:35
  And if you want to challenge my views on this coming from what's likely an American side.
• 1:48:40
  Again, I'm American and European, so I feel like I can be a little bit jujitsu on this,
• 1:48:47
  but I'm happy to buy you a beer and we can talk more about it.
• 1:48:51
  So please come over.
• 1:48:53
  I can't wait to have a beer with you in person again.
• 1:48:55
  It's been too long, sir.
• 1:48:58
  Likewise, my friend.
• 1:49:00
  Well, Bitcoin's cheap compared to gold and silver.
• 1:49:03
  You heard it here first.
• 1:49:05
  This is as cheap as it's ever going to get for silver.
• 1:49:08
  Keep that in mind.
• 1:49:10
  Peace and love, freaks.
• 1:49:11
  Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC.
• 1:49:14
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• 1:49:18
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• 1:49:22
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• 1:49:24
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• 1:50:01
  And until next time.