Latest / TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast / #739: Quarterly Monetary Base Update with Matthew Mežinskis

Transcript

#739: Quarterly 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
  I had to tell you to stop sharing your screen because I want to share mine.
• 0:39
  We met at the end of January to do the Q4 2025 update, I believe.
• 0:48
  I don't know.
• 0:48
  Yeah, I'm changing it up, actually, frankly.
• 0:51
  I know I've continued to change it this quarter.
• 0:52
  It was actually Q3.
• 0:54
  It's going to be Q4 now.
• 0:55
  That was Q3.
• 0:55
  The last update was at the end of January.
• 0:58
  A month before the exploration, the war, is it still a war?
• 1:05
  Is it a ceasefire?
• 1:06
  I don't know.
• 1:07
  Whatever's happening in Iran, whatever we're calling it now.
• 1:10
  It was a month before that.
• 1:12
  And to your point, focusing on Bitcoin, I mean, that's one silver lining, at least from our perspective of, I think, what's happened over the last two months is that I think the world is waking up to the need for a neutral reserve.
• 1:28
  hard capped currency monetary system that's not controlled by anybody and want to pull up the
• 1:34
  screen share we published this on january 31st but when we met things were not looking good for
• 1:40
  for bitcoin uh priced in gold specifically as you can see here from this chart going back it was at
• 1:46
  the lower bound uh the zero percent bound um of of the power power trend and many people were
• 1:57
  wondering, okay, has Bitcoin jumped the shark?
• 2:01
  We're living in a gold world, gold hard money world now.
• 2:05
  And it seems like the tides have changed.
• 2:07
  I mean, a few days after we recorded, we fell down to the low 60s,
• 2:13
  pipped the high 50s.
• 2:15
  And since then, we were range bound for a couple months.
• 2:19
  And now climbing out, approaching 80K again,
• 2:22
  currently sitting at $78,126.
• 2:25
  dollars so um a lot has changed in the last few months three months yeah we should do we should
• 2:34
  do price actually right now this is everybody's favorite just to kick it off um I got a few base
• 2:42
  money stats but yeah a little bit I don't know if I've shown this yet a little bit more of an
• 2:46
  upgraded uh experience experience here on the um with the charts and yeah continue to go through
• 2:56
  the process but it's going to be it's gonna be good and eventually we'll have access to uh
• 3:02
  to subscribers where people can get this as well because people would ask it all the time and
• 3:08
  uh I have some some good unique data that you can't you really can't get uh it's it's a lot
• 3:14
  painstaking work. There's no APIs for this from the IMF or whatever. But in any event,
• 3:21
  the gold thing is very interesting. And just to remind our listeners, viewers here, what the power
• 3:28
  curve is, it's a different type of growth that really only Bitcoin is exhibiting, which is really
• 3:36
  unique so here is a gold chart all right just gold dollar back to 1971 right and you can see
• 3:46
  the january top right here all right we got up to five thousand two hundred dollars now we're down
• 3:51
  to four thousand eight hundred dollar gold okay as of this recording um so far this is if you talk
• 4:02
  about actual trend lines. This is not like Elliott Wave, ABC, 1, 2, 3 corrections. This is just
• 4:08
  statistical analysis where everything is in sample. I have a lot of data points here.
• 4:15
  The gold in general is an exponential asset, but it's growing on the trend only about 5.3%
• 4:25
  CAGR. See that from 1971, August 15th to today, 5.3% CAGR. I have this extended out to 2050,
• 4:34
  but this is the CAGR until today. A lot of the gold bugs like to quote this 9% figure,
• 4:40
  but that is directly catching the $35 an ounce, which really was even higher in August 1971,
• 4:46
  because it was breaking the peg, to today. They just did the quick back of the math or the back
• 4:53
  the envelope with the present value future value uh calculation and you will get this has been a
• 4:58
  rising figure by the way it used to be like seven you know eight percent but with this boom in the
• 5:02
  last couple years it's now nine percent kegger but the question of course is if you've been holding
• 5:08
  gold for that long if you've gotten that kegger um but the big thing here and the thing i just
• 5:17
  am relentless about i try to remind people all the time is whether it's gold apple stocks bonds
• 5:27
  that stuff grows exponentially and exponentially basically means constant growth so like i said
• 5:33
  these keggers you can pick any point on this curve of this black line here the ols and you can just
• 5:39
  pick from one point to the next on a compound annualized number it's only 5.3 growth you could
• 5:45
  have more than that if you buy under you could have less than that if you buy up and that goes down
• 5:50
  but that's the bottom line now bitcoin is interesting in that and i'll go back to the
• 5:56
  dollar bitcoin chart here right so as you said we're getting getting close to 80 grand okay um
• 6:04
  bitcoin is interesting because if you just look at this chart which you know very well
• 6:07
  i know very well you look at in log linear scale
• 6:09
  it's not a straight line you know i'm relentless on this but it's just not a straight line it looks
• 6:17
  different the r squared is a very good fit 96 percent uh and it's not a straight line and the
• 6:25
  best fitting curve is a power curve and so what that means is is that unlike this gold chart which
• 6:32
  again can be volatile it can be up down whatever um but it is constant and it can be volatile
• 6:42
  bitcoin can also be volatile but bitcoin has actually less volatility to the downside it has
• 6:50
  more volatility to the upside which is interesting but it also the rate of growth of bitcoin actually
• 6:56
  slows over time and i'll talk about this as well because this is something i've been uh
• 7:01
  sort of philosophizing about a lot lately because i think it has a lot to do with
• 7:07
  whenever when once we get to a bitcoin standard once we get to this
• 7:10
  cypherpunk ideal of you know everybody having bitcoin as uh base money
• 7:16
  are we going to have loans and uh contracted in bitcoin or will we have loans contracted in fiat
• 7:24
  currencies with unlimited amount of fiat interest on top of limited amount of satoshis
• 7:31
  These are real questions that I think we're going to come to very soon.
• 7:35
  When I say soon, I mean like the next 10 to 15 years,
• 7:38
  primarily because Wall Street is completely in the game now.
• 7:43
  But again, I get on all these side tangents.
• 7:45
  I'm sorry.
• 7:46
  Just to sum up what happens with Bitcoin when it grows is,
• 7:50
  for every, about the brass tacks of it is,
• 7:53
  for every 13% increase in the life of Bitcoin, the price doubles.
• 7:57
  It's very different than gold,
• 7:59
  which basically is on this constant growth rate but is very volatile and has been very volatile
• 8:04
  over long periods of time as you can see here right from the 1980 top of 800 bucks for about
• 8:09
  two seconds on the comex down to the you know mid 200s in the late 90s early 2000s up to now
• 8:16
  where it's 5 000 today the bottom line is that's a 5.3 percent CAGR which is a doubling
• 8:21
  uh you know every 12 13 years and bitcoin doesn't do that so bitcoin is about 6 000 over 6 000 days
• 8:33
  old 6 000 and chain change uh 13 of that number in days is about 800 days or a little bit over two
• 8:43
  years or 40 kegger at the moment so bitcoin at the moment grows at 40 per year compounded which
• 8:50
  an enormous return better than anything in the markets uh although gold has actually competed
• 8:58
  with that in the last two three years but again you got to go back to the full history of gold
• 9:02
  to see the actual trend what it actually means anyway if you take it back to bitcoin
• 9:10
  it's unique in that the growth it usually surprises to the upside but it's actually pretty
• 9:16
  stable when it goes down into its bears and i tell you marty i mean it's just it's hard to be right
• 9:21
  every time i come on your podcast it's hard to be right but look at this i mean look at this nice
• 9:26
  zero percent bound of the uh of the uh quantile regression for bitcoin it's very basic you know
• 9:34
  there's a lot of people in the power law uh industry now which has kind of cropped up and
• 9:39
  i've been following this almost as long as anybody uh that are trying to do like very refined
• 9:44
  differences and change things about these curves and stuff. But the bottom line, this is a very
• 9:49
  simple curve here. It has turned out to be a very nice support of Bitcoin. And we've bounced nicely
• 9:58
  off of these, you know, low to mid 60s, since the start of the year. And then what's interesting is
• 10:04
  so now look, we have Bitcoin in this nice, beautiful power law, which is like how networks
• 10:09
  grow. It's how cities grow. It's very different. Nothing in the financial world grows like this.
• 10:14
  Everything in the financial world grows like this on these straight lines, but they can be volatile.
• 10:18
  And when you combine the two, when you have Bitcoin in dollars, that's power.
• 10:22
  You have gold in dollars that's exponential.
• 10:25
  What do you get when you do Bitcoin gold?
• 10:28
  When you do Bitcoin gold, it's also power.
• 10:31
  So it shows you the fact that Bitcoin dominates this relationship and it turns it into a power law shows you that it's an extremely strong trend.
• 10:40
  and it turns any exponential asset, whether it's, you know, you could do this in Apple stock,
• 10:45
  gold, dollars, it will turn it into a power law. Now, I was talking about this a lot on my stream
• 10:53
  at the end of last year, because people were wondering, okay, are we going to have this
• 10:57
  blow off top? I'm going to go back to the dollar chart here, where we go above, you know,
• 11:02
  the 90th, 80th, 90th percentile. As we were in the fall last year, people were wondering,
• 11:07
  some people were saying the four-year cycle was over i was cautioning a lot that it wasn't
• 11:12
  primarily as a just don't fix what's not broken thing but actually giovanni a big power law guy
• 11:19
  came out with some research that actually shows the four years so far is kind of endemic to bitcoin
• 11:25
  um uh or endogenous i guess would be a better word and the
• 11:31
  The, so far, the cycle is actually completely intact.
• 11:36
  That could actually be broken next year.
• 11:38
  We'll have to see, because some people think that it could blow up in 2027, which I'll
• 11:44
  get to in a second.
• 11:45
  Bottom line, bottom line.
• 11:47
  One thing I was really, I try to not make too many bombastic calls, but as we were,
• 11:53
  as the screenshot that you shared from our last conversation, right?
• 11:58
  So it was in January we were chatting.
• 12:01
  So here we are already almost to May.
• 12:04
  But in January, we were just down, down.
• 12:06
  So like no bottom in sight as far as Bitcoin gold.
• 12:10
  And it went to about 12, 13 ounces of gold per one Bitcoin.
• 12:15
  And that is the one call that I actually thought would hold pretty solid
• 12:19
  as it wouldn't go below 10.
• 12:20
  Because in 2022, the old SPF scam, when that fully materialized,
• 12:26
  we went to about 9.5 ounces of gold. And that just seemed too cheap to me, even for a gold bug to get
• 12:33
  Bitcoin. And so far, this has worked as a nice boundary. Again, I don't know the future. This
• 12:40
  is all probabilities. But basically, the levels that we set as we move forward in time here become
• 12:47
  stronger and stronger and stronger. And anybody holding Bitcoin should have a lot of comfort.
• 12:54
  If you have gold and Bitcoin, you should think very hard.
• 12:58
  Again, never financial advice, but you should think very hard about how cheap Bitcoin is in terms of gold, even still to this day, because it's only 16 ounces of gold.
• 13:08
  But that's not as good as it was in January, which was 12 ounces of gold for one Bitcoin.
• 13:14
  And I think that this was a pretty, it just goes to show, it was a pretty rare event.
• 13:20
  um but it doesn't change anything about the way the bitcoin grows which is a power law
• 13:27
  and it does not like it does not invalidate the power law that the gold bitcoin price was going
• 13:34
  way way low in percentile terms it just shows you that you know when circumstances arise that you
• 13:41
  need to change your probabilities you change your probabilities like it's still the case on the
• 13:45
  bitcoin gold chart that the 10th percentile which means 90 of the time relative to the trend
• 13:50
  the price is going to be above that line. It's still the case right now today that the 10th
• 13:56
  percentile of Bitcoin is 37 ounces of gold per Bitcoin. The actual price, 16 ounces of gold.
• 14:05
  So it's an enormous buy. It's an enormous buy if you have gold right now. Again, I have no problem
• 14:09
  with gold, hold some gold, wish I'd maybe had a little bit more to buy more Bitcoin with. But
• 14:16
  But it's just, these are all probabilities here.
• 14:21
  Yes, we've extended the lower end of this band with the Bitcoin gold ratio, but it doesn't
• 14:26
  change the power law.
• 14:27
  It doesn't change that Bitcoin grows in this very interesting, unique way for a financial
• 14:30
  asset.
• 14:31
  And that's where we are.
• 14:34
  So yeah, I think it's good to look back with this chart in particular, because yes, gold
• 14:41
  is a very analogous asset to Bitcoin.
