TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #310: Q4 2021 monetary base update and the macro landscape with Matthew Mežinskis

Episode Date: March 4, 2022

Join Marty as he sits back down with Matthew Mežinskis to discuss the Q4 2021 monetary base update and the macro landscape. Follow Matthew Mežinskis on Twitter Read everything discussed at: Porkopolis Economics Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl Bitcoin 2022 - use the code TFTC for 10% off

I'm loving it we got a new sponsor freaks McDonald's Fiat Food Empire just kidding we wouldn't take them on actually at what price will we bring McDonald's on Ty is here he can help me with the ads he's going to have to scream

he doesn't have a mic set up at what price would McDonald's be a good advertiser what's your soul worth like what if they offer like a million dollars for a year would you be mad at me if I brought McDonald's on

McDonald's in all sincerity though this episode very important one a lot of feedback from the episode we recorded on Monday with London Paul from the Sirius Report who gave a Russian perspective on

the situation unfolding in Ukraine right now today we sat back down with Maddy Mazinksic from formerly, well, Crypto Voices is still a thing, but he's rolled out Porkopolis Economics as well, which is a new brand, which his quarterly monetary base updates will live under from here on out. We went over our monetary base, but as you know, if you've listened to our monetary base updates throughout the years, Matty Mazinksic lives in Latvia, is very attuned to what's going on in the the baltic region eastern europe that part of the world and he has a

competing perspective with the one that that we put forth on monday and i think it's very important it was a very important episode in this episode matt matthew is very well versed on the history of that part of the world uh the political dynamics that are at play and the situation that is going on right now. And most importantly, I think how everybody is feeling in that part of the world right now, particularly your average citizen. So we touched on the monetary-based stuff very briefly in the beginning.

Most of this episode is about what's going on in that part of the world right now. So I highly recommend you listen to the whole episode. And it was brought to you by our good friends at Unchained Capital. It was a weird segue into the ads, but you just got to jump into them sometimes. We're right down the hall from the Unchained team here at the Bitcoin Commons in Austin, Texas.

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it's an important one okay you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be you got a new mic this time

I don't think you were using that the last time we recorded it's the same oh damn not that I was knowing the camera was going to be a new setup but for next time yeah for next time next quarter what's going on how's your part of the world

for next quarter I wish I could tell you it's it's nice and dandy my friend but we are in some serious shit over here it's uh it's very scary very scary um not sure i'll be my typical uh you know cynical sarcastic self here uh it's like really everything's in high gear um you know from a week ago when this invasion started uh i've been just glued to twitter i uh apologize for any of my twitter

followers who are used to me just tweeting economic money and monetary based stuff because over the last week now it's all right it's just uh over the last week i've actually been on twitter like every moment of the day where typically i you know for long stretches of time i don't even have twitter on my phone uh just get on out of the post quarterly updates but this development with crazy tyrant putin um and everything that's going on in ukraine is affecting all of us here in eastern europe seriously uh seriously um just to a a maddening state for all of us it's really we're all thinking about contingencies we're thinking about what to do if x y and z happens like it's some serious serious shit going on over here so uh i i presume we'll get all into it but

um yeah that's basically what that's basically where we are right now yeah heavy shit fucking heavy times are any of you freaks listening don't know who we're sitting down with you should know by now this is probably what our sixth or seventh quarterly update i'm sitting down with maddie mazinkas you've rebranded it's pork or coppola's economics now yeah yeah so um the uh the crypto voices podcast is still going on that's we've been doing that for about five years um you know i got keto miner from noddle on their uh guest hosting my friend alec harris from a halo privacy company as well it's guest hosting and um we're still doing that and everything but there's uh sort of a branching out of uh new ideas not just

necessarily on crypto or bitcoin uh you know it's it's an extension of everything we've done with the monetary based stuff but i wanted to sort of make it a separate thing so uh porkopolis.io the name uh if you enjoy it great uh if you if you are confused by it you know there's it's many many levels uh the meaning of that name but uh don't have to go into that now but yeah porkopolis economics is the is the new brand and that covers some similar stuff with the monetary base updates and um you know we're going to go starting to do streams and stuff uh it's it's sort of all getting set up now like um where it's going to be more detailed on a lot a lot of economic stuff not just money supply but uh comparing you know different effects different fiscal policies

monetary policies between between different economies and of course how bitcoin plays all into that um that's going to be sort of the focus of the of the brand uh going forward and the crypto voices podcast is still a part of that though well i want to dive into the meaning behind porkopolis when i think about it i think like are you guys you're cutting through the pork of the world there's a lot of shit out there you can take it any way you want it we'll get we'll get there eventually marty we're we'll uh we'll continue on here but uh uh it's it's a multi multi-level name and i'm very uh i'm very happy with it so it should be fun enjoy it um and uh we'll be spending more time together talking about this stuff so don't worry okay let's uh

let's jump into what we came here for if you freaks are new to this podcast you're new um you're just meeting maddie we've been doing this quarterly update on the monetary base which is a data set that matthew has been uh collecting gathering and giving to the world for what is this your 13th uh i don't even have to pull it up honestly it's probably the 15th now maybe yeah 15th yeah so we have we have a um in matt matthew 15th quarter yeah 15th quarter and we believe i i now believe after having done had these conversations with you and seeing the data set that uh and it's not even a belief it's just pure fact bitcoins true competitors are base monies around the world and matthew has been gathering and collecting data around the the

global base monies and where bitcoin falls in comparison to them we do a quarterly update this is our q4 2021 update uh we're doing in the middle of q1 2022 and so let's jump into it i don't think much changed in terms of positioning of bitcoin in relation to other base monies from q3 2021 to q4 2021 it's relatively yeah in q3 we were uh we were screaming if you might remember we were very very close actually to passing uh the formerly great british pound yes so that's uh roughly around a trillion uh dollars in market cap um and bitcoin at the time was you know right around there that 60 70 000 dollar uh mark we'll get it there um now we've we're you know we pulled back a little bit. And at the time, it was just above the Swiss franc, but the same ranking as it's

always been for a long time now, which is if you don't count gold and silver into this sort of bucket, you just look at the fiat monetary base, which is what they call basic money or central bank money, all of the cash and coin that you know and love or hate, it's in your wallet. And plus the central bank reserves, which are the reserves that every bank in the world holds with their central bank. Those two things together make up what's called the monetary basis, the core of the financial system, just like Bitcoin, UTXOs are the core of the Bitcoin system. It's outside of exchanges or DeFi or anything else. It's just Bitcoin, UTXOs. So Bitcoin, as of the end of last year, was ranked number six, if you didn't count gold and silver. And if you threw in gold

silver uh it's bigger than silver but not bigger than gold so it'd be ranked number seventh uh in the world and um and so so yeah that's where it was i uh you know have it under the new brand here we don't have to i was thinking marty you know with in light of you know global events like here this is literally all we've been thinking about for the last uh the last week is everything that's going on in ukraine uh we can probably talk maybe more about some of the macro implications uh free market stuff as well there's just a lot of stuff going on there but um you know both russia and ukraine are included in this uh so another i guess big uh update this uh this quarter besides the change in the brand uh besides um you know besides some of that stuff is the uh the sample

set here which again you're not really going to find this anywhere this isn't on the imf website bank of international settlements you actually have to go to every central bank's website to find this um we had the top 30 floating currencies before it was just just the you know it's my effort the way that i could get to it before the sort of shake it out the best way because you know there are a couple currencies like the danish kroner the hong kong dollar um some you know pegged fixed currencies which are kind of big but they in themselves have reserves at other central banks so i didn't include those but now i've just included them said whatever there's there's some nuance there whether you kind of even need to include some of those currencies because

those currencies themselves like for the danish krona for example is pegged to the euro so a huge portion of the danish central bank's reserves on the asset side of the balance sheet are euros actually euro based bonds actually euro reserves with the european central bank and it's pegged to the euro but for cultural reasons whatever the danes have always kept the danish kroner as a separate currency um in any event i didn't have any pegged currencies in before now i put them in now i'm just have all 50 currencies uh so so i increased it basically from 30 to 50 currencies and now we have um we have basically just the top 50 currencies in the the world regardless if they're floating fixed peg uh or not so it's a big uh it's a it's a it's a

nice big step there and um obviously if you're going to look at this update compared to prior updates some of the indexes are a little bit different uh we increased roughly like 800 billion in overall uh fiat cap roughly if you looked at the 30 currencies with the 50s so those extra 20 you can see how it really really gets marginal uh you know that pareto distribution but nonetheless we have 50 currencies now so it's a pretty huge sample uh i think it's it's uh it's pretty encompassing of all the money in the global system and famously which we can talk about during this episode i don't i want to talk about a lot of stuff with with ukraine with you but the um the as we know um everybody's in revolt against russia right now and you know their their uh

monetary base is also being attacked so it would be kind of interesting uh to see what happens there if you look at uh slide uh six car it's um it's right there yep that's uh that it shows the it's kind of a summary um and it's it shows like basically where bitcoin fits into that so you see gold still roughly around 10 trillion bucks as everybody knows uh or should know uh you hear that number a lot with gold and roughly that is uh all the gold ounces mined throughout history this includes bars it includes jewelry includes everything it does not in my calculations include my estimates of what are industrial gold gold that's sort of lost to um you know conductivity or dentistry things like that it's assumed it's about like 10 to 15 percent the overall ounces

are not included there uh of all ounces mine throughout history so um it's about 10 trillion bucks and then you go into the fiat currencies there you got the euro the dollar the yen the yuan um and then you can see uh i broke it out separately here you got currencies uh 11 through 50 or next if you look at currencies 11 through 50 that's 2.6 trillion dollars currency 6 through 10 or 2.3 trillion so you can see just like how those those shake out there and then the uh the form of the great british pound is actually i think i said a trillion dollars before it's a trillion pounds it's trillion pounds is um is the market cap of the bank of england basically the that's that's when i say market cap i mean the monetary base it's basically the size of the size