• 14:43
  But all the signs say statistically that this relationship is holding just fine.
• 14:51
  It's a 95% R squared.
• 14:54
  And Bitcoin gold price is probably going to go much higher.
• 15:01
  That means worse for gold holders.
• 15:05
  Relative to Bitcoin.
• 15:06
  Right.
• 15:08
  I mean, you called it when we met in late January.
• 15:11
  We were looking at the silver to Bitcoin ratio.
• 15:14
  That's when silver was going above 120.
• 15:17
  Gold was above 5,000.
• 15:19
  And he put it out there.
• 15:21
  He said, hey, I don't think it can go much lower.
• 15:24
  And, of course, we bottom ticked that 0% bound and have been creeping up.
• 15:30
  Question.
• 15:31
  I might have asked you this.
• 15:32
  No, because we didn't make the bet yet.
• 15:33
  I haven't asked you this yet.
• 15:34
  Matt Odell, the other Matthew in my life, the other Matty in my life, we made a bet.
• 15:42
  what do you think the chances of bitcoin making a new all-time high priced in silver and gold are
• 15:46
  this year low okay good makes me feel better yeah still low um but you could see that
• 15:58
  obviously we're at the very very low boundary i mean to get to let's just go to the end of the year
• 16:03
  what was the bet just all-time high he said it was going to be all-time high yeah the silver
• 16:10
  To Bitcoin and gold to Bitcoin ratios have to be, just have to tick a new all-time high at some point in this calendar year.
• 16:16
  He wins, if not, and both have to hit.
• 16:19
  Both don't hit, I win.
• 16:20
  Yeah, that's very good for you.
• 16:23
  So we're looking at the all-time highs of 35, 36 ounces of gold per Bitcoin, which again, just shows you how.
• 16:33
  I mean, Odell is directionally right in the long term, but we're just, we're so undervalued at the moment.
• 16:38
  i have a hard time seeing us get past that uh you know anything is possible um anything is possible
• 16:45
  but yeah it's i think it's going to be a longer a longer rise to get there i think in 2027 it's
• 16:52
  very possible that it could get higher um but yeah that'll be an interesting bet in fact
• 16:58
  because sometimes when things fall so fastly they can spring back fast and i think a lot of
• 17:04
  the gold bugs that have been in the business like the the real professionals you know like the rick
• 17:08
  rules of the world and peter schiff when he's not when he's doing something opposite of what he's
• 17:12
  telling you talking his book like they've sold a lot of their hard metals and um you know retail
• 17:18
  is going to be left holding the bag here on this channel which again here i i told you i thought
• 17:24
  this was going to be pretty you know this was pretty much close to the top i think that is
• 17:28
  his dollar gold price. So yeah, I would agree. I would agree with you. It's still going to take
• 17:35
  some time, but we could probably next year, take it out again. Because it is insane that
• 17:42
  even if you look at again, look at the Q, the 10th percentile, just take it off again. So it's like
• 17:48
  the second worst percentile by the end of the year. That should be an all-time high.
• 17:55
  So it's possible.
• 17:56
  It's possible.
• 17:57
  It's so undervalued at the moment that is Bitcoin priced in gold.
• 18:01
  It's possible it can spring back.
• 18:04
  But I'm just one of these more like sort of gradually follow the signal.
• 18:08
  Don't worry too much about the noise.
• 18:09
  So that'll be an interesting bet to follow.
• 18:11
  That's for sure.
• 18:12
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  code TFTC20. I know we've talked about this before, but it always fascinates me. It's like,
• 20:13
  I love sitting down with you because you zoom out.
• 20:17
  You silence all the noise and the narratives around these markets.
• 20:24
  And you just look at the data that pertains to the exponential growth trend or the power trend.
• 20:30
  And it always gives me a sense of calm and confidence.
• 20:34
  Okay, we're tracking.
• 20:36
  then it's just fascinating how the narratives,
• 20:39
  when you do turn the noise back on
• 20:43
  and begin accepting signals from the markets in terms of headlines and narratives how they do line up And I think I mean right after we recorded less than a month after that the Iran war
• 20:56
  started.
• 20:57
  And then you have the beautiful coalescence of factors that really bolstered the fundamental
• 21:06
  value prop of Bitcoin.
• 21:07
  It's like, oh, this is why Bitcoin exists.
• 21:10
  These people, these nation states can't trust each other.
• 21:13
  Yeah.
• 21:13
  And a neutral reserve settlement network actually makes sense.
• 21:16
  And it seems that the start of the war, Bitcoin, imperatively, has performed rather well, obviously, coming from lows here on the power trend.
• 21:29
  But the narratives are lined up almost perfectly.
• 21:34
  Yep.
• 21:34
  Yep.
• 21:35
  Completely agree.
• 21:36
  The geopolitical questions surrounding Bitcoin, I think, are going to rise and rise and rise very quickly.
• 21:47
  I am curious.
• 21:48
  I'm not following all the latest with the Clarity Act and things in the US.
• 21:53
  But there's still a lot of tension in the US.
• 21:55
  It's like on the one hand, you got Wall Street very involved institutionally.
• 21:59
  but then on the other side you have
• 22:01
  a president who he's running a shit coin he's got this world liberty financial he literally i'm
• 22:10
  sure i know you've talked about this right he's scammed the ultimate scammer he's pardoned him
• 22:14
  then scammed him and uh justin's son of course and then you know if there is a swing in a hard
• 22:25
  swing to the left, which would be bad as far as political, you know, sort of social political
• 22:32
  issues. But if there's a huge hard swing to the left and Elizabeth Warren somehow can
• 22:36
  call all the World Liberty Financial people to the hill in, you know, fall or next year,
• 22:45
  that could be pretty bad news for the short term. We all know that World Liberty Financial
• 22:52
  doesn't represent you know what bitcoin does but i'm curious how you think about that just briefly
• 22:56
  we don't have to spend a lot of time on it but do you think institutionally wall street what guys
• 23:02
  wall street wise can can sort of get through that and push that more in a better direction of bitcoin
• 23:09
  uh there's a lot of conflicting narratives yeah i mean the world liberty five stuff is like the
• 23:14
  biggest own goal retardation i've ever seen in my life did you see steve wickoff's son is i guess
• 23:21
  co-founder of world liberty fighters got caught with coke at 11 in my head
• 23:26
  he's gonna run two days ago i didn't see that but it fits the bill obviously yeah um yeah it's i
• 23:32
  mean it's just very incestuous obviously you have don jr i think eric's involved you have steve
• 23:38
  whitkoff's son yeah he's running the negotiations with israel with jared kushner involved world
• 23:44
  world liberty by dude gets called a coke like obviously a trump meme coined the night before
• 23:51
  the inauguration or weekend before the inauguration just night before why why why uh and to your
• 23:59
  point yeah i think if you're if you're in trump's camp and you're thinking of ways to reduce the
• 24:07
  the social attack vectors that exist.
• 24:10
  Like, obviously, you know,
• 24:12
  the left has been very litigious
• 24:14
  and is trying to ruin your life,
• 24:17
  take all your assets,
• 24:18
  throw you in jail.
• 24:19
  They've tried for 10 years now.
• 24:21
  Like, why give them another shot on goal
• 24:23
  with this World Liberty 5 thing?
• 24:25
  It's so egregiously a scam.
• 24:27
  And now I'm sure you've heard of, like, the whole,
• 24:30
  like, it's an illiquid shitcoin.
• 24:33
  They're using it to take out loans
• 24:34
  and the stablecoin they created,
• 24:36
  and then they're buying other assets.
• 24:38
  It's just like...
• 24:38
  Yeah, USD1, they want some of that Cantor Fitzgerald cheddar.
• 24:41
  They see all the cheddar that Lutnick's collecting.
• 24:44
  They want some of their own in USD1.
• 24:47
  To your point, yes, I think that is going to be
• 24:51
  one of the low-hanging fruits for the left to point at
• 24:55
  and try to throw the book at them for.
• 25:01
  But to answer your question directly,
• 25:02
  I do have confidence that Wall Street...
• 25:05
  I do think the trend in the United States, particularly with all the DeFi blowups in recent weeks and months, is Wall Street really separating Bitcoin from crypto.
• 25:16
  And I think it's not going to be easy.
• 25:20
  It's not going to be straightforward.
• 25:21
  But I do think if that were to happen, left takes over, throw the book at Trump for shit coining.
• 25:30
  I think there could be some short term pain for Bitcoin.
• 25:33
  but i do think the market is beginning to realize that bitcoin is different than all this stuff and
• 25:38
  i do think there are enough uh financial incentives within wall street around bitcoin
• 25:45
  specifically for them to sort of brute force okay yeah throw the book at them for this stuff but
• 25:49
  this bitcoin stuff we're gonna we're gonna keep going on with and tax maybe that's naive maybe
• 25:55
  that's a um overly idealistic but no no i take take your point and tax what about tax situations
• 26:01
  around bitcoin uh the minimus fight is going on right now i got in i got in the mud with coinbase
• 26:08
  a few weeks ago over that um i saw yeah but ryan armstrong didn't take you up on the offer no he
• 26:16
  didn't stable coins are the best form of money ever created you didn't know that
• 26:23
  certainly not base money like bitcoin uh you want me to keep going on the old base money
• 26:31
  train yeah let's do it i know you do i know um you were very accommodative to record with me this
• 26:37
  morning and so you weren't able to run all the numbers that you wanted to run before we recorded
• 26:43
  but i think yeah no i mean um by the time this comes out hopefully i'll have a post on it this
• 26:48
  will be the this is only going to be the i'm gonna i've i've i'll just explain in case people are
• 26:57
  really nerding out on the numbers and i think it's interesting but i've now got the currency set up
• 27:01
  to like 136 which is basically all the currencies in the world that have somewhat some value but to
• 27:08
  do that you have to even be slower on the report to get the total number so it's going to be um
• 27:16
  it's going to be sort of a three level thing there's going to be
• 27:18
  uh when we do these reports now right just uh you know our quarterly updates it's actually going to
• 27:28
  be for the total set it's only going to be almost like a full quarter a full quarterback so year end
• 27:36
  is what what is done like literally because that's the only that's the numbers don't exist beyond
• 27:42
  that to get the full set uh and then for the big ones the dollar euro yen yuan sterling just this
• 27:49
  big five which is over 80 of the value itself that can be as of the first quarter and then also just
• 27:57
  a little bit of commentary on the weekly balance sheets of the fed and um the ecb unfortunately
• 28:07
  with the whole new system and everything and trying to do it all at once i i took took on
• 28:11
  too much so i can only talk about just a few a few numbers here but um basically we were at 30
• 28:20
  the grand scheme of things after covid december 2021 we're at 30 trillion dollars of base money
• 28:26
  printed now we're down to something like 26 trillion but it's bottoming and it's been bottoming
• 28:34
  for the last couple quarters um in the us and europe there is global chaos as you know and
• 28:47
  sort of an open question still whether wars well first of all whether he's going to come in during
• 28:52
  uh he's going to come in of course next month but trump has this vendetta against powell so
• 28:58
  that's still playing out until he comes in but he might not be as dovish as people thought
• 29:04
  originally so maybe he won't he won't print and i thought he would print a little bit more like
• 29:08
  for sure guaranteed rate cut this year we'll see but generally yeah when you think of bitcoin just
• 29:16
  remind people that are hearing this all for the first time you know we're going to get back to
• 29:20
  2 trillion in market cap very soon that value is directly comparable not with your bank account
• 29:27
  not with a stable coin but it's comparable with the balance sheet of each central bank
• 29:33
  the monetary base so it's primarily that's cash and coin plus the bank reserves which is basically
• 29:37
  each bank in the system the core of the system is their bank account with the central bank so
• 29:41
  those two things bank reserves plus cash and coins monetary base we're about at 26 trillion
• 29:48
  as of last quarter and you know like i said 80
• 29:53
  uh 80 percent of those top five currencies that you would think uh about probably the most dollar
• 30:01
  euro yen uh you want in pound sterling um so it's bottoming it's turning around uh overall
• 30:10
  if you want to think of another number that kind of I like to just throw out a lot and this has
• 30:14
  come down it got close to 13 a year during covid because it's a slow slow moving number now it's
• 30:20
  about 12.5 percent that's the global weighted compound annual growth rate of these currencies
• 30:28
  since 1970 so you want to think about what people your brokers might say you should get
• 30:40
  you want to think about uh what people say inflation is or don't admit that inflation
• 30:47
  is the bottom line is central bank balance sheets over the course of a year on average since 1970
• 30:54
  have grown at an exponential rate of 12.5 per year so bitcoin growing at 40 per year though
• 31:03
  volatile though we go through these bear markets still well outperforms that as long as you hold it
• 31:09
  for four years as long as you hold it for about that four-year number get through a cycle get
• 31:14
  they're having you're going to be winning and you're going to be winning against all central
• 31:18
  bank balance sheets in the world so that's really the bottom line of course i don't have like too
• 31:23
  many charts here but i do have your favorite one i do have your favorite one which is the the flow
• 31:28
  of base money so this one just to show you again this is the dollar value transacted on the network
• 31:36
  uh really peaked in 2021 still interestingly uh at 63 trillion so 63 trillion over the course of
• 31:48
  12 months in dollar terms it's actually just bitcoin flowing through the network in dollar
• 31:53
  terms now it's only about 25 trillion and if you think about that versus what fedwire does which
• 32:00
  which is still the big boss, it's very small.
• 32:05
  As you know, we've talked about this many times.
• 32:07
  You know, you like this chart,
• 32:08
  and I wanted to get it updated for you.
• 32:10
  So it's $1.1 quadrillion trailing 12-month in Fedwire.
• 32:16
  So we got a long way to go.
• 32:18
  But still, if you just did a little ratio of that,
• 32:23
  we're getting there.
• 32:24
  We're getting there.
• 32:24
  Only 46 times smaller than Fedwire.
• 32:28
  But if you just look at that number,
• 32:29
  and if you look at the general trend,
• 32:32
  we're in the right direction.
• 32:34
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• 32:35
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• 34:36
  I want to bring it back to Warsa because I think you're the right person to ask this question again, how he's positioning how he would like to operate monetary policy if and when he gets nominated as Fed chairman.
• 34:52
  He's talked about really leaning on interest rate.
• 34:58
  He wants to get away from balance sheet manipulation, focus on interest rates.
• 35:02
  And it seems like implicitly through that posturing, he wants to push the sort of stimulus on the balance sheet side to the commercial banks.
• 35:12
  And this is by changing SLR ratios and all that.
• 35:15
  But he wants that sort of base money expansion, which only the Fed can really do.
• 35:21
  But he's why you're the right person to ask.
• 35:23
  Have you been following this?
• 35:25
  like he's yeah he wants to push it to the commercial banks and basically have them
• 35:30
  be the front for monetary expansion is that yeah he's hawkish uh from that side he actually says
• 35:35
  the right things right as a as a governor uh you know what fed's supposed to be as an independent
• 35:41
  governor of a nation's currency he does say the right things um it's an analysis i want to do more
• 35:50
  because you can see very uh weird pools of money that actually buy bonds of the of the the us so
• 36:01
  again just i don't have this chart unfortunately handy but roughly during covet the federal reserve
• 36:08
  held about 28 of the government's debt which was an all-time record by far
• 36:13
  uh it was rising up during qe1 two and three but in historical terms like the highest levels before
• 36:22
  that was about 18 17 during the vietnam war when the vietnam war ended in 1975 and the other reason
• 36:28
  the percentage went down was because uh the gold standard had ended and people still wanted dollars
• 36:35
  right so they could increase the debt and the federal reserve did not have to be the only buyer
• 36:40
  of that debt. But now, so now it's down, it's actually down to Powell's credit, from the massive
• 36:47
  stimulus, which you and I both would think that, and I think there's plenty of empirical and
• 36:54
  anecdotal data points to suggest was not necessary, but you know, all the stimulus, all the fear
• 36:58
  around COVID, they ballooned the balance sheet to nearly $9 trillion for total holdings of nearly
• 37:09
  30%. That's, you know, just to explain, you know, how the bond buying works, not all the mechanics,
• 37:15
  just in general, a currency like the Zimbabwe dollar, you know, during the hyperinflationary
• 37:21
  times, you can just imagine that they're basically the sole buyer of debt of the government of
• 37:28
  Zimbabwe when you're running these, you know, 1000% plus inflation. So they would be buying 100%
• 37:34
  of Zimbabwe government bonds uh the Federal Reserve got up to almost 30 which was it's
• 37:43
  obviously too much so Warsh is trying to get that down and he says he wants to get it to the banks
• 37:49
  and things like that but still there's a big foreign presence you got to work about look at
• 37:54
  there uh that has there's a lot of rumblings that has been weaponized during uh actually the European
• 38:02
  fears this gets in our geopolitical discussion we could we could talk about a little bit later
• 38:07
  but there was a lot of legit I mean Europe actually thought that Trump was going to break
• 38:12
  U.S. law and invade a NATO ally in Greenland I can't tell you how pissed the green the the the
• 38:19
  Danes are and the Greenlanders about this whole thing but that's we could save that for the
• 38:22
  the geopolitical part of our discussions we'd like to do but apparently that was weaponized
• 38:30
  The Europeans said, look, we're going to start dumping if you do this.
• 38:35
  Bases are going to be closed in Europe, all the rest.
• 38:37
  I mean, it was a big deal.
• 38:38
  It was a big deal in Europe.
• 38:41
  So more and more every day, the United States is playing with fire here with a clear –
• 38:48
  this is a clear benefit to America over the long term has been dollar hegemony.
• 38:56
  And I think you and I can see the writings on the wall.
• 38:58
  Obviously, we've been in Bitcoin for a long time, but you just can't ignore the fact that, you know, there are other ways to store wealth.
• 39:06
  And the way that the U.S. is going about doing it, I actually don't think has shown much foresight at all, particularly Trump.
• 39:14
  But if Warsh says, again, that he's going to take – so the point is, back to your question finally after laying all that out.
• 39:19
  if warship says that banks should bear the burden of treasury costs more okay but also need to see
• 39:28
  where the foreign flows are and where and how those are being used and that's it's very murky
• 39:34
  still it's it's not a purely free market right like there's a i don't know like the cayman islands
• 39:39
  is a huge holder of bonds right 1.4 trillion or something they're the largest foreign holder i
• 39:45
  believe probably even larger than China so then you have to ask the question well who's actually
• 39:49
  it's not the Caymans it's not like the government in the Caymans Islands right it's investors that
• 39:54
  hold Cayman bank accounts basically but who are those investors and then you know what's the
• 40:00
  corruption there and the grift and everything else so the U.S. is playing with fire I mean those
• 40:05
  things you know we're just in a fast digital world these days we saw that with the SVB collapse a
• 40:11
  years ago so it's very dicey it's a very dicey situation um i i i think the us is gonna have
• 40:22
  a lot of issues here and and again it's all the more reason to buy bitcoin
• 40:26
  uh i have more geopolitical things to say about that but i i'm saving them
• 40:30
  because it's it's just generally about dollar hegemony and i think that
• 40:35
  i could be wrong and i i usually i'm usually not like fear-mongering over the dollar
• 40:41
  much you know when I come on I'm trying to just say okay these are the facts these are the figures
• 40:45
  uh so far the Federal Reserve is doing better it has it's gotten that percentage down from like a
• 40:51
  third it sounded like 18 at the moment so that's better but uh there are a lot of headwinds I think
• 40:58
  still for uh dollar hegemony and actually uh Bitcoin is just one of them but this multi-polarity
• 41:06
  trade alliances uh the u.s is not doing themselves any favor right now so
• 41:11
  my answer to your question is it's much deeper and i'm not really sure that the u.s banking system
• 41:17
  like absorbing more of the holdings of treasuries is i mean i guess in theory it's better but i'm not
• 41:25
  sure it will solve the problem yeah no it's been uh been fascinating to watch that i'll play it
• 41:34
  And don feel like we need to say the geopolitical if it to the end because if it pertinent to not pertinent if it relevant to this part of the discussion
• 41:46
  Because that's one thing I wonder, because I mean, your point, like it would obviously be preferable that the commercial bank takes, commercial banking system takes that risk.
• 41:55
  And you would think that they're in a position where they have to think more critically about risk than the Fed and the Treasury, which can just either print the money or issue the bonds and capital misallocation be damned.
• 42:12
  And if you sort of have this forcing function of a somewhat private market, private market actors, private market in the sense of not government actors trying to manage risk, because there's actually costs associated with it for them, it would be preferable.
• 42:32
  to your point like i want to say it's uncharted territory but it is a a tectonic shift in how we
• 42:40
  viewed the relationship between the fed the treasury and the commercial banking system for
• 42:44
  the last 20 years right yeah and furthermore i mean to be clear like the chart that we're looking
• 42:50
  at right now this is probably the best chart that shows dollar hegemony i mean you see how huge it
• 42:56
  is how huge the network effect of the dollar is not just to bitcoin but to anything else i mean
• 43:01
  I mean, you could look at the, I think it's called chips, is basically the UK equivalent of Fedwire or whatever, ECB, Euroclear, all these sorts of different ways to settle other major currencies like the euro, sterling.
• 43:17
  They don't even hold a candle to this amount, which is $1.1 quadrillion, $1.2 quadrillion, $1 trillion, 12 months.
• 43:24
  Again, compared to Bitcoin, it's $25 trillion, which is 46 times smaller.
• 43:28
  So to be clear, it's going to take some time.
• 43:31
  It's going to take some time.
• 43:32
  I don't see the flood to Bitcoin moment.
• 43:37
  This also happens to do with the fact that power curves generally don't do that.
• 43:42
  So in my view, that's actually a good thing.
• 43:46
  But I think it's going to take some time.
• 43:50
  But Bitcoin has all the capabilities.
• 43:52
  So this is the one we didn't look at.
• 43:53
  Bitcoin has the capabilities to actually deal with this.
• 43:55
  so this is transaction count right so bitcoin at the moment does more than fedwire 373 million
• 44:09
  uh transactions for bitcoin versus fedwire 219 million transactions and to explain this like
• 44:16
  you've you've taken out change addresses and all that to this is like as distilled signals you can
• 44:23
  go right uh this one actually may be gross but i don't actually think um i don't think that's
• 44:31
  as big of a problem anymore as it used to be a lot of people uh
• 44:37
  that know don't send bitcoin transactions with change and i actually just don't think it's uh
• 44:44
  i'm not adjusting actually this is gross full-on gross um but you could do that and you would get a
• 44:52
  little bit less it might be less than if you if you did that adjustment it might be less than the
• 44:57
  fedwire total of 219 million but more and more that bitcoin is going to be used like
• 45:05
  people are going to probably even do better practices with batching where you know basically
• 45:09
  all all old utxos are going to get completely it's great i mean and this has been the case since
• 45:16
  It looks like it started at the beginning of 2016, which is fascinating.
• 45:23
  Again, looking, trying to, your new listener, your Bitcoin curious, the price has gone up towards 80K.
• 45:30
  And you're like, okay, this thing isn't dead.
• 45:31
  You're coming to listen to this.
• 45:33
  You're looking for signal through the noise.
• 45:35
  I think Maddie and I have been doing this for six, almost seven years now.
• 45:41
  And probably more than seven years now at this point.
• 45:44
  Yeah, probably eight.
• 45:45
  Yeah.
• 45:46
  Yeah, and...
• 45:47
  7.5.
• 45:50
  What you need to understand is, like, what is Bitcoin?
• 45:52
  Matthew explained it briefly in the beginning,
• 45:55
  but what are you comparing Bitcoin to actually base money, M0?
• 45:59
  It competes with the Fed and its settlement networks,
• 46:02
  and as you can see from this chart,
• 46:05
  Bitcoin is 46, Fedwire is 46 times bigger
• 46:08
  on a pure value-transacted perspective today.