of the bank of england's balance sheet it's what the bank of england controls as far as monetary policy goes through that's what they directly control and then you have bitcoin and then silver which bitcoin as well passed last year as well as the uh the swiss franc so that's sort of a summary uh summary way to do it um and then one more interesting one that i'll stop for a second is if you look just two more slides or actually just one more slide uh this one was new as of last quarter but it's just very very overall top line sort of how does it compare to gold silver all of fiat and then electricity because that's always a big one uh you know big uh gets people very excited that don't like Bitcoin talking about Bitcoin's electricity usage. But it's

very interesting. You see, if you look at non-industrial silver, non-industrial gold, same numbers I talked about. Bitcoin is now, as of last quarter, which is roughly around the price that it is right now. Bitcoin is about 145% of non-industrial silver value, 8% of non-industrial gold. It's the same thing I just said. And then we got this global monetary base number which is top 550 currencies in the world excuse me top 50 currencies in the world uh it's 2.7 percent of that and then if you look at the uh you know that midpoint that the uh center uh cambridge financial center i forget the name of them actually cambridge cambridge that does the research on uh on electricity you know you're looking at 100 or so terawatt hours compared to

roughly you know 20 000 23 000 probably the updates haven't been done from iea for this year but 23 000 terawatt hours of consumption globally that only puts bitcoin at 0.5 percent of global electricity consumption so it's an interesting uh different way i guess to look at you know kind of where bitcoin fits in and uh in the global landscape that's what we're trying to do here yeah it's uh it's on the stage it's there and like we said between q3 2021 and q4 2021 it was relatively static in relation to the other currencies of the world maddie's added 20 to the list at 50 one chart that i wanted to pull up a car was 25 tweet 25 and i just thought this is an incredible visualization of again the Pareto distribution that you explained earlier of how

the dominant currencies break down across the the top 50 and obviously bubbles up to the top with the the first four to five taking a lion's share of overall but this uh I really like this chart and I'm not sure if you included in your in updates past is this a new one I have uh it hasn't been from the very beginning but it's it's been in the last few years progression so it's a big table actually of all the 50 fiats that bitcoin has passed over the years yes and i i just think it's an incredible visualization that highlights the covertness with which bitcoin has sort of climbed the ranks and and is uh establishing itself as a a base money in comparison to to other base monies in the world and so the far right uh of this table the last two columns

particularly highlight the year in which bitcoin surpassed um or excuse me the fourth from the right column highlights the year in which bitcoin surpassed and that particular base money and and whether or not it's still um larger than that base money and i think out of all 50 it is larger than 44 or 45 of them, which is pretty crazy to think of when most people around the world are just thinking of Bitcoin as some Ponzi play toy

that isn't really anything to worry about. But I think this table particularly highlights the fact that it has climbed the ranks relatively quickly and has established itself as something that is a mainstay and something that has proven that it it has stabilized relative to the um the other base monies that that aren't at the top

which may not seem like a lot to most but that's where you have to start right yep yep and it would slide and actually looking at the markets just now um because of my mind has been focused on war all week but uh right now it's probably at 40 000 just slipped below the swissy the frank there so it would be uh not number six in terms of fiat but number seven but it's it's always right on the line there of the swiss franc it has been for all of last year um unfortunately our friend elon musk actually took it over the swiss franc for the first time that he'd get he'd get more arrogant than he already is so i wouldn't uh inform that of him anymore but uh wait what was that uh when last about a year ago you might remember uh tesla made the announcement of uh

that they were they were going to do in the same sailor thing they were buying bitcoin basically and that was the first time that it launched bitcoin somewhere up into like the 45k realm if i if i remember correctly and so it's really on that news in fact it was a big you know green green candle up that uh that bitcoin passed the swiss franc literally on tesla news uh which is kind of interesting i guess thanks elon but uh yeah i don't you know we i'm sure you and many of our listeners have the same feelings about that but um anyway anyway uh we're right around the the swissie and yeah it's going to um obviously i mean the way that uh the world is going with recovering here from, from COVID. And then of course, now a new thing

to worry about, um, with all of the uncertainty in, in Europe, and there's going to be much more fiscal spending. And of course, some of that's going to be complicated, uh, complimented by monetary inflation. Um, these things, again, it's not something I'm cheering on. It's not something I'm hoping for. Uh, but these are things to obviously just keep an eye on and track and to see how it's going to make a difference uh when it comes to bitcoin so really you know we're on the border of the swiss franc we have been if not above that most of last year right on the border uh right you know tandem with it at parity with the level of basically the value of swiss franc which is incredible in itself to think about and then the only ones above that is like the last

mid-major which is the formerly great british pound and then the top four which is you know dollar euro yen and yuan um so yeah that's it that's it uh and and in this chart as as you say marty is in this table you can see all the dates that have passed most of them you know even uh bitcoin passed in the in the in the 2017 boom so that's like when the first time it passed pretty much you know most all of these currencies and one other thing to point out here now is that So, yeah, Russia is number 10 as of now or as of December 2021. Probably fallen way down. Yeah, I haven't, you know, the website's getting hacked.

I was trying to do some other research comparing just NATO and Russia and Russia and Ukrainian spending. This is other non-Bitcoin stuff. Obviously, it's kind of hard to get on Russian websites these days. Not necessarily even wanted to try to do that. Um, but, uh, it's, it's number 10 and probably that's going to fall drastically, uh, next quarter. Uh, Ukraine, the Grievna is number, uh, the Ukrainian currency. That's number 45.

It's number 45. So, um, that's just something to, uh, to look at there. Yeah. Um, man, I want to jump into, but like, is there anything else in this update that you think is particular particularly no not really i think we can talk about it more and um and maybe refer to it but i'm pretty much uh this is so remarkable what's happened in the last week over here that i'm fine to just start talking about uh some stuff that's going on over here if you're well if you're interested yeah i'm very interested and i think for the sake of this conversation

and creating a flow why don't we start with the monetary implications and everything that's happened um via sanctions and posturing currency devaluation reaction to everything that's going on and then we can finish as we always do on on the more geopolitical geopolitical yeah yeah well let me let me first maybe do a little little disclaimer i was thinking about this i've done this for a few other audiences that i've been speaking to and um i think it's important especially since i know your audience is uh well i don't know for sure but i assume you know you got a lot of libertarians classical liberals and free market bitcoiners in primarily the western hemisphere let's say so you might not be thinking about this part of the world a lot but um so for

anybody who who hasn't joined the discussion with matthew now matthew lives in latvia um he's over in the Baltic region? Yeah. So I'm, I'm half Latvian. Um, my wife is Belarusian. Uh, I have a lovely brand new baby daughter who's Belarusian blood as well. Uh, Russian blood as well, uh, in there. Um, Chuvash blood, which is an Eastern Turkish, uh, group that's, uh, still based in russia today uh latvian blood irish blood norwegian blood so uh absolutely consider myself citizen of the world and you know for peace and harmony and bitcoin and all these things but uh i think if you're if you're sort of of the ilk that we are and you're in the u.s the first thing you're going to think about when you see conflicts like this in europe is that this is somehow to do with the

us's fault and it's totally reasonable to think that um i'm one of those people sure sure i imagine you are i haven't been following too much of uh what you've been saying about this particular conflict but i imagine perhaps you you have uh but i want to just say and we can talk about all that it's fine we can talk about that we can talk about nato we can talk about everything uh i'm i'm really i'd say i'm fairly well educated on this topic i'm very well educated on the putin regime on everything that's happened in russia in the last 20 years so we can talk about all that but i guess just as a little disclaimer you know i'm from the midwest originally i'm from ohio so before we actually tell you what we're thinking we have to tell you you know all of the things that might

uh ruffle some feathers just so you understand uh but it's perfectly like consistent rational logical to have been, you know, anti baby Bush, anti, uh, you know, anti Vietnam, uh, following the French, anti Afghanistan, following the Soviets, anti Iraq, you know, Bush, uh, finishing his daddy's war over there in the Gulf. All of these things, we know a horrible, bad foreign policy, uh, for years and years. You talk to any of my friends, uh, from when I was in university, which was just post 9-11, very, very dark days in the United States. I mean, these were the debates of our times. It was never, never for this. These arguments about they hate us for our freedom. We have to go over there before they come here. Childish, childish debates and very,

very sad for the state of American foreign policy. That's my feeling. It's always been my feeling. And I presume that's somewhat aligned with what a lot of your listeners would and viewers would think uh i believe you know we're pro-peace anti-imperialism whether it's the u.s or whatever um and and and just just for for sort of sound you know saying hearts and minds kind of coming together and not uh being so uh divisive in politics that's generally generally supported the views that i think you probably take and i do as well uh when it comes to hear, you have to understand, though, that this idea about Putin as being, well, let me just continue the disclaimer. My position is, and I've always held this position, those long-time

listeners of my show, it's perfectly consistent to have those views about anti-US imperialism and also have those views about anti-Russian imperialism. Okay, so we can talk about NATO, we can talk about those effects, but it's perfectly consistent to have that. And I would even go further say it's not it's not anti-russian imperialism it's anti-putin okay it's just like baby bush uh caused a lot of problems for u.s foreign uh policy uh in the early 2000s post 9-11 putin has done this in the exact same time frame except he's still in power because he's a tyrant and he's a dictator and he's been in power for 22 years and it's horrible so everybody's suffering there. The other thing I would just say is I am like an anarcho-capitalist at heart. I love that