• 46:12
  However, looking at the number transaction,
• 46:15
  the bitcoin surpassed fedwire in 2016 and is that dominance has maintained on the trans
• 46:23
  transaction count level since then so over a decade and it it shows that there's nothing
• 46:31
  technical stopping it from beating fedwire just adoption and price yeah all that we have to have
• 46:36
  is price go up you know for all the arguments we've ever had about scaling bitcoin which were a lot
• 46:41
  exactly during this time uh bitcoin itself did enough technically to compete with fedwire
• 46:50
  technically it's just a question of value network adoption uh and time yeah so like bitcoin is fully
• 47:00
  equipped today to replace fedwire it's just a matter of pricing the purchasing power of bitcoin
• 47:05
  10x 20x 46x um the big question is can't replace the global reserve currency and from a technical
• 47:16
  settlement perspective it certainly can so it's exciting man there's a lot of room for optimism
• 47:25
  uh the short term you know i don't know how you feel these bears but i'm usually uh just more eager
• 47:32
  and eager to have these bears we can buy at these levels um you know not financial advice but i mean
• 47:37
  there's so many things you can do like if you don't have any capital you can write puts now
• 47:40
  on etfs uh you know there are ways if you do have cash or you have bitcoin and you want to borrow
• 47:47
  against it uh you know your ltv is going to do much better if this really is the bottom which it
• 47:52
  seems like the bottom and you can use these quantile regression uh percentiles just to really
• 47:59
  see where we are in the development of the market again not financial advice anything can happen and
• 48:03
  in dollar terms you know this q0 right this one i'm flashing here could technically set a new bottom
• 48:10
  uh by the end of the year technically um just like it's did with gold at the start of the year
• 48:18
  um it would just mean that the distance between the q10 and the q0 expands it's not there's nothing
• 48:23
  fixed about this chart but what it is it does is it gives you a very very broad overview of
• 48:30
  the distribution of uh price around a trend and bitcoin's trend is a very interesting power curve
• 48:39
  very different than financial markets and the price historically right now relative to the curve is
• 48:45
  you know 90 of the time bitcoin has been higher all right so i'm extremely bullish i was never
• 48:50
  worried for a second during this bear um you know just be careful obviously it's not financial
• 48:57
  advice do what you need to do but um you know i think a lot of the bombast too it's usually people
• 49:06
  that don't know anything about the power curve like i heard a lot of people in the fall saying
• 49:09
  that the four-year cycle was over uh bitcoin's on a permanently high plateau some people are
• 49:15
  calling for a super cycle is idiots was that you or it was sarcasm i i should listen to more tfcc i
• 49:26
  i confess they don't but um that was on rabbit hole recap i mean uh it was a bit facetious it
• 49:32
  was like hey maybe this is it yeah no but there's a lot of people a lot of people that are uh saying
• 49:38
  that and i would even say by the way i still think even though we are we have wall street
• 49:44
  involved which almost guarantees that the sort of nation-state threat of bitcoin is is done uh my
• 49:52
  original thesis in fact going back to the world liberty financial thing my original thesis was i
• 49:56
  was saying you know sometime around this like around a year ago so i could very much see
• 50:01
  a blow off top which we didn't have all right but a top in in 2025 the four-year cycle continue and
• 50:08
  then the democrats take the house after all the trump madness and you know the world liberty
• 50:13
  financial is like the on a nation state level sbf uh celsius luna type event right where it's just
• 50:22
  out in the open that the president united states has been scamming his taxpayers
• 50:26
  and that would bring in the traditional bear uh we still could have that news event by the way i'm
• 50:34
  not predicting that i'm not saying that i don't know uh anything more than anybody else does
• 50:38
  about what's posted in the news about that company.
• 50:41
  But yeah, we could still have a tough,
• 50:45
  theoretically, according to the four-year cycle,
• 50:47
  four years is a shelling point in Bitcoin.
• 50:49
  Theoretically, we could have,
• 50:51
  which would be good for you on your bet against Odell,
• 50:54
  but we could have another leg down by the end of the year
• 50:56
  based on geopolitical events in the United States.
• 50:59
  It's possible.
• 51:01
  Yeah, but I think comparing World Liberty Phi to FTX,
• 51:04
  I think that's an insult to FTX.
• 51:07
  I feel like nobody actually uses them.
• 51:12
  Sure.
• 51:12
  I think the blast radius of actual financial exposure of individuals is way smaller than it was for FTX.
• 51:23
  I do agree.
• 51:24
  The actual broad Bitcoin or crypto exchange community is not exposed to World Liberty the way that they were to Celsius and Terra and FTX.
• 51:37
  i agree but politically the narrative will be stronger pretty enormous it's pretty enormous
• 51:45
  and it's pretty predictable um it's very predictable it's like why would you
• 51:50
  that's like the most frustrating thing it's like why would you do this i mean it's
• 51:54
  loot the uh loot the treasury stage i'm not sure if you saw like the press conferences yesterday
• 51:58
  but they were like flippantly joking about some of this stuff well i mean the even broader markets
• 52:04
  obviously let's not waste time on it but you know the s p 500 mini uh contracts the shorts on the oil
• 52:12
  futures uh it's it's never ending the the grift here so yeah it's gonna be interesting uh one more
• 52:22
  one more sort of on um well let's do this one let's do this one while we're on bitcoin interest
• 52:28
  so I think I showed this one last time it's a very checkmate type charts just UTXOs in profit
• 52:35
  and lost short term long term and you can basically see that we're in a situation
• 52:46
  where there's a lot of long-term hodlers that means longer than a half a year roughly that are
• 52:52
  leading out. That has only happened in the past four years of these four-year increments.
• 53:05
  So here I would say as well, caution, we do have a little bit of green coming back for
• 53:10
  these short-term hodlers that are coming in profit again. But I think that this sort
• 53:21
  of this this bleeding out event it could it could take a little bit longer uh but but so far so far
• 53:29
  signs are pretty good that the the worst of the worst was in february and when gold was over 5 000
• 53:36
  but we'll see i this this is not showing any signs to me that it's like we're really on the mend here
• 53:43
  but yeah for what it's worth i don't know if you've if you have any comments on this one
• 53:48
  No, I mean, James is a good friend.
• 53:51
  Follow his analysis.
• 53:53
  I like yours pretty religiously, and I think he's been pretty consistent about this
• 53:58
  since over the last month, six weeks, that things were back in a chop-solidation range.
• 54:03
  So we're going to—
• 54:06
  This floor may have been set, potentially not set, but going back to a range
• 54:11
  where we just set a floor and begin building up from there.
• 54:15
  I don't think it has a timeline, but just using pattern recognition and vibes analysis.
• 54:26
  I could easily see us ranging through the summer and then things popping off in the fall.
• 54:32
  Yep. Yep. I agree. It's totally possible.
• 54:37
  So this one I think is interesting.
• 54:41
  This mirrors the presentation that I gave at Peter's conference in Bedford about a month ago.
• 54:49
  So look at S&P over its total history plus a little bit of some backdated stuff.
• 54:55
  S&P only goes back to the 1950s, but there are – there's the S&P 90.
• 55:00
  There's some other – you can use the Dow.
• 55:03
  You can use other sort of ways to even backtest even further, like to the beginning of America.
• 55:09
  so i did that um here and you can kind of see so this is this is exponential
• 55:19
  which again it's uh it doesn't matter your order of magnitude here it's about like base 2 2.2
• 55:25
  um but when you run trend lines they're going to be straight lines okay so this is the old
• 55:30
  jeffrey west who wrote a great book scale everybody should read yeah yes that's about
• 55:35
  to say we're talking about the uh the treadmills here yep the treadmills and it's a little bit of
• 55:40
  an update and a little bit of some thought that i think will spur hopefully spur some more interesting
• 55:46
  discussion on this because i think you know we're talking about protecting your purchasing power
• 55:52
  we're talking about how markets are moving they're moving faster and faster it's clear like even on
• 55:57
  log scale you can see it goes faster and i'll just show that here so again straight line on log scale
• 56:02
  1800s stock market was giving you two percent okay uh you picked the founding of the fed until 1971
• 56:11
  basically was you know end of the classical gold standard into the dollar standard which
• 56:17
  really did only lasted like 27 years after world war ii to 1971.
• 56:23
  huge you know boom and spike there grace great depression boom and busts uh moved faster on trend
• 56:31
  five percent four point eight percent 1971 to 2008 9.6 2008 until now
• 56:40
  11.7 and this is without dividends so if you invested those dividends you get at least two
• 56:44
  percent higher so you'd be closer to 14 15 now on a trend which is enormous right think about
• 56:54
  you know i mean i was when i was in school we were talking you know about seven to nine percent
• 56:58
  equity returns and how the market was so overheated with the dot-com boom and you know we see where
• 57:03
  we are now but it's undeniable what you see here is this sort of faster and faster treadmill up in
• 57:10
  a shorter and shorter amount of time and so this is what really bitcoin's up against and i think
• 57:15
  this will if you look at the bitcoin power curve basically you can see that mathematically we're
• 57:22
  going to run into very interesting tension and what i think that tension is going to occur is
• 57:27
  probably somewhere around uh 2035 2040 and i'll explain but so we have these these curves and then
• 57:38
  if you think about how market trends actually occur which you don't think about a lot uh or a
• 57:46
  lot of people might actually not think about graphing this but if your broker says okay i'm
• 57:50
  trying to get you know eight percent or seven percent how does that actually look like over time
• 57:54
  and in exponent with exponential assets with exponential growth it actually just looks like
• 57:59
  so i'll take these trend lines off it's the same thing but i'm just going to show the percentages
• 58:03
  they just look like straight lines across the chart so put them all on then i'll get out
• 58:12
  so you can see here this is a two two percent here 4.8 9.6 so you get those you know very strong
• 58:19
  strong straight line on the value but if you actually just plotted the percentage this is how
• 58:26
  markets look they used to be two percent now they're five uh or sorry that they were five in
• 58:33
  1914 after 1971 9.6 now they're 11.7 and it's probably even low but that's what they are any
• 58:41
  questions on this so far there's the faster and faster treadmills no I like this visualization
• 58:45
  yeah so like the and you can see i mean i think um point of feedback here for the uh
• 58:53
  for the last trend line i would shorten it to the last data point or a little after it
• 59:00
  that's that you can really see what you're articulate i mean you said it you you articulate
• 59:06
  it but i think this visualizes it which is like it's getting shorter and shorter like the next
• 59:11
  stair that you go up the time of that that rate of change is shorter than the previous rate of change
• 59:17
  yeah and this is um this is something that is yeah I've given a few presentations on this for
• 59:25
  about a year probably would do a variation of this in Prague as well um but
• 59:32
  this is this is what there's going to be a tension here basically so
• 59:36
  Jeffrey West calls it the essential singularity, right? He's not talking about the Ray Kurzweil
• 59:42
  thing, but at some point, whether it's AI, whether it's the next step after AI, we're getting so fast
• 59:49
  in the growth, in the productivity, and oddly inflation in other things, even though theoretically
• 59:55
  the productivity is supposed to be deflationary. We know we have huge inflation in other areas
• 59:59
  like energy um there's just going to be this point where if you're just faster and faster and faster
• 1:00:07
  in these shorter and shorter time periods there's going to come a point where you sort of
• 1:00:10
  mathematically it can't really go any further and they call that the essential singularity
• 1:00:14
  it doesn't mean he's not predicting anything he's not predicting flying cars he actually leaves it
• 1:00:23
  open in his book and so i what i've been sort of well we've been talking about for like a year now
• 1:00:28
  yeah shamelessly shamelessly borrowing this idea and saying well it could be bitcoin is actually
• 1:00:33
  the what's going to happen so at some at some point there's going to be a realignment and it's
• 1:00:38
  coming and so i'll give you the slide i did in uh in bedford right here this is basically what i
• 1:00:47
  see is the tension the the steps are a little bit different because i was usually dead don't
• 1:00:52
  worry about it but i said say we even get to 20 percent like this is today say we get to 20 percent
• 1:00:57
  which we're not far off, right?
• 1:01:01
  So maybe we'll be at 14%, 13% on the stock market
• 1:01:03
  for a little bit longer,
• 1:01:04
  but eventually we get to say we get to 20%.
• 1:01:05
  This is Bitcoin's growth.
• 1:01:08
  This is why Bitcoin is so weird,
• 1:01:10
  is Bitcoin does not have this flat line,
• 1:01:13
  you know, the straight line exponential growth,
• 1:01:14
  which slightly rises the super exponential growth
• 1:01:18
  because inflation gets more and more, you know, volatile,
• 1:01:21
  and we have to just keep papering over it, basically.
• 1:01:24
  Bitcoin is actually coming in with super fast growth for all the early adopters, but then it's slowing down.
• 1:01:32
  So the tension is, of course, in my view, this is my reasoning here is,
• 1:01:37
  I don't know if it's going to be technically called the singularity whenever these cross, right?
• 1:01:42
  Whenever the stock market saves, if it's 20% or if it's 30% or if it's 15%.
• 1:01:46
  But there's going to be major tension where you could say in the stock market get, I don't know, 20%, 25%.
• 1:01:54
  percent return but bitcoin is actually going to clearly it's a superior asset but in dollar terms
• 1:01:59
  it's actually growing slower right back to this chart it's growing slower over time still massive
• 1:02:05
  numbers all right just i'm throwing a number out now 2050 ols is 22 million okay so it's all
• 1:02:12
  projected to be just fine in dollar terms but this nice stable network power growth slows down
• 1:02:19
  whereas the stock market speeds up.
• 1:02:22
  So just as you see there in the slide it projected the price or network growth of Bitcoin is projected be 30 percent hit 30 percent on the downward should we at 40 percent now go down to 30 percent in 2031 20 in 2041 10
• 1:02:39
  percent in 2070. 2070 is too far away 2041 is probably even too far away although that's about
• 1:02:45
  when you get to 100 trillion in market cap 15 years flies by man that was uh it's it does it
• 1:02:51
  but i this is where i you know food for thought for you i mean i think i think it's five to ten
• 1:02:57
  years honestly i think it's when you get to 30 to 25 percent that's really where uh
• 1:03:04
  well i can say is fireworks it's going to be fireworks because you're going to have superior
• 1:03:08
  money yeah go ahead as you're explaining this i can't stop saying because matt and i adele and i
• 1:03:12
  were talking about yesterday on rhr the whole concept of uh universal high income and uh the
• 1:03:18
  emergence of AI and you have Elon and everybody else sort of preparing the narrative that
• 1:03:25
  we're going to need UBI or some form of sort of subsidy for the average person because their
• 1:03:34
  job is about to get replaced by these robots that we're building.
• 1:03:38
  And I don't know, as you're explaining this, this singularity, it's just like,
• 1:03:42
  Like, in my mind, I'm like, everybody in that part of the world and AI is focused on UBI.
• 1:03:50
  But it's like, no, maybe we just need a deflationary currency to pair with this form of abundance that you're bringing to the world.
• 1:03:57
  And I thought Odell made a very apt point because I think the narrative forming around UBI or universal high income is, I think, more of just a feigning of like, hey, we're worried about you.
• 1:04:15
  Like, just like to save their back so they don't get Luigi Maggioni.
• 1:04:21
  Right.
• 1:04:23
  Yeah.
• 1:04:24
  They don't get Luigi'd in the street.
• 1:04:27
  When it comes to the technical implementation,
• 1:04:29
  it doesn't make any sense.
• 1:04:30
  Matt made a very good point yesterday.
• 1:04:31
  Universal high income doesn't make sense
• 1:04:34
  because it's universal.
• 1:04:35
  If it's equal across the board,
• 1:04:38
  you get Zimbabwe dollar territory.
• 1:04:41
  It's like, yeah, everybody can make a billion dollars,
• 1:04:43
  but it doesn't really mean anything
• 1:04:46
  because the purchasing power is so diminished.
• 1:04:48
  And Elon, the AI camp put together,
• 1:04:51
  well, don't worry, the productivity growth
• 1:04:53
  of all this technology is going to be so high
• 1:04:55
  that it doesn't matter.
• 1:04:55
  the velocity of the productivity growth is going to be faster than the velocity of the money
• 1:05:01
  distillation throughout the economy. So it'll sort of even out. But still, I think it's a half-assed
• 1:05:07
  attempt at a solution to this problem that is emerging. I do think half of the half-assed in
• 1:05:17
  this is just a narrative forming to make sure that they don't get shot in the street.
• 1:05:20
  Yeah, totally agree, man. I mean, it's a very interesting signal, nonetheless, from the
• 1:05:26
  technological elite out in Silicon Valley. It's hard to know. Honestly, it's hard to know
• 1:05:34
  how this is all going to play out. The war, the rising interest rates, energy,
• 1:05:44
  I don't want to say scarcity, but energy monopoly that is being sort of distorted,
• 1:05:49
  dislocations as the economist would say is rising uh the only good thing in many stories
• 1:05:58
  around the world seems to be like what bitcoin is doing right you know it better than most as far as
• 1:06:03
  like you know developing markets with mining um accessing it this neutral asset worldwide and be
• 1:06:12
  able to transact with anybody with nobody telling you you know that you can't uh everything else is
• 1:06:18
  starting to look pretty orwellian so well again i'm i'm not i'm not a doom and gloomer typically
• 1:06:23
  but this to me this is this this is a mathematical representation of how i think the fireworks are
• 1:06:28
  going to play out and i do think it's probably going to be within the next 10 years yeah agreed
• 1:06:34
  um and i'm happy you brought that up because it is going to be stressful it is going to be chaotic
• 1:06:43
  and i think it's necessary like you have to go through these these growing pains and these these
• 1:06:48
  moments of turbulence to really recognize what the signal is. And I think we both agree it's Bitcoin.
• 1:06:52
  I mean, to your point on the Orwellian tip, I mean, we had Tether freeze $344 million worth of
• 1:07:01
  their stablecoin yesterday morning. And that is another parallel narrative that's been formed and
• 1:07:07
  the drum has been beaten over the last two years. The stablecoin is the biggest innovation. We're
• 1:07:14
  going to modernize our economy with them. Like I said earlier, Brian Armstrong was out earlier this
• 1:07:18
  week saying they're the best form of money of all time. But I think the market is learning the lesson.
• 1:07:23
  And we reported on it at TFTC yesterday. And I talked about it. It's like this is like the whole,
• 1:07:31
  particularly here in the United States, the politicians saying, hey,
• 1:07:35
  we're never going to have a CBDC. We're going to make sure we pass laws that make it so the
• 1:07:41
  The Federal Reserve cannot issue a central bank digital currency, and we're going to have freedom in the monetary realm here in the United States.
• 1:07:49
  It's like, well, actually, you're erecting a private market, a private bank digital currency system that is functionally serves the same goals as CBDC.
• 1:07:59
  I think people are beginning to see this with the freezing of assets.
• 1:08:06
  But it's not only the stablecoin guys, Marty.
• 1:08:09
  And this is where, again, it's free real estate for me to criticize because he's obviously done a lot.
• 1:08:14
  But let's keep this analogy going now.
• 1:08:18
  So this is the idea, right?
• 1:08:23
  Contrary to what people might think, and you still can get great returns.
• 1:08:26
  We'll go back to the chart.
• 1:08:27
  You can get 100 plus percent returns on Bitcoin if you buy at those lower quantiles and sell at the upper.
• 1:08:33
  Again, not financial advice, but it's actually not that difficult compared to, say, more volatile, negatively skewed stocks, which they can blow up faster than you can track them.
• 1:08:46
  But Bitcoin actually usually is a positively skewed asset.
• 1:08:49
  It blows up to the upside.
• 1:08:51
  The bottoms are pretty rounded.
• 1:08:54
  I'm getting on a tangent again.
• 1:08:55
  But the point is, bottom line, on a trend, if you really are mathematically rigorous about it,
• 1:09:02
  and you can follow Giovanni or Stephen Perrineau, a lot of these power law guys that I've gotten to know over the years,
• 1:09:08
  and I fully agree with all of their takes, but on a trend, Bitcoin used to be 50%, 60%, 70% CAGR.
• 1:09:17
  It goes down.
• 1:09:18
  It actually stabilizes and goes down.
• 1:09:21
  Now, someone who controls a lot of Bitcoin, Michael Saylor, has made the announcement, which is just purely absurd.
• 1:09:30
  But he does it for the lulls or for the, I don't know, just for the cheeky numbers.
• 1:09:36
  He has said, well, first of all, besides saying all your models will be destroyed and then making a model, which he's done a few times.
• 1:09:42
  and then second of saying he said recently that uh he thinks that the bitcoin growth rate he has
• 1:09:50
  admitted actually that it's declining but he doesn't admit that it's in a power fashion he
• 1:09:54
  does this like just weird thing he says that it's going to stabilize around 21 per year
• 1:09:59
  now besides the fact that that's just unbelievably uh cheeky and convenient that you picked the
• 1:10:07
  number 21 also happens to be 10 above you know your 10 11 cost of funding to most of your investors
• 1:10:14
  through your uh your own stable coin type thing right your own stable coin instrument it's not
• 1:10:21
  real it's not there's nothing there's nothing grounding that statement he could say it but
• 1:10:26
  it's not real so this is really to me and and uh you know I need to probably write a paper on it or
• 1:10:31
  But I think mathematically, this is what we're looking at.
• 1:10:37
  So it's either Bitcoin continues on its power trajectory, and it grows like a network, and nobody can stop it, and the cypherpunk era is realized.
• 1:10:50
  Or Wall Street, in particular Wall Street, but probably other capital markets as well, maybe weirdly in authoritarian countries.
• 1:11:01
  really takes over, truly authoritarian, you can't withdraw. And crucially,
• 1:11:09
  crucially, you can have endless amounts of fiat interest backing a limited amount of Bitcoin.
• 1:11:17
  Then you could have what Saylor describes as, pick your number, 21%, 15%, whatever,
• 1:11:25
  at that singularity, at that meeting point, which there will be a meeting point of Bitcoin
• 1:11:29
  sort of slowing down in growth and the rest of the market's speeding up in growth if they are
• 1:11:35
  successful and i i do mean this in sort of the uh an em versus term i guess but if they are
• 1:11:41
  successful that is the system the fiat currencies then that means that they if they are successful
• 1:11:49
  in in sort of co-opting bitcoin then that means that bitcoin turns exponential so it actually
• 1:11:53
  means that unlike here where Bitcoin goes down, but if it goes to say 21% and it just hovers above
• 1:12:02
  this red line, first of all, Bitcoin can do fine. Like price-wise, you might be pretty happy if you
• 1:12:07
  bought Bitcoin. Bitcoin can do, well, I'm already going to jump the shark. I mean, not jump the
• 1:12:13
  shark, but jump to the point. Bitcoin can do better in both scenarios as a Bitcoin holder,
• 1:12:18
  but the vision is not necessarily the one I think that we would want. And probably one could
• 1:12:23
  really without great pain withdrawal bitcoin at you know licensed kyc institutions and uh this is
• 1:12:32
  actually how i see it now i i'm sort of i'm fleshing it out kind of in my mind i'm looking at the
• 1:12:37
  numbers but you're going to have a meeting point of uh cost of capital return of value and interest
• 1:12:46
  and sort of on the other side by the way which is you know aligns very nicely with the theories
• 1:12:52
  that have been said by many Bitcoiners over the time,
• 1:12:54
  you know, Jeff Booth, Saifedean, whatever.
• 1:12:57
  People have theorized if it's going to be,
• 1:13:00
  if we're going to have interest
• 1:13:03
  or we're going to have these sort of equity contracts.
• 1:13:05
  I'm not exactly sure, but it is a fact.
• 1:13:09
  It is a fact.
• 1:13:09
  This is one more thing that makes me pretty sure
• 1:13:14
  that like mathematically we're on the right track here
• 1:13:16
  is that you cannot actually have interest
• 1:13:19
  in a world where Bitcoin grows in power
• 1:13:21
  because it's not exponential.
• 1:13:24
  You can only have interest working in an exponential system.
• 1:13:29
  Do you understand what I just said there?
• 1:13:31
  Because I've said this a lot,
• 1:13:32
  and a lot of people even in the power sort of camp,
• 1:13:36
  I've pressed them on it, and I haven't gotten good answers.
• 1:13:39
  But when I say that you can't actually,
• 1:13:41
  like if Bitcoin is growing,
• 1:13:43
  but it's growing at a sort of sustainable rate that declines,
• 1:13:46
  you actually cannot for your investments
• 1:13:49
  have a fixed rate of interest
• 1:13:51
  because at the end, you wouldn't want to lend the Bitcoin
• 1:13:54
  because your Bitcoin would be more...
• 1:13:56
  You wouldn't get enough out in Bitcoin interest
• 1:14:00
  compared to the growth of the investment.
• 1:14:03
  Does that make sense?
• 1:14:04
  Yes.
• 1:14:05
  Yeah, you have it there.
• 1:14:06
  Bounder acts are equity-based or very short-term debt.
• 1:14:09
  Yeah.
• 1:14:10
  I mean, I've been partial towards that, and it's funny.
• 1:14:14
  A lot of...
• 1:14:15
  There's been a lot of commentator, I think,
• 1:14:17
  TXMC Trades or whatever.
• 1:14:19
  he's been beating the drum
• 1:14:21
  like Bitcoin will never be
• 1:14:22
  will never be a
• 1:14:25
  medium of exchange because
• 1:14:27
  of the growth rate and
• 1:14:28
  it just makes sense to hoard
• 1:14:31
  and not a spend
• 1:14:33
  and sell
• 1:14:34
  but I think
• 1:14:35
  and I can see that argument
• 1:14:39
  it's a very strong argument to make but I think
• 1:14:41
  it's operating from
• 1:14:43
  a context where the world
• 1:14:45
  remains
• 1:14:46
  in its state at least from a monetary
• 1:14:49
  and economic organization perspective
• 1:14:52
  and what you're putting forth here on the left is like,
• 1:14:54
  hey, that shifts and we have a new way
• 1:14:58
  of sort of monetizing, not monetizing,
• 1:15:02
  but investing and doing capital allocation
• 1:15:06
  that is very different from what we've become accustomed to
• 1:15:10
  over the last couple of centuries
• 1:15:12
  and the last century specifically.