theory. I love talking about free markets, how Bitcoin is going to play into that and everything else. But where we are in 2022, like it or not, just like we were in the year 2001, we're very far from 8 billion sovereign flags actually in the world. We're very, very far from that. we have questions about nuclear proliferation we have questions about nuclear war uh these things concentrated in a few crazy governments that everybody needs to be careful of and think about so as much as i would like to see a billion sovereign flags around the world um we just don't live in that situation here today uh so again it's perfectly consistent to want human rights to be anti-empire but this is the situation we live in today so particularly when it comes to

i'd say european libertarians classical liberals they use the word liberal here for to basically refer to libertarian this is that the word wasn't hijacked like it was in american politics so a liberal over here is like a libertarian they probably have a very different view than most americans do when it comes to defense but again we can get into that and the last thing i would just say is you know last disclaimer here is like really you got to start with heart when we talk about this i mean this is a war uh that's not necessarily unlike many other wars that have happened uh it's a different aggressor but um at least in the way that maybe maybe americans might think of it but uh you you have to really start with the heart here if you want to try to get

past some of this stuff because um you know ukrainians are dying every day uh russians are being forcefully conscripted into this they had they half of them literally half of them as far as i can tell uh had no idea what they were doing they thought that they were going into drills uh to you know and maybe watch out for a ukrainian provocation on the border and all of a sudden they're in ukraine and uh you know ukrainians are defending their country and shooting at them um and then you have russians that are trying to protest all of this in the streets of moscow and st petersburg and they're getting arrested uh babies a mother holding a baby was arrested with a pro-peace sign children were arrested uh with pro-peace

signs anti-war signs um it's really really bad right now for freedom like all over the world but particularly in russia and what russia is going to do and that's not that's really not on uh you know nato or the u.s and i'm sure you're gonna have questions on that i'm happy to answer them but i just want to say those are my little disclaimers there that like we really need to be thinking about uh this is some bad stuff this is bad stuff like with implications for the whole world it's a nuclear power but this is a crazy motherfucking dictator that is holding the world hostage right now and he loves it he loves the fact that we're talking about this and we have no control over what he's doing so it's really really scary yeah it's extremely scary and that's

i mean i've been trying to articulate it on this show the last week the best i can and the way i articulated yesterday is that just watching this unfold from texas from from the united states It's just like, I'm like, fuck. My big question is, did it have to get to this point? Yes, obviously Putin's a terrible dictator, evil person. But was there the ability to avoid this direct conflict in your mind if the West and NATO countries did things a bit different, particularly around posturing of Ukraine joining NATO?

yeah let me let me just try answers like really i like to get on these tangents i'm not going to try to do that here regarding nato and specifically uh and eastern european eastern europe generally okay let's let's just put ukraine aside for a second but what i kind of alluded to it in my disclaimers there is the view that europeans have towards security is very different than the views that americans have towards just general security so when the soviet union ended in 1991 peacefully thankfully there's only you know i mean there was there was more than a handful of people that died uh in in the baltics and in azerbaijan and georgia but generally a massive communist uh tyrannical structure dissolved peacefully in 1991 it was amazing times amazing free time like i was

young at the time i didn't know what was going on but i i just like even through the 90s i mean my father was explaining this stuff to me and it was always um it was an amazing feeling of peace and freedom uh nonetheless from the time that germany was going through their reunification which was basically during 1990 1991 after the berlin wall fell uh in 89 um all the way until let's say 1999 every single european country that was either formally in soviet union like my heritage is the baltics latvia lithuania estonia um but also all the former countries that were in what they call the warsaw pact which was under the influence of the soviet union so poland hungary czech republic slovakia uh uh romania bulgaria

all of these countries um they were running towards nato they were not walking they were not crawling they were all running every single country wanted to be in nato including russia by the way yeah it was always a more complicated discussion with russia because of their nuclear status but even uh russia had discussions about being a part of a new type of peace agreement with the clinton administration correct yeah with the clinton administration is in the 90s it was basically nice it started with uh with with baby bush's daddy but uh after after that you know when he was only in one term it was basically clinton that was running this with yeltsin who was the it was uh who ran a coup and uh again thankfully peacefully and it helped in

the soviet union because he became the first russian president ever and and he's still the only peacefully elected russian president because as far as i know all independent media uh what do they call them that basically the people that sort of judge the fairness of political elections as much as we might laugh about that even in the states there still is yeah fact checkers all that stuff it's never been um i think maybe it's disputed whether 2000 was for putin because he was already kind of set up yeltsin just okay this is going to be our guy while i'm he was getting yeltsin was getting sick all this stuff uh maybe 2000 for putin was included in that but since 2000 it's never been a free and fair election which is another thing that i think american libertarians

need to be careful of is saying that that like eastern europe wants to be in this sphere of influence because they never have never ever none of them uh so basically i'll stop but let me just say nato as let's again holding ukraine aside as far as eastern europe was concerned former soviet countries former soviet uh oppressed countries warsaw pack countries all of them were going as fast as they could a few of them got in 1999 and the rest got in 2004 okay so that was a long time ago that was 18 years ago and it hasn't it hasn't increased yet so this idea you know this candace owens idea of uh aggressive nato expansion listen to putin's speech is so eloquent when he's talking about ukraine being formed by lenin i mean the other the other week which is just insane

absolutely insane but anyway i i get ahead of myself uh nato has not expanded in eastern europe uh since 2004 accepting a few balkan nations okay so it's like croatia north macedonia they don't border russia they're not far they're small they're small that economies are extremely small the biggest expansion and it was the main expansion was the topic of uh cole who was leading the West Germans to reunify Germany, everybody, Germany wanted in, everybody wanted in and they wanted the Soviets out. And here's another last thing I'll say about this in the nineties. So in the cold war, Germany was split in two, right? We had East Germany, West Germany was famous. We know this Berlin wall as well was Berlin, even though it was in East Germany,

it was split in two. So you had the Russian zone, the Soviet zone, typically on the East. and then you had the uh both in berlin and in germany itself you had the american french and british zones in the west russia had a soviet russia had a huge amount of troops there like 400 000 troops more than the americans british or french i'm not sure about combined maybe it was somewhat equal um but they they were just just sitting there dragging the economy down and it was a soviet type economy so again this is famous everybody wanted to get to the west berlin wall all this stuff but can you imagine that in 1990 when these discussions are going on the position of weakness that the so former soviet the position of embarrassment they were

speaking from they were like gorbachev first who was the secretary general of soviet union and then yeltsin who came in to sort of finish some of this stuff these guys needed to get money from the country that they formerly occupied. So not only was the United States granting loans and money to the Soviet Union and then Russia, it was billions and billions and billions in the 80s and 90s, both in the Soviet times and post-Soviet times.

Not only the United States, but West Germany. The Soviets were basically sitting in East Germany and they needed money from West Germany. The Soviets, not the Germans, the Soviets. so it just goes to show you again how it all comes back to economic power first and foremost before like bullying power like we're seeing today uh but that was that was an amazing time just to see how crust and destroyed uh an autocracy like the soviet union was and again why it was such a free and amazing time for eastern europe because from then to this day

I can just assure you, I can assure you, you're not going to find one soul that wants to be under this Russian sphere of influence, or they want to be a part of Russia. All right, so not one soul in Eastern Europe. And then I will tell you, but I'm going to stop and we can maybe go further if you want or not. That also includes Ukraine. Ukraine has a unique spot, but that also includes Ukraine. And as we know, Ukraine was never allowed to join NATO. So Ukraine is not in NATO. And we're watching as women children babies are being born in the subway and this fucking mad tyrant is bombing the hell out of them and he's targeting the largest nuclear plant in europe as of last night who knows i was gonna the largest nuclear power plant in europe has been targeted been bomb

was on fire it's fucking madness it's it's certainly man and again it's completely discombobulating for me personally i'm like all right what the fuck is going on and you mentioned there towards the end of that rant like it all comes down to economics and that's really the driver of a lot of things in this world and so again going back to that question like what could have prevented this like we know obviously europe is highly dependent on russian natural gas like if the leverage was tilted more towards Europe's favor in that regard via the fracking for natural gas in the UK and other parts of Europe, giving them a sufficient supply so they weren't so dependent on Russia for their fuel to run their economies. Is that a factor that gave Putin a bit of confidence to

be doing what he's doing right now? Would he have done it regardless? That's what I'm trying to get Number one, we can't prevent the invasion anymore. It's already happening. It's ongoing. How can we prevent this going forward? Are there economic policies that can be instituted, energy policies that can be instituted outside that sort of shift the leverage away from Russia back towards European countries,

Western European, Eastern European countries? so that the potential for this type of conflict is not there in the future. We know, with Germany specifically, that Russia has paid for essentially propaganda campaigns to besmirch nuclear and natural gas in Europe so that they would be dependent on Russia. It seems like there has been a long con at play, Russia, particularly around energy, that has given them the confidence to do what they're doing now. Is that an accurate description in your mind?

100%. 100%. It's a huge part. I think most educated people have started to understand this story by now. It's way too late. Nord Stream 2 was a disaster politically. I mean, this is a gas prom.