• 1:15:15
  And I think that's to answer your question or to try to help you answer the question.
• 1:15:22
  I think we've both been mulling over for the last year because of your introduction of the treadmills as a thought experiment.
• 1:15:32
  Does the market sort of force the left?
• 1:15:38
  The left Bitcoin turns the world to power law.
• 1:15:43
  Does the market force that? And when I say that, I mean, that's getting out of like the technical arguments.
• 1:15:51
  I like to focus more on the social and just look at the multipolarity that's increasing and the lack of trust of institutions.
• 1:16:00
  I think there's a social aspect. We talk about it in hyperinflation all the time.
• 1:16:04
  Inflation is two parts, mechanical and social. Mechanical, obviously, the number of monetary units that exist and then social once confidence collapse.
• 1:16:10
  There's nothing that can return stability of the currency.
• 1:16:16
  It's just going to devolve into hyperinflation.
• 1:16:18
  I think similar here was what you're describing on the institutional side.
• 1:16:23
  Can they sustain enough of a reputation and sustain confidence?
• 1:16:32
  Can individuals sustain confidence in that system to allow them comfortably to turn Bitcoin exponential?
• 1:16:38
  I that's where I would I would say I think the long-term trend particularly since 2008 is that
• 1:16:45
  like confidence is eroding and waning and um that side of the market the social side of the market
• 1:16:51
  may force um or may just end up with Bitcoin turning the world into a power law power trend
• 1:16:59
  excuse me yeah no I don't mind power law I mean I I say power trend because some people
• 1:17:04
  who don't know the math
• 1:17:07
  get confused, but it's just a technical
• 1:17:09
  term, calling it a power law.
• 1:17:11
  Exponential is a trend.
• 1:17:13
  Power is a trend.
• 1:17:14
  It makes sense, though.
• 1:17:15
  It makes sense.
• 1:17:17
  This is basically my thesis now.
• 1:17:21
  I don't see...
• 1:17:22
  I think that mathematically explains
• 1:17:24
  the situation.
• 1:17:27
  Like you said, socially,
• 1:17:29
  all the factors
• 1:17:30
  are there to
• 1:17:32
  keep pushing Bitcoin into this area. And we know, I mean, technically, all the factors are there.
• 1:17:40
  It just needs to keep this decent, you know, self-custody act, self-custody actually has to
• 1:17:45
  dominate and you can't be afraid to withdraw. But that is a question in itself. Yeah, go ahead. I
• 1:17:51
  got more, but go ahead. I mean, that's another part of like, technically, like, even if you get
• 1:17:54
  to the world on the left on the right, excuse me, where the world turns Bitcoin exponential. And for
• 1:17:59
  all the audio listeners i'm sorry i'm i'm describing um something visual that you may
• 1:18:02
  not be seeing which is a slide which is a slide bitcoin turning the world power of the world
• 1:18:08
  turning bitcoin exponential um even if there is a short period where the world turns bitcoin
• 1:18:14
  exponential if there's enough full node distribution and geographic and ownership
• 1:18:22
  distribution of hash rate that exists the ability like yes or maybe a kyc aml regime
• 1:18:34
  everything may be gated off but at the end of the day the literal ability to send a utxo from
• 1:18:41
  one address to another signing a private key will still exist and if that ever goes away then why
• 1:18:48
  Why are we even doing Bitcoin?
• 1:18:49
  So like there may be some social, political sort of factors that make people believe that this is the way we use Bitcoin.
• 1:18:57
  But at a literal fundamental, is this thing possible?
• 1:19:00
  Is it possible to do this thing, which is use a private key to buy and broadcast a transaction that has a UTXO land and a public address that you technically can control by yourself?
• 1:19:13
  Yes, that will remain true.
• 1:19:14
  And as long as that remains true, I think Bitcoin turning the world to a power trend will be possible.
• 1:19:23
  And I think it's going to be an uphill battle.
• 1:19:26
  And I think it will come with volatility just like the price chart does.
• 1:19:30
  But I think, again, going back to the tether thing, I think people, I mean, maybe it's a bubble, but I think you're just going to have more and more of that.
• 1:19:38
  People are going to be like, no, I actually want to control my money.
• 1:19:40
  don't want to use these tools that make it hard for me.
• 1:19:45
  And I think, again, the multipolarity of the political landscape
• 1:19:49
  is going to only increase and get more vitriolic from here.
• 1:19:52
  And I think we're in a relative peacetime
• 1:19:56
  in terms of Operation Chokepoint 1.0 and 2.0,
• 1:19:59
  but the things that that stuff has gone away forever
• 1:20:01
  is completely naive.
• 1:20:02
  100%.
• 1:20:03
  And it's going to come down to people rallying around,
• 1:20:07
  probably politically, and Peter Todd talks about this,
• 1:20:09
  you know we have to bring it back to the geopolitics now so i mean um peter and i might be the
• 1:20:20
  loudest uh supporters for ukraine and freedom and uh against russian tyranny uh i'm not going to go
• 1:20:28
  full full throat into that as i usually do but but i will say it's always been strange to me
• 1:20:35
  me just lay out the example so it's always been strange to me that on the sort of libertarian free
• 1:20:41
  market right we have this hard right faction which goes to tucker who does a sort of walter
• 1:20:46
  duranti type interview of putin uh this is the guy that from new york times basically uh glossed
• 1:20:53
  over the holidomore and all the uh terror that the soviet union was doing in the 20s and the 30s
• 1:20:59
  But he's not doing real journalism with Putin.
• 1:21:05
  And he is throwing out this angle, which I think is very appealing to Americans that are fed up with American empire, which is correct in some ways.
• 1:21:17
  Which I would agree.
• 1:21:18
  I mean, the war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iraq in particular, completely unjustified, called shameful by the British intelligence, the way they were dealing with Americans back at the time.
• 1:21:27
  We could go on and on and on.
• 1:21:29
  But there's an appealing thing here in a free world West, also pushed by this where you have to be careful on social media.
• 1:21:39
  It's like in China and in Russia, they can't, they, their bots can use our internet.
• 1:21:44
  We'll talk about their internet usage in a second, but they can use our social networks.
• 1:21:48
  We cannot use theirs.
• 1:21:51
  So in the free thinking West, they are manipulating you every day, every day in the trenches, they're manipulating.
• 1:21:56
  kidding but what is happening what I'm seeing is uh and you tell me I know that you're more involved
• 1:22:04
  with the uh human rights foundation and so you probably see this more than most but I've looked
• 1:22:10
  I've asked AI to provide me examples of on this sort of right wing bro kind of hard right now
• 1:22:17
  podcasts various various levels whether it's whether it's Tucker's show whether it's Rogan
• 1:22:23
  uh Dave Smith all these guys like have they ever talked about the tyranny in Russia that is coming
• 1:22:28
  down the pipe right now today and for those that don't know um basically right now the internet is
• 1:22:34
  entirely throttled in Russia you can't go on to any Western website okay uh everything is throttled
• 1:22:42
  for Russians uh telegram is completely shut off 95 percent uh VPNs like 486 VPNs were just attacked
• 1:22:51
  and targeted, Putin is calling it their digital sovereignty.
• 1:22:56
  He's basically saying that there's an attack on Russia.
• 1:22:59
  There's no attack on Russia.
• 1:23:00
  Russia is attacking Ukraine.
• 1:23:03
  But we are very close now to this sort of, in my view,
• 1:23:07
  this sort of Orwellian tipping point,
• 1:23:09
  this sort of, what's the word?
• 1:23:11
  Like an event horizon,
• 1:23:13
  where at least in the very authoritarian countries,
• 1:23:16
  you're not quite sure what's gonna happen after.
• 1:23:19
  me to me where are all the cypherpunks if they are sort of center right or even you know hard right
• 1:23:26
  are they aware and i think you are aware but are they this is why i'm glad you allow me to talk
• 1:23:33
  about this but like are you aware how authoritarian it's going right now in russia i mean it's
• 1:23:37
  completely censored uh there's more political prisoners in russia since stalin they have
• 1:23:44
  something called the foreign agents where actually they just i saw that the great granddaughter of
• 1:23:50
  khrushchev himself which khrushchev ironically stopped the stalin purges i'm not saying khrushchev
• 1:23:57
  is a good guy he was actually bad during uh the nkvd times as well but when he came into power he
• 1:24:04
  stopped the ridiculous stalin purges his grant his great granddaughter is on this list she's a foreign
• 1:24:10
  agent she and so basically you're uh they actually you're taxed higher your uh your your travels are
• 1:24:19
  stifled your all your accounts are basically blocked uh you're gonna need bitcoin more and
• 1:24:22
  more but like the radioactive canary in the coal mine is actually not the us it's in russia we can
• 1:24:28
  talk about the war in ukraine in a second or at least some things that i think will affect us
• 1:24:34
  hegemony but yeah it is it is unraveling like fast in russia and um i just say that to sort of warn
• 1:24:43
  people in the west like you you really need to be careful because like they're the first of all
• 1:24:49
  russia's not someone you want to cheerlead i mean two and five russians don't have a toilet
• 1:24:53
  there's 1200 schools in russia where children don't have a toilet 1200 schools um this is
• 1:24:58
  supposed to be like a superpower trump wants to do you know 12 trillion dollars of business
• 1:25:03
  his golfing buddy, Steve Whitcoff, as you mentioned, is the chief negotiator with Ukraine and with
• 1:25:09
  Iran and Israel. He could do everything, and his son-in-law as well. But his golfing buddy,
• 1:25:14
  real estate developer, Steve Whitcoff, he's being titillated by $12 trillion of apparently deals
• 1:25:21
  that Russia's going to do with them. And Lavrov, the Frankenstein foreign minister, has been quoted
• 1:25:26
  in saying in some of these leaks that happened in Hungary that once we get the Ukraine war out of
• 1:25:30
  the way we can do business with the Americans.
• 1:25:34
  All of this is very much in Trump's mind
• 1:25:37
  that he can be this sort of dealmaker.
• 1:25:39
  But in reality, I mean, the Russian economy
• 1:25:41
  is 2 trillion and falling.
• 1:25:43
  They're being attacked every night
• 1:25:44
  because Ukraine is taking out their air defense.
• 1:25:45
  So there's a whole war going on right now for freedom.
• 1:25:48
  And thank God the Ukrainians are fighting
• 1:25:51
  as heroically as they are.
• 1:25:53
  But I just want to say,
• 1:25:55
  all the nightmare scenarios that you think about,
• 1:25:58
  hear about like they're happening right now in russia there are uh you can't you can't assemble
• 1:26:04
  in russia you can't protest this uh there's a good there's one journalist from the from western
• 1:26:11
  countries from the bbc actually his name is steve rosenberg he's still there they haven't kicked him
• 1:26:15
  out he's still there everybody knows it like he he goes to their little press conferences he's
• 1:26:20
  never allowed to ask a question he's kind of like putin's beard you know like if putin's a gay
• 1:26:25
  authoritarian you know which he is but but he's like putin's beard to the west like so oh look at
• 1:26:29
  we have this bbc guy here everybody else is kicked off there's no americans there french whatever
• 1:26:34
  they they can't go that they're at risk of being thrown in jail themselves but they leave rosenberg
• 1:26:38
  just kind of as a as like a token and he just did a very interesting documentary i'd recommend it
• 1:26:43
  just you can search bbc russia you'll see you'll find it um he's going through he's talking to some
• 1:26:49
  of these people that are on the foreign agents list uh the people that have tried to put protests
• 1:26:55
  not against the war in Ukraine, which they should,
• 1:26:57
  but they tried to actually run government-approved protests
• 1:27:02
  against the closing of the internet.
• 1:27:06
  And, of course, these protests are denied.
• 1:27:09
  I mean, it is right there.
• 1:27:10
  So, like, we are at a level right now in 2026
• 1:27:14
  where you have a nation, a former great power,
• 1:27:17
  that is going back, not going forward, but going back.
• 1:27:20
  So everything that you just talked about,
• 1:27:21
  Like you have this radioactive canary in the coal mine that is Russia.
• 1:27:26
  And I think, I just think that the last line of defense, as Reagan said, is in United States.
• 1:27:31
  There's nowhere else to go.
• 1:27:32
  So you have to, you have to be careful about them encroaching on your freedoms.