You had Schroeder, Eastern German. Again, horrible economically, corrupt, trying to make it back. A lot of these, they call it the Schroederization. You have these people that are under this corrupt, awful tyranny that was the Soviet Union trying to make it back. You have this Eastern German politician that was on the board of Gazprom. And now, way, way too little too late to sort of shut that down. they did shut it down uh they stopped it now it's all going you know to hell but that was 100 agree with you and anybody i think who relatively knows how to read understands that this is a massively massively uh hinging around energy security for europe um everything you said is correct germany since fukushima just germany germany is way too sensitive with everything

probably has to do with their historical uh yeah historical stance in the world um but they're way too sensitive they shut down all nuclear after fukushima and everything else and they were were very poorly influenced as you said by propaganda but just in general by corrupt politicians dealing with russia and knowing knowing that they could get cheap gas it's something i think like 40 is the mix of both oil and gas that germany gets right now from russia So very, very cheap. Cheap gas, basically, and very, very important to them. And so, yeah, they were doing nothing and all this stuff for the longest time. And I should say, Ukraine has huge reserves that have been only discovered kind of recently. Again, you talk about Crimea, Crimea, oh, it's this like, you know, historical thing for Russians, whatever. There's huge gas reserves that have been found under the Black Sea there, close to Crimea on both sides, east and west, as well as in Ukraine in general, that weren't sort of economically viable before. it's not exactly fracking i'm not sure all the details of all that but there's huge huge energy

resources that now ukraine itself is finding with modern technology no surprise putin wants to uh to take that yeah so you can get so it's energy energy is a huge part of this picture yeah it's not this you know denazification or uh demilitarization that you know daddy tyrant putin says he wants to do for for ukraine that's all lies you have to understand as a westerner everything you hear from putin is a is a 100 lie well this is uh i could agree like we should assume that everything we hear from putin is 100 live but as a westerner too it's like our media has lied to us our politicians have lied to us that's again so just so discombobulating because like who the do we believe right now like what the is going on like with the denazification

thing i mean there i mean i have seen videos of nazis in ukraine talking about going to dumbass and killing the the russian-speaking population there there's obviously been videos of u.s politicians going to ukraine and actively arming these neo-nazis even though they're a small minority of ukrainians and that's when you talk about gazprom under biden has relations with them he's on their board yeah like zielinski in 2014 was that a color revolution it's just like what the is going on this is a complete show well a big thing that's always important to say is zielinski is jewish so uh zielinski's uh grandfather fought in the great war as they call that um eight eight million ukrainians helped to fight against the nazis so you just see i mean

europe is just one of the worst places it's the darkest stories to try to you know sort through all of that stuff but yeah it's i can guarantee you it's trigger words when they say nazi okay yes there is uh one group i believe one sort of i don't know battalion or group of people that like in the East that openly identifies as like a neo-Nazi type regime in Ukraine. But let me just say about Ukraine, I have Jewish friends in Ukraine. I have Ukrainian friends in Ukraine. I have Jewish friends that are married to Ukrainians. I've been to Ukraine multiple times. I've been to Kiev before the Maidan revolution. I've been to Kiev during the Maidan revolution. I've been at Lviv many, many times. I've been to Ukraine a lot. They're beautiful people, wonderful people.

they're free people they're different than russians um it's fine to be different they're different they have their land they're not nazis okay like just yeah i'm not saying all you that i'm not saying all ukrainians are nazis but yeah but no it's a it's again because there's that before there's a kernel of truth right like maybe i said a hundred percent of of lies from the kremlin uh of everything kremlin says is lie okay there is a kernel of truth there and uh my jewish friends tell me you know this is just they tell me straight up i mean i asked them a question like well what do you think like well uh if we looked at russia that that's type of sympathy for like neo-nazi type groups is x amount times bigger okay so however many nazis you think

they're in crane uh there's a hell of a lot more in russia having the same type of view but again this is like you know you and me two like jesuit catholic guys talking about this stuff it's just this is this is bullshit propaganda from the kremlin it was invaded a country and here's i want to go back to my disclaimer all right this is again i have something in my mind i think about i wish we lived in a world where we had eight billion southern flags i wish we had a world lived in a world where we had you know bitcoin uh reigning supreme totally transparent defense contracts for every family insurance was robust and transparent and clear and we could really sort of just you know go about all the bullshit to true peace and live

our lives yes i really do unfortunately we don't in 2022 so what i what i want to say again about this sort of where we are with what putin is doing this motherfucking tyrant cunt where what where we are here is like in the west i mean a lot of americans talk about a secessionism might be a good thing okay and it might for certain states but let's just imagine like alaska wants to join with canada okay so maybe they do all right maybe they want to do it great if it happens peacefully happens peaceful but what about alaska you know the united states purchased alaska from russia you know do if alaskans wanted to go back to russia maybe they do maybe they don't okay but But what you have in Ukraine right now is you basically have Russia coming over the Bering Strait and saying, all right, you motherfuckers are going to join us. Historically, you are ours. Nothing that you hold sacred in your culture, your people, your morals is true. You're all Nazis. This is what I say. I hold the nukes. You're going to join us.

That's basically what's happening. OK, so as much as you can, you might be even persuaded by like this Kremlin propaganda that Ukraine really, really, you know, just like Belarus, which has a dictator, by the way, since 1994, Lukashenko, he's known as the last dictator throughout Europe until, of course, Putin came along in 2000. so you have these two slavic dict uh autocratic tyrant led countries and they're trying to get this country which yeah they had their problems but they had color the color revolution in 2004 where that yushenko guy you might remember he's poisoned he was also in the team america movie poison face uh he's the general totally democratic guy came in unfortunately yanukovych the guy that he defeated came back and in in 2014 the whole maidan revolution that was uh that was started not with some american coup all right and i agree that the americans did not come off looking well when uh what's her name's phone call was was hacked but by the way there were plenty of other

hacks from russian uh russian uh diplomats during that same time and they were talking about running their own coups as well so uh it's not that since 2014 it's american-led coup in 2013 november uh ukrainian uh the parliament the people they were so strong in trying to get to the european union in 2013 november they were starting uh basically collaboration agreements which would have led to eu accession in 2013 november that deal was reneged because wankakovich yanukovych he signed to deal with putin to basically back off completely he was he was the you know the puppet master from uh the puppet of basically the kremlin at the time and that started and students were the ones that started to come out students protesting that just a few students in november of 2013 all right so i

was there in february of 2014 as well like not the first time was in kiev uh looking at that it was an amazing feeling i mean it was like a church festival just to give you a feeling of like what was going on there was it was it was just like so much energy uh there was music it was organized they were fighting for their freedom because they wanted to be a part of the eu every time you're going to hear a libertarian western uneducated person say this was a u.s-led coup to where they got to uh portashenko and now zelensky as sort of democratically elected presidents which by the way portashenko peacefully stepped down when he lost the election and now he's fighting might have email in the news, he's fighting alongside Zelensky, two presidents of Ukraine, democratically

elected Ukraine. Where did this Yanukovych cunt, where did he go after he was ousted during this Maidan revolution, which all U.S. libertarians who just hate, they're so disillusioned with U.S. empire, back to my disclaimer, they just think it has to be the U.S.'s fault. Where did this ukrainian president go at the time did he go to syria did he go to italy did he go to you know somewhere in africa he went to fucking russia he went in the middle of the night got on a fucking helicopter and went to russia plane i guess eventually but he he fled to russia and he had a gold palace like yeah that's what i remember is like they they turned this they turned this into a museum to show you how corrupt this motherfucker was he had a gold like every you

know gold bathroom taps all this shit gold toilets whatever i mean and then these are the type of people that that exist all right so here's another thing just one more one more thing sorry all of these motherfuckers exist right this oligarch culture this corrupt shit all of them exist because of the soviet union itself all right so again it always comes you have to look at the boom before the bust i know we have disillusioned americans that hate empire listening to this show all right maybe marty you're one of them i am very dis very disillusioned hate u.s empire i agree with you i understand but look russians are so fucked up because they were at the core of a fucked up ideology for 100 years that is the reason that's the only reason that you have

oligarchs it's because after the soviet union tragically economically ended you had a shit ton Socialism is the its definition of socialism is the means of production are run by the state You're the state owning all the big ticket items. All right, every train station every factory Every power plant everything and that was all privatized of course in a corrupt manner because It's just shock therapy as it's called. There was no easy way around. It was a blank sheet No one had done it before they didn't have organic growth with capitalism. So all of these motherfuckers who are corrupt Look at the boom before the bust

it's not because of some american coup it's because of communism itself they themselves all right they themselves they all of eastern europe none of us want anything to do with it no eastern european wants anything to do with russia we don't want to be a part of russia's sphere of influence and stop saying i'm calling that to certain people like scott horton here who i actually do like most of his views but on eastern europe he's wildly wrong stop saying uh that the that the uh russia has been you know once everybody in eastern europe everybody in russia wants to be under a sphere of influence from moscow under a democratically elected leader all of that is fucking bullshit 100 of it no eastern european wants any of that they ran to

nato as fast as they could ukraine did as well unfortunately they got fucking sucked into the corrupt vacuum of the former soviet union so russia belarus ukraine the three main slavic nations. They're fucked altogether. We're seeing it. But none of them are democratic, democratically elected, except for Ukrainians. Yukashenko in 2004, in the 90s, they had democratically elected politicians. And then they had this Yanukovych fucker who got in and fucked shit up again in 2010 to 2014. But even since then, they're back to democratically elected leaders. Again, I wish we were in an eight billion world of sovereign flags. I'm not going back to my disclaimers this is Ukraine has tried their hardest and now they're suffering just for

wanting freedom just for wanting freedom you have to understand that yeah no I mean hand up I am one of those disillusioned Americans who uh again it sucks understandable it's understandable right and I do and so and everything's very nuanced and very complicated this is obviously you mentioned there's decades a century of history here and so this outburst do you think it's a sign of like the the final collapse of the soviet remnant like if things go a certain way with ukraine here like the oligarchs uh are we towards the end of their reign um is this a desperate um flailing to to hold on to a grasp of power uh well where do i want to go um you you got a time limit no no i just want to this light right all right um

we we're in a very precarious time yes because of because of this motherfucker in in the kremlin what you need to understand about how like russia's system is is run is all of these oligarchs came in in a corrupt way banded together because the system was collapsed and they took over all of the big ticket items they had this program called loans for shares in the 90s where basically the state printed money gave the oligarchs the money they took a loan they with that loan they bought uh the shares the newly issued shares of these companies and basically everyone had shares That was how they privatized it. Everyone in the country got shares of like, you know,

Gazprom or whatever. It probably wasn't called Gazprom at the time. The main companies, all of them got shares when they were privatized. But the oligarchs would get in and basically pull them and buy people out for more money than they've ever seen before. So of course they sold.