• 1:27:36
  I've been more worried on the right now because of the Trump admin, but I'd be just as worried on the left when, you know, when they come in, what's going to happen.
• 1:27:44
  So everybody needs to take serious account of what's happening in Russia.
• 1:27:48
  okay I mean we I was telling you that man I covered on our HR yesterday like the banning of VPNs
• 1:27:54
  be big that's not scratching the surface though like it is there's nothing the business is
• 1:28:00
  cratering even but they're doing it because they can't control the narrative of how shitty their
• 1:28:04
  country is yeah well yeah I mean we've been going back and forth since what 2022 this war popped off
• 1:28:11
  almost whole thing yeah four years now just over four years February 2022. yep I think it's shitty
• 1:28:18
  I mean, I don't like Zelensky.
• 1:28:20
  I don't.
• 1:28:22
  He's an authoritarian, is right, my perspective in many ways.
• 1:28:25
  Like, I think the Russian people and the Ukrainian people are cannon fodder for this proxy war between Russia's view of the future and what I would deem to be like the Davos-Glas-West view of the future.
• 1:28:42
  And to your point about like, I mean, here in the United States, the right, you have all these right-leaning politicians passing all these anti-Semitism laws, which is like, hey, I don't think you should be out there being overtly anti-Semitic.
• 1:28:56
  And who even knows what the definition of that word is these days.
• 1:28:59
  But the fact that you have free speech infringing laws being passed here in the United States is not good.
• 1:29:06
  And then on top of that, you have this.
• 1:29:09
  I mean, I had described this with Tom Luongo.
• 1:29:12
  I think you two would disagree vehemently on your worldviews.
• 1:29:16
  But the last time he was on, I think this is the best way to describe how I try to be all these things.
• 1:29:22
  It's your different lenses, like particularly why I love having you on and then sort of a wide variety of guests with different perspectives.
• 1:29:32
  It helps me put on different lenses.
• 1:29:34
  I mean, your lens is the pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia, Baltic view, which I think is very important and very valuable for me to have as a perspective and for everybody to have as a perspective.
• 1:29:45
  Then you have others, which is, I mean, the Luongo sort of lens is that we are trying to break free from our hide at the hip nature with European economy, with European politics as it may be.
• 1:30:06
  um and break free and get out of all these forever wars which iran was like something i look at i'm
• 1:30:12
  like this is this is a a mark against this this lens um but you go back to like the national
• 1:30:21
  security strategy that was laid out that is something i agree with like i think we should
• 1:30:25
  get out of these forever wars we should focus on the western hemisphere um we should secure our
• 1:30:30
  border um but then you look at the day-to-day murkiness of reality and it's just so hard to
• 1:30:36
  believe or so hard to understand what is real and what is not um and that was just like a long-winded
• 1:30:43
  rant monologue but is this the guy that says the like the uk still controls the us or whatever city
• 1:30:49
  of london it different than different i do i do vehemently disagree with this yeah um look just Just a couple of things Firstly on the war Zelensky Gary Kasparov says it right Every politician in the world today is a clown Leave it to a comedian to actually be the new
• 1:31:11
  leader of the free world. Whatever you're hearing about Zelensky, whether he's on coke,
• 1:31:15
  or he's corrupt or whatever, he's that's just not the case. He, he was offered a ride out of
• 1:31:21
  Kyiv by the Biden administration. He said, I need ammunition, not a ride.
• 1:31:25
  He's leading his people truly in a Churchillian effort against a much larger power that has much
• 1:31:32
  greater resources that, thankfully, they're just so inept. And not only inept, but they are corrupt
• 1:31:40
  to the core. They extort. They're just a terrible outlook on life. They're imperial.
• 1:31:44
  That Ukraine, which, you know, like Russia, the phrase is basically Russia is sending slaves to
• 1:31:50
  liberate a free people like what Ukraine is doing is unbelievable now the United States's role in
• 1:31:57
  that I know there's a lot of people listening to this and say oh well you know just it all
• 1:32:01
  need to get out cut bait fine you're actually getting your wish um but I would say the way
• 1:32:07
  that it's happening is more and more a sign of American weakness than strength um just one
• 1:32:16
  a fine point you said the ira or the iran war was a strike against this view or not uh that that
• 1:32:22
  about the forever wars yeah strike against forever wars in this if you believe what was put forth in
• 1:32:30
  last year's national security strategy which is we need to untangle ourselves foreign involvement
• 1:32:35
  and focus on our hemisphere we'll be much better off like three months later start bombing iran
• 1:32:42
  well i think yeah but i think what you should take from that first of all is actually the deep
• 1:32:47
  state is not as deep as you think it's very clear that trump himself and trump alone started this
• 1:32:54
  war uh as he does on a whim yeah well i mean no you could say he's forced by bb but if you're
• 1:33:01
  gonna say he's forced by bb is that does that evolve absolve trump from starting the war yeah
• 1:33:08
  no so I I have no problem with people saying he was forced by Bibi but he alone started the war and
• 1:33:16
  I think it's pretty clear to say that this was not a sort of deep state and it actually should
• 1:33:22
  make people even more convinced if they weren't already that Bush clearly I mean it's it's been
• 1:33:28
  on record the all the intelligence services of the UK I can't remember her name it's a she
• 1:33:33
  uh on the record saying that the just what the americans were trying to do laying the groundwork
• 1:33:40
  for iraq particularly the bush administration was shameful this is this is uk intelligence
• 1:33:46
  services saying that so it's really not the deep state it's just
• 1:33:49
  um over reaching u.s admin and if that's not under control then it can happen but i actually
• 1:33:59
  I think this is even more example of how the U.S., if we had our shit together, we could do even better.
• 1:34:06
  But we don't, so we do worse.
• 1:34:08
  So, again, I'm not fully disagreeing with it.
• 1:34:10
  I'm saying you're going to get your way, by the way.
• 1:34:13
  I mean, you are disengaging.
• 1:34:15
  This war in Iran, the way that Trump has dealt with Russia, these are signs of weakness, not strength.
• 1:34:24
  This is American weakness, not strength.
• 1:34:25
  they're the way that you're dealing with allies uh basically insulting them every moment and for us
• 1:34:33
  in the baltics and poland in particular who have been ravaged by war in the 20th century occupied
• 1:34:39
  twice by the soviets once by the nazis um it's hard it's jarring it's jarring like coming from
• 1:34:45
  a 1989 1991 i was quite young at that time when you know the wall came down and the soviet union
• 1:34:51
  eventually fell but it's hard to see the united states is sort of there's not even a moral
• 1:34:56
  authority right now in europe so this is again um for those that haven't quite picked up with this
• 1:35:03
  my american accent i'm a dual national so uh i'm dangerous dual loyalty i'm like jewish right you
• 1:35:09
  have to be scared of me like a jew because i have two different i have an american nationality i have
• 1:35:15
  have a European nationality passport.
• 1:35:18
  And this is very scary.
• 1:35:20
  But no, I mean, bottom line is there is, in my view,
• 1:35:25
  the free world, we talk about, you know,
• 1:35:28
  I don't want to go too much on this tirade,
• 1:35:30
  but the values of the free world started in Europe.
• 1:35:36
  They continued in America.
• 1:35:39
  That's a fact.
• 1:35:41
  The US is choosing a different path right now.
• 1:35:44
  And it's usually, not usually, it is overtly doing it in a sign of weakness.
• 1:35:48
  That's going to continue.
• 1:35:50
  So I just say be prepared.
• 1:35:52
  This is my recommendation.
• 1:35:54
  We can't control this stuff, but be prepared.
• 1:35:56
  I've been in Europe for 20 years, Marty, and $5 gas has been the norm.
• 1:36:02
  All right, you got to do the conversion from euros or $5 gas has been.
• 1:36:06
  Why do you think they drive these stupid fucking cars over here?
• 1:36:09
  It's because we can't drive gas guzzlers in Europe.
• 1:36:13
  that it's the norm. And that's coming to you. Here's the other thing I wanted to say.
• 1:36:19
  One of the things, again, not talking about the Iran war specifically, not talking about who caused
• 1:36:23
  what, but one of the more shameful things that the Trump admin has done has been failing to learn
• 1:36:29
  from heroic Ukrainians defending their land against tyrannical two and five toilet Russians,
• 1:36:35
  who are, again, living in this weird fantasy land and going back to Stalinist ways right now,
• 1:36:41
  as we speak it canary in the cold mine the internet is shut down in russia no mobile internet
• 1:36:46
  they can't get it on any western sites uh by the way there's one more thing i didn't mention there's
• 1:36:50
  this it's an app just research at chat gpt and ask about it it's called max it is the most orwellian
• 1:36:57
  thing you could ever do no one no one in russia wants to use it they're buying separate phones
• 1:37:01
  if they have to to like register something we talked about a couple weeks ago on rhr yeah it
• 1:37:04
  takes i mean this is not new guys this is coming and it's been this it takes control of your contacts
• 1:37:09
  it's just a full takeover of your phone everything you've been talking about on
• 1:37:15
  rhr tftc for years and years it's not it's not originating it's not flowering right now in the us
• 1:37:22
  it's it's in full throat uh genesis basically in russia and this is just typical for them
• 1:37:31
  they're an empire that they they just cannot the real reason for the ukraine war i'm going to get
• 1:37:35
  get back to my thing about America's Americans being prepared prepared for rising costs the
• 1:37:41
  reason Putin started the war is a wag to dog war all right Putin could not have a free democratic
• 1:37:46
  Ukraine bordering him that's why he started the war all right it's not about anything else it's
• 1:37:52
  not about NATO it's not about Nazis in Ukraine it's it's because Putin cannot have a free
• 1:37:58
  democratic Ukraine that will be the end of uh him so he's not stopping this war he can't stop the
• 1:38:04
  So the war is going to drag on, unfortunately.
• 1:38:07
  And the Ukrainians are now moving.
• 1:38:09
  They're already, the United States hasn't put a dime in.
• 1:38:12
  So again, you're getting your way.
• 1:38:14
  I'm sorry, you're getting your way.
• 1:38:16
  The United States hasn't put a dime into Ukraine since Trump came into office.
• 1:38:20
  I'm going to go back to my argument that everybody's assholes on offsides.
• 1:38:24
  Like, focusing on Europe, the EU specifically, European Parliament.
• 1:38:30
  Like, I don't think, I think they're tyrannical.
• 1:38:33
  as justice traffic in trending and not even close not even close you want to know why you trending in that direction not even destroyed the demographics demographics with their immigration policy Look at their energy policy over the last 20 years You look at what they doing for civil liberties and speech on the internet
• 1:38:48
  It's trending in that direction, too.
• 1:38:50
  There are many issues. We touched on this a little bit last time.
• 1:38:53
  Again, the entire nation of Russia is shut out of the internet right now.
• 1:38:57
  That's the first thing.
• 1:38:59
  There are corrections that the UK is taking.
• 1:39:01
  They need to, of course.
• 1:39:01
  Again, I'm not a woke left liberal.
• 1:39:03
  It should be clear.
• 1:39:04
  if it's not uh that they but again whatever it is whatever the number i don't know three thousand
• 1:39:09
  ten thousand the people have gotten notices or fines whatever for their hate speech it's insane
• 1:39:15
  what they're doing in the uk they're they're going to correct it they're correcting but
• 1:39:18
  and the radical islam and everything but there's a lot of holdover carry over there by the way from
• 1:39:25
  u.s intervention in the middle east over the last 20 years right i mean where do those refugees go
• 1:39:30
  those refugees didn't go to the u.s and by the way i see that we're trying to ship out the afghan
• 1:39:34
  uh i see the u.s is just shameful the people that actually helped the locals in afghanistan and now
• 1:39:41
  have residents in america i see that ice is trying to get them out of the u.s it's shameful behavior
• 1:39:47
  but in any event where did most of those refugees go they went to europe so we can thank bush one
• 1:39:52
  for that bush two um hold on i want to i want to still bring it back bottom line the eu is at the
• 1:39:59
  bottom line of the EU, it is actually the exact same institution that all the hard right, old
• 1:40:04
  right, Misesian people say they want, is a confederation. It's like the old American
• 1:40:08
  Articles of Confederation. There is no supranational EU debt. I should qualify that. There was not
• 1:40:16
  until 2020. They did do a COVID package, which you and I just talked about ridiculous stimulus,
• 1:40:20
  money printing. It's like 700 billion, right? 700 billion at the EU level of debt. Not like the
• 1:40:27
  $38 trillion on the American federal level of debt. Every debt in the EU is solely controlled
• 1:40:35
  by each nation state. It's not an EU policy. There's only about $700 billion. And again,
• 1:40:40
  that was fully from COVID, and you and I would fully not support that. The other thing,
• 1:40:45
  the EU budget is balanced. So every country sort of proportionally contributes to the debt. Some
• 1:40:53
  Some countries even take a little bit, or not to the debt, to the budget of the EU.