So, you know, they work the system as you do when you're close to a government like Monopoly. So this loans for shares program, they didn't have to even pay any money. They got a loan for it. didn't have to pay the loan back and they bought all these companies that's that's the oligarchs now putin came in and said okay you guys can do all that it's fine you can keep it we had a little bit of a wild time here in the 90s but you're going to give me as bill browder says you can

give me 50 of everything so the oligarchs basically have their money they have their wealth they have their resources they have their assets putin gets 50 of it he has all different holding company structures whatever and then the political structure uh anybody that's basically around putin and however putin's succession plan will go it's looking you know more iffy by the day here but anybody around putin is all from his security uh forces so like former kgb basically the FSB, the GRU, the SVR, which is kind of like the CIA, it's the foreign intel, the SVR, I guess. Yeah, SVR. Those agencies, all of them are basically running the government apparatus. So everybody around Putin is a dumb twat that basically follows his orders. They are

uh you know he he has it's it's he has people around him that are just smart enough to get the job done but no one's gonna you know that's sort of a system you don't have like someone rising to the top and uh you know you're just going to be outed or you're going to go into private business with the oligarchs like he's not going to keep anybody around him in the government that's going to stand up to him so he's totally isolated so it's extremely dangerous again this is what governments do they make dangerous situations even worse you know they create monopolies all of these things it's a it's a monopolized centralized autocratic state and they're all dumb and another point uh just to say on this about like how it might go or how it could

have gone again with libertarians that don't get it uh last week we had this uh vote which is one day before the war was declared but it was a vote that putin set up to basically declare the independence of Donetsk and Lugansk, these two regions in the East. They've been fighting since Russia invaded. Again, let's not forget Russia invaded Ukraine eight years ago for all the reasons we're talking about with energy and whatnot. And Crimea, which is their Black Sea access. I saw a tweet from Eric Voorhees, which again, I thought he thinks he's just being clever. He says, separatists should be allowed to separate. And I replied to that showing him the quote of the testimony, I don't know what you'd call it, of Narushkin, who was the leader

of the SRV. I don't know why you would have your security forces put this one to a vote about what we're going to do with Donetsk and Lugansk. But again, this is the structure of how it goes in the Kremlin. All right. So libertarians might think they're kind of clever or whatever. Oh, separatists, Russian separatists, they want to be part of Russia. again not understanding that it's a gun to their head and it's about taking sovereign land it's about taking your energy and everybody that was in those regions since 2014 were russians they were russian it's not just russian led it was a russian backed it's russian led like they were in there like absolutely stirring shit up okay so just understand that but if you just say this

so phrase like separatists should be allowed to separate and you think that that's like going to be a good thing you think that those two little nations should break a little republic should break away from ukraine it was told to you very clearly if you watch that uh that little meeting in the kremlin the night before putin declared war so staged such bullshit this narushkin guy who's the head of the srv he gets up there and he's talking to putin he was a bumbling fool i mean it's there there are there are english subtitles to this we can link it in the show notes or whatever um it's all it's all over twitter this guy who's the head of srb again he why would a security chief be making this question to putin i don't know but this is how the kremlin

is set up it's not like you know it's some member from the duma member from the parliament saying no it's a security chief and he's bumbling away trying to tell putin okay what do we do with these these two uh separatist uh governments in in ukraine well i move that they should be part of uh russia and he's bumbling along when he says it means i move they should be part of the russian federation and then putin's just loving like just scolding this guy because he's a psychopath he's like sergey we're not talking about that speak clear we're not talking about that yet we're talking about their independence recognizing their independence so they tell you right there all right and again this is just if you're coming at this from denver or wherever you know someone

like eric boris lives which i i tend to think that he's not a uh naive person not an uneducated person but he just sees these words like separatists oh separatists should be allowed to separate this libertarian way it's fucking right there for everybody to see the the plan is never that these two little republics are going to separate this is completely choreographed and the bumbling dumb shit chief of their foreign services intel services says oh yes we should actually move to make them part of russia because he he misspoke and put them like oh no we're not talking about that yet we're going to vote on their independence this is the kind of shit that they're managing i mean it is it is beyond fucked there i mean if if you as an american i'm not

paying attention to this and i'm speaking to you dear listener dear viewer here if you have no idea what's going on here this is the kind of shit that they're doing all right again i know you're disillusioned with what's going on in the u.s but these motherfuckers are you you got just oligarchs and putin they're working together they're trying to make everything happen now they overstretched now the interesting thing is about private property regulations uh swift the modern financial system they really overstretched uh russia is getting cratered right now both from governments but also voluntarily interestingly you know ikea microsoft i saw i don't know steam yeah international cat pageants

yeah these guys are all i mean it's actually beautiful to see the sports federations you know because sports does bring people together and to see them say all right this is just enough enough of this fucking shit you can't just be murdering uh ukrainians and having you know poor babies being born in the subway while you bomb try to bomb nuclear power plants uh this is where it's it's going i'm not optimistic about it and the only people as vladimir karamurza so by the way there is a russian opposition here you might just think russians are just like in this vacuous state and they are i mean all russians consume their media especially all older russians they consume state tv it's like watching msnbc plus fox put together

in this just ugly cyclops, you know, monster of a bad propaganda channel that just this is from the beginning. Anybody thinks Putin just kind of stumbled on this or naively, whatever. He started this from the beginning, nationalizing everything that was done in the 90s. He consolidated everything that was done in the 90s from the beginning. In 2001, 2002, he was nationalizing private uh private uh channels private private tv channels private news companies he was nationalizing them barazovsky was one of the oligarchs that owned one he fucked him gusinski was another one he fucked him uh all of these all of these whether they were ill-gotten gains or not in the 90s he said enough we're going to organize this around me and the oligarchs

50 as bill browder says and he nationalized all of it so this is what we're dealing with you're dealing with literally a super state of fucking corrupt tyranny. This is not going to be an easy out. This is not an easy out. And the only people that can stop this is Vladimir Karamurza. I urge all of you listening to follow a guy and his name is Vladimir Kara dash Morza. He is part of the opposition. He's been part of the opposition for 20 years. He's been poisoned twice and poisoned twice by Vladimir Putin. And he still lives in, in, uh, I think he has residence United States, but he's in russia right now he's just uh he's a brave soul uh he's he's you know closely works with team navalny if you if you don't know who alexei navalny is he's also been poisoned he was

poisoned uh two years ago in germany and imprisoned right yeah and now he's in prison in basically a gulag and you know he's there's more political prisoners than have ever been in russia even more than in soviet times just so you know how bad it is these motherfuckers are just that if you want to stand for freedom, you have to stand against Putin, is what I'm saying, basically, in all this. But there is an opposition. And as they say, as Vladimir Karamurza says, the only people that can stop what Putin is doing are Russians. So we're in it. We're really under the thumb. We're up against it. Just please support us, but let us do our work. And I think that's a very good message, right? I mean, I'm not talking about an American-led coup here into Moscow at all. Russians

need to stand up but they are up against it man they are there they are at the whim of a dictator who is taking control of an economy that has been fucked for 100 years and he overstretched right now and it's it's wild to see their economy just be absolutely cratered and completely uh completely just shunned by the rest of the world uh it's some serious shit yeah the shunning by the rest the world are like because you think of the everyday russians who are affected by this who live under putin don't want to be subjected to that it's like ah like i saw videos of people in germany like trashing russian stores and like you have this weird like some something similar to like post 9-11 where you had a bunch of anti-muslim hate here and they're just wary

that um all the propaganda around this on both sides is leading to collateral damage of your everyday citizen who just wants to go about their life and be free uh it's such a war such a fucking hairy thing man and it's but yeah like talking about like the economy and stuff so like let's talk about the monetary effects of this right like so you had obviously the u.s and western nations have levied sanctions you're having private businesses you know pull out and and do private sanctions of the russian economy like what does this mean for the state of the us dollar as a reserve currency of the world uh and russia and china and other brick countries may be going off and making a parallel system that that sort of neg swift because they don't

feel comfortable um keeping their their monetary rails on that particular messaging system like there's obviously russia and china specifically have been accumulating large stockpiles of gold over the last two decades there's been a lot of chatter behind the scenes that they've been developing a monetary system separate from swift and western rails that may be ready to be rolled out like like are we having a monetary bifurcation uh at the moment in your opinion i think that's the most obvious uh scenario and most realistic scenario i mean i think it's a new it's a new world order right here uh and it's uh i i don't necessarily know if it's uh it's good or bad for the russian people i mean if they can if they can somehow stop putin it would be very good

i would love to see russians come into the fold and be free and western and again we're not going to get any anarchic capitalist anti-central bank people anytime soon but uh if you could just have russians be free and stand up and get you know if you know if if if if they could get putin out and the belarusians could get lukashenko out that would be a beautiful i don't see that happening so what that means is yeah like you said a bifurcation uh all of the swift action pushes a digital iron curtain up which basically you know whether it's going to be some bullshit cbdc uh some second form of a swift but basically all the backward nations will be a part of you know russia's little gangster plan and then of course china's involved in that