• 1:40:56
  Some countries even take a little bit more out.
• 1:40:58
  I agree.
• 1:40:59
  Bureaucratic problem.
• 1:41:00
  They're going to fix it.
• 1:41:01
  All these things, they got a lot to do.
• 1:41:02
  But the percentage of what each individual European nation pays into the EU is about
• 1:41:09
  one to one and a half percent of their entire spending.
• 1:41:13
  so just as a as a raw figure brass tax number it's actually not this orwellian thing like
• 1:41:23
  washington dc at all it's a confederation it's confederation there's issues we don't have time
• 1:41:27
  to go into it i gotta uh i know you got a minute hard stop right yeah but um here's here's the
• 1:41:33
  thing again just to warn about what i think is coming down the pike for americans with costs
• 1:41:38
  and a lack of leadership in the world i can't remember if i mentioned this last time i mentioned
• 1:41:43
  a few times on different shows in my own in the course of this war. So when the war started,
• 1:41:49
  Iran lashed out at all the Gulf nations. America could not defend them. So in my view,
• 1:41:56
  one of the most egregious oversights that the Trump administration made about starting this war,
• 1:42:00
  besides all the other problems that are reported ad nauseum in probably left-wing media more than
• 1:42:05
  not, the most egregious thing is that the Trump administration did not prepare and listen to
• 1:42:10
  Ukraine. For four years, Ukraine has been, Ukrainians have been killed every night by
• 1:42:16
  Russians with Iranian design drones that they themselves have augmented. The Iranian drone is
• 1:42:22
  called the Shahed, means like witness. And the Russian drone is Geron, which is like geranium.
• 1:42:30
  Russians have this weird like fetish of naming their missiles after like flowers. So it's a,
• 1:42:38
  the drones that kill Ukrainians every night now are produced in Russia but they're Iranian designed
• 1:42:44
  okay so they've been working hand in glove the last four years the Russians and the Iranians
• 1:42:48
  and the Americans that were killed the first day in the strikes were killed by drones Russian
• 1:42:53
  augmented Iranian designed drones and they're there it's been reported you can look it up once
• 1:42:59
  you have GPT whatever there are uh Russian augmented drones shooting uh down and shooting
• 1:43:08
  American allied cities and states in the Gulf and have killed Americans. The fact that there's still
• 1:43:15
  people don't understand these just basic facts is very hard for us in Eastern Europe, who have
• 1:43:20
  always suffered under the thumb of Russian imperialism, to understand why that's not like,
• 1:43:24
  that's not, people aren't understanding that. Bottom line, you're getting your way. You're
• 1:43:30
  actually getting your way. It might not be the way we like it, or at least let's say us in Eastern
• 1:43:36
  in Europe who always pay our fair share of NATO and are asking for friends and values,
• 1:43:40
  friends and allies in the US who have similar values to help.
• 1:43:46
  You are actually getting your way, but the cost will be much higher gas at the least,
• 1:43:53
  and probably other things as well, supply chain.
• 1:43:55
  I'm not even talking about straight-hore moves, all that stuff.
• 1:43:57
  I'm talking well down the road because the Gulf states had to turn to none other than
• 1:44:03
  Ukraine for their defense. This is like an unbelievable own goal for the Trump administration.
• 1:44:10
  And Trump was even saying, oh, we have these low cost drone interceptors. He was getting those from
• 1:44:14
  Ukraine in some of his random conferences and stuff. He said, we have these low cost drone
• 1:44:19
  interceptors. Those are from Ukraine. And unlike the disgraceful performance over a year ago in
• 1:44:24
  the Oval Office, J.D. Vance said, did you say thank you? I'm not hearing the Americans,
• 1:44:31
  the american admin for sure thank the honestly it's it's all i can say is what ukraine is going
• 1:44:38
  through right now is just as much a 1776 moment than americans have had and uh we could go on and
• 1:44:45
  on about this i've said it before i mean the americans weren't just some cornbread uh thorough
• 1:44:50
  bread uh corn fed thoroughbred americans in 1776 the french blockaded the hell out of the british
• 1:44:59
  they had more soldiers die at Yorktown uh the Poles the father of the American cavalry is Polish
• 1:45:06
  the Poles were actually losing their state to Russia in the late 1700s and they came over and
• 1:45:12
  helped America win and now the tides are actually uh turning Europe is Eastern Europe in particular
• 1:45:19
  is still dealing with the scourge of Russia for the last 150 years and America is unfortunately
• 1:45:25
  not really there um and doesn't really want to help but this is this is what we're dealing with
• 1:45:29
  it's uh it's a true like the realignment is here it's uh you're getting your way it's here uh
• 1:45:37
  you're you're not engaged and i think it's probably going to be a higher cost to americans
• 1:45:43
  in the long run you might disagree with me on that but uh it is not a proxy war like there's no
• 1:45:50
  there's no proxy between Ukraine and Russia this is uh the Russian Empire started with the
• 1:45:56
  subjugate subjugation of Ukraine and it's ending with the subjugation of Ukraine so
• 1:46:02
  uh from that side me as a European as a dual national you know traitorous uh person here
• 1:46:08
  talking to you right now it's going to be good like we cannot thank and support the Ukrainians
• 1:46:13
  for what they doing enough it just from my view I say it a bit sad to see the way that US is handling this like the way that he dealt with with and i don think the greenland story is over by the way by the way greenland was not in the national security memorandum but trump has been fixated on taking it i mean that u law a
• 1:46:31
  border treaty is u.s law russia has broken all laws with their border treaties which are signed
• 1:46:37
  into law with ukraine okay so again there's no justification for what russia is doing it's a
• 1:46:41
  tyrannical state right now but what we're seeing with the u.s is very dangerous i would say for like
• 1:46:46
  like a traditional European ally, because if Trump could,
• 1:46:50
  we got two more years of this.
• 1:46:51
  And if Trump continues to go down the road of,
• 1:46:55
  we don't need anybody, we're just going to take Greenland
• 1:46:57
  and Fox News justifies taking like a sovereign Democrat,
• 1:47:02
  Democratic nation and an ally's territory,
• 1:47:05
  it could get much worse.
• 1:47:06
  I hope that it doesn't.
• 1:47:07
  I think that it won't, but like the Greenland story is big.
• 1:47:12
  The Danes are pissed.
• 1:47:13
  I mean, the Danes lost more per capita in Afghanistan
• 1:47:16
  than anybody.
• 1:47:18
  The Bolts were close as well.
• 1:47:20
  But the Danes lost more per capita than Americans.
• 1:47:24
  And it's like they're the best allies that America can have.
• 1:47:28
  They're the biggest contributors, by the way, per capita.
• 1:47:30
  It's Ukraine's defense.
• 1:47:32
  So you're getting it.
• 1:47:33
  The realignment's happening.
• 1:47:34
  You're getting it.
• 1:47:35
  I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't,
• 1:47:37
  when you talk about Europeans not paying for their defense and stuff,
• 1:47:40
  that's something for like Spain and Germany and France.
• 1:47:42
  But for us in Eastern Europe who have always been subjugated to like a tyrannical imperial
• 1:47:49
  Russia, I think what you're seeing is an empire die in Russia right now.
• 1:47:53
  You're seeing America also die and lose their power.
• 1:47:57
  I mean, not die, but retreat in a very disorderly fashion.
• 1:48:03
  And it's going to be much more expensive for Americans in the future.
• 1:48:10
  It would be my caution.
• 1:48:11
  so again it all roads lead back to bitcoin but i i think you're actually going to find costs
• 1:48:15
  probably rise and influence dwindle fast and um i don't know that's my caution we can't change it
• 1:48:23
  like i said we can't change it but what i see is uh is us losing a lot of power oh the one more
• 1:48:28
  thing so the ukrainians are helping the gulf countries now with all of their air defense
• 1:48:32
  low-cost drone interceptors it's just another example of how ukraine is rising above sort of
• 1:48:37
  the hand that they've been dealt the gulf countries in those first like 48 hours when iran was
• 1:48:43
  attacking them a month ago spent a thousand so the patriot interceptor the patient patriot defense
• 1:48:49
  missile interceptor system is the best in the world it's the one thing ukraine cannot replace
• 1:48:53
  and they're desperate to have it every night because they get bombed and droned every night
• 1:48:57
  in ukraine they have their low-cost drone interceptors but the patriot missile interceptor
• 1:49:01
  is the big one the gulf the rich gulf states they launched a thousand of these interceptors in
• 1:49:07
  two days. And Ukraine has launched 600 over four years. Just to give you some perspective of again,
• 1:49:15
  like the just the crazy disparity, the distribution of these things, if you have money versus if you
• 1:49:22
  don't. It's a real, it's a real realignment. I don't doubt it. I think you and I agree on,
• 1:49:29
  you know, 80% of this stuff. But I would just say, you really got to, I would, I'm more worried
• 1:49:35
  the hard right not understanding the dangers of the authoritarians like the putins in the world
• 1:49:42
  uh and even the left like these losers like on the left these left libs you know like this hassan
• 1:49:47
  piker i don't know who he was recently but i saw how you know big he's become i guess like just
• 1:49:53
  saying the soviet union it's a shame the soviet union broke up all this i mean economically they're
• 1:49:59
  going to lose every time and i think americans know that i think economically the left crazies
• 1:50:03
  will lose every time in their policy but the it's it's kind of the hard right authoritarian which is
• 1:50:11
  where i see the trump admin right now which unfortunately scares me more a little bit more
• 1:50:17
  but i don't it's not even right there that's my that's my rant man that's my soapbox on it
• 1:50:23
  it's appreciated rant i know uh i can hear people typing in the comments already but i would caution
• 1:50:29
  and put the lens on and view it.
• 1:50:32
  And I think just to wrap up, because I know you've got to go,
• 1:50:35
  the authoritarian right, I think it's more,
• 1:50:42
  the missteps are more disheartening because the opportunity
• 1:50:46
  to do the right thing exists where you know the left will never do it.
• 1:50:52
  That's what I would say.
• 1:50:53
  And I would, I mean, to think, to obviously build on that,
• 1:51:03
  like I think the right in America right now is completely divided.
• 1:51:08
  Yeah, the center has collapsed.
• 1:51:10
  The center's collapsed, and I don't see it changing.
• 1:51:13
  And I would just caution Americans that, like, you're going to have to move politically.
• 1:51:18
  You know, if the government, whether it's a left government or a right government,
• 1:51:22
  and i can see the hard sides of it the horseshoe theory is real by the way the crazies love putin
• 1:51:29
  on both sides but um just look the the hellscape is there it's it's this max app in russia no vpn
• 1:51:39
  no internet uh businesses are cratering and they're just doing it because they have started an imperial
• 1:51:44
  war i know it sounds familiar to a lot of americans that are anti uh iraq afghanistan uh
• 1:51:51
  wars and we'll see where this Iran war goes.
• 1:51:55
  But I agree with you.
• 1:51:55
  I agree with you on American imperialism.
• 1:51:57
  But once you lose your rights at home,
• 1:52:00
  it's very hard to get them back.
• 1:52:01
  And that's where we are.
• 1:52:03
  I think that's where we are.
• 1:52:06
  We'll pick this up in the summer.
• 1:52:09
  Keep where we are.
• 1:52:11
  Enjoy the conference.
• 1:52:13
  I'll try.
• 1:52:16
  I don't envy you, but...
• 1:52:18
  It'll be fun.
• 1:52:19
  It'll be good.
• 1:52:19
  It'll be good.
• 1:52:20
  It's just a long, it's exhausting.
• 1:52:23
  You will see some good people and have some good discussions.
• 1:52:27
  And I know that 95% of the people that you'll talk to won't agree with me on the Eastern European issue, but that's all right.
• 1:52:34
  I'm sure many who do agree with you will find me and come up to me.
• 1:52:39
  Thank me for having you on.
• 1:52:40
  Thank you for coming on.
• 1:52:42
  I hope they do.
• 1:52:44
  Yeah, they are out there.
• 1:52:46
  They're not as loud in the YouTube comments, but they are out there.
• 1:52:50
  Like I said, you get in your way.
• 1:52:53
  America's disengaging.
• 1:52:57
  So there it is.
• 1:52:59
  Peace and love, freaks.
• 1:53:01
  Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC.
• 1:53:04
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• 1:53:08
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