um and then some other you know emerging economies presumably as well and then on the uh on the american side everything that putin said he was against is going to happen i shouldn't say american side just say the western side the nato side okay so finland and sweden two historically neutral countries when it came to military i mean they're all they're both countries that are in favor of joining nato i don't know if it's going to happen i don't necessarily say i want it to happen but putin says he doesn't want nato at their doorstep they might join nato precisely because of what fucking vladimir what putin is doing right now they may join nato all right and they never have so uh the the security uh apparatus of of europe is just sprung right back

into the cold war mode because of this motherfucker so it's it's very uh it's exactly the opposite of what Putin said he wanted, and then probably the opposite of what the Western coalitions want is that Russia may not necessarily, not even not join the fold, which would be great, but they're just going to completely reject the fold and go completely

digital iron curtain up, work with China, new swift for them, completely different system. Well, while I agree that Vladimir Putin is a motherfucking cunt,

is there a path to diplomacy in your opinion like like just uh de-escalate get everybody to calm down because like again if this digital iron curtain comes up maybe it becomes a physical iron curtain as well because i worry about the people in europe their energy it's like what if it gets even if it gets pushed and obviously is irrational in a lot of regards it gets pushed to a point where it's like all right you get no natural gas and that leads to absolute chaos within weeks in in europe that's something i wear yeah yeah i don't i don't know the answer to that question marty i wish i did but i i think for sure it means higher energy prices for everyone yeah i mean we've already seen wheat was up what like 50 yesterday alone yeah corn up and a quarter

of the wheat is provided by russia and ukraine for the world ukraine is the bed basket of you bed bread basket of europe their flag literally means the yellow and the blue it's the land and the sky uh it's part of their culture and history again uh they've always been uh yeah just that's that's the agriculture is a part of their tradition so um again it's hard to i think understand a lot of these dynamics if you're just sitting there in the u.s and the u.s does have much better security thankfully because of shale um i think there was something like nine percent maybe if gas that might come in from the you from from russia but my understanding is that that's only used for like petro carbons or plastics or whatever you know different

petrochemicals different things that are uh not necessarily even for energy um and of course we know the shale story in the u.s which has turned out to be very very good and uh it's good when they let it be good that's the thing yeah i agree here so so i think you're just a moron if you're a politician and you keep thinking you gotta like just make this death march toward you know i know you i know you talk about that a lot uh and it's not particularly my expertise but i do think that it's fairly clear that energy independence is massively important and i don't see a way that prices don't rise massively uh in the medium term short medium term yeah i think we'll be paying but you know how that how that's going to play out with this current

situation it's just it's too hard to tell this guy is such a wild card he's such an asshole and um you know apparently he had this call with putin like it's just so bizarre still like do we really need to live in a world like 150 like where russia and france need to like make these decisions like you know i know france france has a special relationship with russia but like it's just so funny that putin called macron yesterday apparently um they've talked a few times and and he was just saying no i'm gonna do it where you know and macron told me he was lying to himself and whatever we got these two motherfuckers like you know deciding for the rest of us and it's just so it's so dangerous but that's i mean again you gotta you gotta at least

feel for uh you got to at least believe that western situation like the way that the western political world works here is better than the way that the russian political world works for people again go back to my disclaimer we don't have eight billion sovereign flags so it's clear that like at least what we're doing in the west is more democratic on a relative basis on a relative basis on a relative basis but that leaves just a huge question mark for what's going to happen to ordinary russian people uh i was again following twitter like mad these days and there's a massive russian brain drain right now i haven't even heard if they're if they've done martial law i don't know if you've heard it but they're talking about maybe it would happen today in russia i heard

rumblings of it i don't know yeah i haven't checked right now but but if that happens then no more protests at all in russia i mean no more resistance uh and everybody who's relatively smart and sees the writing on the wall is trying to get out like people are driving to the baltics driving to finland there's no flights out uh flying to turkey baku any way you can just get out of the fucking country it's a brain drain and putin's gonna have to see that as well so it's an absolute clusterfuck it's so disappointing i mean it's so sad my heart is for russian protesters who are standing up my heart is for all of the ukrainian people who are fighting for their land uh it is it is just really really disheartening right now so uh wish i could be

more optimistic i mean it's hard when you're looking it's uh it's all fucked you got nuclear questions about i don't want to be alarmist with the nuclear stuff but yeah it's it's pretty fucked up with this the largest nuclear power plant in europe and he's targeting it i mean he's actually shooting at it well what do you like so like i was reading multiple perspectives from that last night and apparently like ukrainians retreated there which is like if if you're thinking strategically like why would you do that like you're you're in a war why would you retreat to a nuclear power facility knowing that there's potential for firefight and then the russian convoy coming in it seems like the ukrainian shot first with a an rp an rpg um

and then you have like then you have the theory that then you have the theory that like russia went to chernobyl really quickly because they wanted to secure that so there wasn't like a false flag making them look bad again this is like me trying to dissect all the information coming in from all sides so that's what i've been trying to like get the russian perspective which we got on on monday and then now we have somebody like yourself giving another perspective here on friday and it's just like again just incredibly confusing if you're worried about a ukrainian false flag i mean stop worrying about that it's all the stories that again that from my side well that was the thing again this is this disillusioned american coming in like apparently

at chernobyl it was like the russian army and the ukrainian army uh protecting it because obviously ukrainians don't want anything to happen there because they live there and russia would be affected russians don't want anything to happen because they would be affected as well and then it could be used as a a um an event to paint them a certain way in the international way which the levels did rise i mean once they pushed them out they took all the uh the workers they're hostage and then levels were rising they said well what the fuck we got to keep managing this so they did they went back and they were managing it so um look if you've seen anything you know how fucking unorganized this army is i mean they're throwing conscripts 18 year old 19 year

olds they're not they don't even know where they're going this is what they do uh yeah they don't have food they're running out of fuel yeah they're running out of fuel and by the way they don't want to fight their brothers so like they are uh they're driving around in fields uh again i don't know how many there are but definitely this happened tanks driving around in fields to out of fuel people emptying the tanks so they run out of fuel that's definitely happening from the russian side people are retreating walking across the border where they're going to be treated much worse in russia but they just you know they don't want to fight um you have to understand who you're dealing with here and it is a mother fucking cunt dictator you cannot believe anything that they say

there is ukrainians are not going to do a false flag you know to try to make putin look bad they're getting invaded like there's what is the false flag needed from the ukrainian side they're getting fucked every day and we're not helping them i mean nato is not doing that's the thing like yeah it's like again like going back you've seen i'm sure you've seen the clips of political scientists here in the u.s warning years ago many years ago that like nato like pushing ukraine towards nato is going to lead to a situation like this uh and like the u.s that's again as a disillusioned american like seeing the u.s posture toward ukraine like yes come to nato come to nato and ukraine stepping in the direction towards that which some argue is what was the

trigger that led to the invasion and then the invasion happens and you're nowhere to be seen which is like that you're just like leaving these people high and out the dry and as americans like that's fucked up that's not the character of the country i want to live in um and it seems like again there's games being played and ukrainians and the russian citizens are just pawns in this game between yeah fucked up tyrant and uh terrible intelligence agencies here in the west yeah proxy proxy war i mean you know you're gonna have to make that decision for yourself i can't prove a negative yeah no each individual person's gonna have to make that decision i can tell you from as i as i said earlier the eastern european side was all running towards nato they got in uh they

wanted in it's absolutely incorrect to say that they don't want this security uh as far as ukraine felt the exact same way and uh well okay i have one more thing to say that but but specifically regarding your point about you know uh did nato really uh you know lead up to this conflict this is where people need to wake up ukraine has been invaded eight years ago i mean again the leader of ukraine who uh got a second chance after yeah oligarch type guy got a second chance after there was the orange revolution in 2004 he came back still got a second chance still the ukrainians were pushing toward eastern europe there's excuse me towards european union uh with their with their parliament there and they were going to do it vladimir putin made him renege

uh all of that stuff he flees to russia of all it doesn't go to syria it doesn't go to italy goes to Russia. It's obvious who is supporting who there. Vladimir Putin goes in and takes Ukrainian land. Again, it doesn't matter how Russian you think some of these people are. I can make the same example in the Baltics, right? There's a small proportion of Russians, about 20% in Latvia and in Estonia, right? Those people, those Russians that live, they're integrated into society. Some are kind of not. They only speak Russian. They're in the eastern border you give them a russian passport and you say go to russia they will tell you to fuck right off they're not going to russia they're not going to russia they live 100 times better

in latvia and estonia than they would in russia they will tell you to fuck right off so it's just not right to say that like all these separatists want to separate and all this shit it's uneducated their their intelligence services are telling you exactly what they think they're so bumbling fucking idiots and you just have to pay more attention to see what's actually happening with uh with the people there now one more thing regarding uh ukraine security did you hear about the the budapest memorandum 1994 agreement uh you heard about this it's not the minx agreement obviously so no no it's a complete fucking shit show and this never i mean but it was around that time wasn't it russia russia did russia fucked with the mince agreement

more than ukraine no matter what like some people want to say that but now mince agreement was was absolutely bullshit and ukraine was in a very vulnerable position to sign it ukraine was also in a vulnerable position to sign the budapest agreement but it's a much stronger grant which was completely run over the budapest agreement was the non-proliferation agreement when ukraine gave up their Soviet nuclear arsenal. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. 1994, long fucking time ago. And Ukraine, same time,

all of Eastern Europe wanted to go into NATO and get safety, as did Ukraine. The more important thing for Ukraine in that time was neutralizing their nuclear arsenal. Now, they didn't have the button. They couldn't have, like the briefcases were in Moscow. There is still, as I understand,

two of three briefcases. Yeah, they didn't have the keys. they didn't have the keys but ukrainians were always very smart scientists always the ones that were like leading the stuff this was where the major a major nuclear arsenal was was in ukraine is also in kazakhstan um so they had this thing where they're okay we're basically going to not give them the opportunity to enrich not give them an opportunity to educate themselves on this system let's just move all of it out back to moscow and that was another thing that clinton tried to do in hindsight that looks very very bad yes they didn't have the keys but they

still could have had uh a much better protect it's just like i mean it's just like self-defense in this case right uh it's just like self-defense it's it's with a gun i mean it's just like this is second amendment like basic shit beware of dog sign yeah they gave up any sort of nuclear uh nuclear uh arms and and and energy whatever not energy but basically nuclear arms all right in rich uranium. And so the, uh, the Budapest agreement was to, uh, to guarantee their security because of that, right. It was signed by the UK, the U S Ukraine and Russia for main signatories for Ukraine. Also Kazakhstan got an assurance. Also, I think Belarus had got an insurance. Um, that agreement was just completely violated by Putin in 2014. And again, Russian propaganda,

which some people actually buy i mean i i can send you a link to where it is it's four pages it's not hard to read uh it's in english it's also in russian but it's in english and ukrainian uh fucking lavrov another cunt from putin's regime he's the foreign minister when when they rolled into crimea with their little green men in 2014 and everyone's like well what about the budapest agreement what about the budapest agreement uh lavrov was like oh no all that was was that we said we promised we wouldn't invade ukraine with nukes it's the most bullshit fucking statement ever it's you just open it up and read it it says we will protect the territorial sovereignty of ukraine we will we will not protect we will respect it we will uh we will not invade

their borders we will not use force we not use aggression all these other things the one thing if you go back to this kind of kernel of truth stuff is it does say that the un security council could be called if there's a threat or a use of nuclear force against ukraine it doesn't say that if there's a regular use of force but it does have like it has eight clauses all about the security of ukraine the security of its borders uh russia will not use force all this stuff it still says that they can go to the un and all these other things but the un security council was only for a nuclear force so again it didn't happen anyway this we see how agreements work in international stage i mean you know uh he who wins the war yeah he who he who wins the war

makes the rules you know we talk you've probably heard a lot in the media about all the war crimes vladimir putin has been committing he's not going to be a war criminal if he keeps power i mean the only time he's going to be declared a war criminal is if he loses power then he'll be a war criminal so that's the reality of the situation it's extremely sad um just want to make those points again about the way that this stuff goes ukraine has for decades you just got to read like i can send the books people want to read some of them you just got to read the situation on the ground in the 90s in the 80s ukraine was like every other eastern european nation they're 40 million strong they're 50 million strong by the time when the soviet union ended uh like most eastern

european countries there's a brain drain more to the west um but uh they want they just want to live peacefully they wanted to live free this crazy tyrant is the only thing that is stopping them and you really have to understand like it's not this this narrative of just you know nato expanded too fast or this and that it's nothing if you think that nato has anything to do with this right now vladimir putin going in and killing you know innocent innocent people babies having going to be born in the subway, bomb shelters, all of these things. It's just not, it's just not the case. It's not the case. So you have to have, I have to, I hope I'm opening some hearts here. Just one, even because, you know, these people, they want freedom. That's all they've

wanted for the last 30 years. And, uh, now that they don't have it and now that they're under attack, we're all under attack here in Europe. We're all worried sick. We're all doing contingency plans um you know we're there's truckloads of food and supplies and goods that we've donated uh i i think uh uh again another reason why bitcoin is amazing thanks satoshi i mean you know i've donated millions and millions of stats many people have donated i think i saw maybe the latest count was 30 million in bitcoin might have been 30 million crypto i saw gavin wood got a nice uh marketing for putting five million in dot i think there was a there's at least 230 bitcoin last i saw that one ukrainian address okay well there's there's many different organizations you

can donate to but the crypto donations bitcoin donations i believe are more than humanitarian donations so and again again you get these these vultures coming in like uh Christine Lagarde, Elizabeth Warren saying, oh, now's the time to regulate crypto because we don't make sure Russia doesn't get to use it. These people can fuck right off. Look at what the good things that Bitcoin is doing. Look at the genuine humanitarian aid that is pouring out in the name of these people and is easy to cross borders, unbelievably easy.

So good. So amazing. I love the memes. i love the memes that started like peter schiff with his gold and his ship like donating gold to to ukraine i mean the memes are just non-stop the disinformation is non-stop i understand you marty i understand that you're disillusioned i understand your listeners if you're disillusioned but look i'm over here i'm telling you these are good people this is like they're under attack their their nation is under attack so i've gone i've gone just uh full in and in retweeting stand with

ukraine over the last week i hope people will do it uh any way you can like fight the different disinformation if you're good in cyber as they call it in the government sphere uh it's amazing actually to see the russian government sites being taken down all as much as we can this information uh ukraine music was playing on some of these state tv channels even i love that anonymous is fighting for ukraine uh it's not all doom and gloom but it is extremely precarious right now the way this motherfucker is acting yeah no i agree and i want to make it clear like i'm not like rooting against ukraine obviously like it's just again being so i'm just saying i get your point i get all of your points that you're making about you about being the disillusioned

american yeah and all of this i guess which is a goddamn shame it's like fuck i wish it was more clear and this conversation is making it much more clear so thank you for for explaining everything and before before we move on but i think while we have you here particularly somebody who i would consider more privy to monetary economics and the dynamics of currencies on the global stage if we just zoom out 30 000 foot view abstract the um the individuals and the dictators involved from a monetary perspective well we won't abstract your own pal because earlier this week he said something which is supposed to be unspeakable in his position as fed chairman he said voldemort by by alluding to the fact that there could be one there could be more than one global reserve

currency moving forward which if you're the chairman of the federal reserve you're not supposed to say that because you're supposed to protect the u.s dollar as the world reserve currency at all costs and so just thinking purely the monetary developments that that come from this event and these comments from jerome powell like what how do you see the landscape of the global monetary system shifting in the coming years and where does bitcoin into play come into play in your mind at all well i think that this this war will show how far this digital iron curtain goes okay so if the russian people stand up if russia which is a huge nation uh and a huge territory and the the sphere of influence that uh some people think that they like to be in uh but they

absolutely don't if that sphere of influence of russia could just come into the fold come into western peace and markets and and and bitcoin and all of that stuff uh i think it would be pretty amazing and um i think you probably see the dollar retain its uh its strength um if that doesn't happen then as we talked about before i think you're very very quickly going to this sort of uh multipolar world maybe they will have uh there's a lot of misinformation misinformation I don't know the exact way of how these CBDCs are going to play out in China or with something that Russia might do. Russia is just a resource economy. You know, resources go up, they do better.

If they go down in price, they do worse. So I don't exactly know how that might play out. But what I do think is that contrary to what people thought even a week ago when Bitcoin went down on the news of the war, obviously it's more up now, up and down, whatever, as it does. i'm still very much thinking that in the next two to three years i mean bitcoin is going to be right at the level of at least one of these currencies okay so at a at a price of 200 300 000 dollars for bitcoin that puts you right up in line with uh with one of uh one of the main sort of reserve currencies which would be you know dollar euro and yen and then of course the one the yuan but

even though they have they have a lot of foreign reserves as well so i think that i think that in the short term it's too hard to tell like it's if it's going to be this big multi-polar shift a lot of it's going to depend on this russian war um and a lot of that's going to depend on the russian people but um i do i don't see any way that that stops bitcoin from uh accreting in its value in the global monetary base is under three percent uh it's under 0.5 percent in electricity uh so again all the haters you have to recognize that it's creating faster in monetary value than it is in electricity spend um and i can i believe that that's absolutely going to continue and uh yeah equaling one of those currencies in the next two to three years is i think right on the roadmap

yeah and you think too because the euro has been weak last couple days right it's been hasn't the euro been collapsing against dollar because of the energy crisis and the uh but probably that's the thing that's why i can't like i can't get my mind off i can't believe we fucked up energy policy so bad in the western world like that puts us at a dis so with that in mind with the energy the terrible energy policy in mind it puts us at a disadvantage in terms of it limits the options we have for potent pushback at this particular juncture and if we're gaming out game theory hypotheticals here if russia and china joins them and they go down this bifurcated path and you

accept the assumption that they've been accumulating gold over the last few decades with the intention of reverting to a gold-backed currency that rivals the dollar or attempts to compete with the dollar. In the U.S., obviously we know the Federal Reserve and the Treasury in conjunction have fucked up our money here. It's unfixable. And again, playing to your anger at the Senator Warrens and the Christine Lagardes for bashing Bitcoin,

trying to get it hyper-regulated and potentially banned. I think that is, I think for any politicians who may be listening, probably not, but if you are, it is a bit counterintuitive, but if you really do want to cut Russia and China off at the kneecaps as they attempt to do this, allowing at the very least Bitcoin to flourish within your economy is a great way to curb any success that Russia and China would have relative to western nations on on the monetary landscape in the monetary landscape allowing

bitcoin to flourish in the american economy or the western economy yes yes to allow americans companies potentially even states to put bitcoin on their balance sheet just deregulate i mean obviously we all agree to that but you know that we know that the but that's the thing so that's what i worry about like the western world like suffering just again so i think there's a bunch of people like i tweeted that out earlier than me like i think what jerome powell said is the final nail in the coffin as the u.s dollar is the reserve currency of the world moving forward and obviously you're gonna have others vultures circling smelling or shark circling sniffing that blood in the water and throwing things to compete and uh into the markets if they're their new

gold back currencies digital central bank digital currencies whatever it may be um and as an american i would like to see like the best way to counterpunch those sharks they're they're smelling your blood in the water is to open your arms to bitcoin and let it flourish but again yeah these people are and i also sorry go ahead these people are too arrogant hubristic and to old understand even understand the game theory playing out here yeah and i also have a hard time uh ever seeing that gold will come back even even amidst all this chaos uh you know what we see just the way with the gold actually gold works really well when you're in a good environment uh that's you know, you want to have it act as a hedge and you're, you're, you're feeling good about its

security. Um, but when you're in an environment like Poland in 1939, and the Nazis are coming to take down your whole country and you've got to transport your gold, like down through Europe and then through the black sea and then through Istanbul and then to France and then to the U S uh, which is an amazing story of the Polish gold, uh, during world war two. And it actually made Still, during that time, you have one central banker sitting on that boat, sitting on that train, paying a little bit to the captain as commission for the transport. I don't see that dynamic changing, especially not now, looking at the way that Russia is, you know, no matter what Peter Schiff says, I mean, the dynamic just doesn't change as

far as actually moving the gold. So I have a hard time thinking that central banks will go back to that in a meaningful way. Yes, they have been accumulating it in the, in the Eastern sort of block nations, but I have a hard time. And plus it's not actually, you know, people talk about the values that I've put out here. We didn't even say the numbers. It's a little over 30 trillion right now is the monetary base and fiat gold's 10. So it's like 40 trillion. A lot of people think that actually is not a lot of money. Cause again, that's not including claims. It is a lot of money, but still it's, it's, uh, it's not, I understand the point that a lot of

people say when they don't understand what it actually means like yeah all of the the rest of the claims in the economy are are sort of settled on top of that and there's you know hundreds of trillions of dollars of of m1 money m2 money m3 money uh money market mutual funds other claims other things you know stable coins are not now a part of this uh all ways that we can kind of trade and transfer wealth. So I don't really see that gold is necessarily, I guess, needed in that scenario. But Bitcoin absolutely is going to, and this is why I always make the point, even though Bitcoin is comparable economically to basic money, it has features that are vastly superior to basic money. And so it could well accrete beyond $40 trillion in value

before we know it. And that just depends on the geopolitical situation of the world, like how the world shakes out, which obviously is an unknown. But I don't see gold really accreting much past the 10 trillion that it already is. And bear in mind, 50% of that isn't jewelry, so that'd have to be like melted down anyway. So I'm talking about $5 trillion in gold. Again, it's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. But Bitcoin's already, you know, it's been above a trillion, Bitcoin itself. So it's only 5x less. And again, to be clear, I'm not saying that I see bitcoin stopping there i'm not saying that bitcoin is completely analogous for these reasons because it's just vastly superior and it won't have the transport problems uh that gold has

i had one more point to make there but maybe i'll think of it if you say something else to visibility does that come in or no no i mean i think another thing we have to do is zoom out and recognize just us humans alive now again i've said this many times on this show but it can never be overstated like we're just fucking thrown into this crazy inflection point in human history we're just like with the advancement of technology and the emergence of the internet i think like with these volatile times the internet as a technology has changed the way misinformation

and information is spread and percolated throughout society. I think our brains are still attempting to adjust to the pace at which information is spreading throughout the world right now. It's creating this hyper-volatile situation. It would be interesting to see

how it affects this Russian war specifically. I remember what I want to say. It relates to what you just said. Carr, if if you could pull up the uh cue back to my twitter account and just the general like go back to the main page off of the base money stuff so i just posted this today um so yeah just down right there that that one top top tweet and then the yeah so uh i think military again really wish we lived in a world as you said where we were beyond this inflection point a little bit more

peace many more sovereign flags uh i just did this little thing today uh military spending is actually an interesting thing to look at we don't have to go through this whole thing but if you go down to like maybe the fourth or fifth tweet i show nato versus russia and um i think yeah down one more down one more one more actually so this one that back back back just one up so that one right there so that's that's russia versus nato uh since 1993 so basically since russia has been an independent state and um you can see how so if you if you put ukraine in here it'd be like microscopic it would round to zero as far as the value of these things but basically you're seeing the cumulative military spend at least on budget i'm sure it's even more in the

united states but on budget it's uh i actually can't see on the screen there but it's like it's over $22 trillion, is it? I think it's over $22 trillion, $23 trillion. Over $24. Over $24. Okay. So it's $23, $24 trillion for the United States. Sorry, that's for NATO. That's for NATO in its entirety, the NATO alliance. All right. And so Russia is $1.2 trillion. So it's like 20x smaller. I haven't done this analysis with China, but basically, you know that's i'm not saying it's like the value of the military or anything but it's just that's the independent times last 30 years the independent time post-soviet time that russia's

been there and by the way ukraine so 20 24 trillion is like nato spending in total in the last 30 years the u.s is like 30 of that sorry the u.s is two-thirds of that it's like 15 trillion okay is what the u.s has spent on their own military so you see the difference between all of nato and just us which is in nato russia's 1.2 trillion and ukraine is like 70 billion just to show you how fuck they are but it's a motherfucker but uh just anyway um that is probably as many people suspect as well it's just always kind of interesting to see the numbers i'm not i'm not making any conclusions from this slide it's just um obviously military makes a difference right the gun gun to your head makes a difference yes so um you know that kind of goes

back a little bit to what you say it's still smaller than monetary base the 30 uh the global monetary base over the last 30 years uh military spending still doesn't reach the amount of the monetary base but you can see how much bigger nato with the u.s uh is than russia so from this slide at least it does relate to what you're saying and it does show that the dollar at least has some military hegemony in the western world to remain pretty entrenched for some time but again as as we all know and as we all are favorable to bitcoin has so many better properties um where i i can easily see it meeting at least one of the big four monetary bases over the next couple years fuck man it was thank you for your perspective on it honestly like

refreshing early in the week again like i said monday i got probably what many would consider is like the russian perspective on all this nato encroaching and i think it's incredibly important not only for me but for anybody who listens to this podcast to get the perspective that you just laid out, which is there's a lot of propaganda out there. We've got a tyrannical autocrat invading a nation that once remained sovereign and free. And there's a lot of hairiness with it. And that is the truth. I mean, just to say, I totally agree with you from that perspective, Marty. I understand your listeners. I'm American myself, disillusioned at their foreign policy. But you just have to look at the way the Ukrainians are fighting this war with no help,

So regardless of what happens in the past, like, do you really think that they want to be under the thumb of Russia? Do you really think they want to be under the sphere of influence of Russia? That would be the question I would just leave people with is like, these people are fighting heroically. uh eastern europeans have suffered a lot more than americans have suffered in the last 75 years uh the last 100 years maybe in the case of soviet countries um they know they they know how to suffer and they know that they want something better and so i would just yeah i really just encourage people to understand that about about ukrainians in particular and about russian protesters in general they're struggling as well it's not a vacuum there but it's really you know Look at Team Navalny, who's in the gulag right now, political prisoner. Look at Vladimir Karamurza.

Look at a guy named Vladimir Milov, although he's more in Russian. Actually, he's not very a fan of Bitcoins. Maybe skip over him. But Vladimir Karamurza is very good as far as human rights go. And I would really recommend people. He very wonderfully speaks English and French. That's your thing. And these are people that are in the genuine opposition of Putin and will remain so.

Yeah. a check out yeah we need to check out these these perspectives we need to i mean yeah i'm fighting fighting or pulling for the people of ukraine regardless of what you think like invading countries is unacceptable and i mean forcing women to give birth in subways is something that we need to get away from like and hopefully you keep you can be pro peace you You can be pro-Bitcoin. You can be anti-American empire. You can be anti-Putin empires.

No, I don't see any cognitive dissonance there. I don't see any problem with that. Just open your heart a little bit. Please open your heart for what's happening there. Because it's like, we're scared. We're scared. We're not feeling good about this situation at all. Yeah.

Here's hoping something drastically changes. Putin gets ousted. We get the potential for peace. stay the fuck away yes yes yes stay away yeah that's that's the thing again the disillusion american image is like how the fuck is the cia planning to like take advantage of this and it's i i know i know that that's that's there but look the russian i just i tried to explain to you the russian state is built on the russian security services so it's oligarchs russian security services who are dolts and morons and submits putin and can't even speak in full

sentences and then putin himself so it's absolutely corrupt maybe that's the silver lining of all this is that these people are incompetent and maybe we can depend on their incompetence to i mean we can't depend on their hopefully their incompetence leads to a bad outcome for them in the long run here just donate please uh fight disinformation everything the kremlin tells you is a lie uh fight for freedom fight for the ukrainians you can and when Matt and I talked about this Matt O'Dell and I talked about this yesterday on RHR, Gleb Delmenko

who's a Bitcoin core dev just in terms of donating via Bitcoin one avenue that I would trust is getting it through Gleb who's a Bitcoin core dev and knows how to do it in probably the most private way possible

and I would be confident in his ability to distribute in a seamless way as well so that's donate.btcaid-ua what's that last? .org so donate.btcaid-ua.org if you're watching now absolutely

this conversation is a bit heavier than many we've had in the past hopefully the Q1 2022 update we have better news to report and better topics to talk about and more peaceful topics to talk about. Let's see. Let's hope and let's see. I'm unfortunately too much glued to Twitter.

I hated it before. I really hate it now. But I can't stop looking. I'm almost scared to look sometimes. So I hope that people can understand. And thank you. Thank you, Marty. Enjoy your time.

I know it's getting late where you are. Enjoy your time with your family, your daughter, your wife. Yeah. Stop doom scrolling. Save your own mind to stop doom scrolling for at least a day or two thank you my friend thank you very good advice very good advice i mean i'm guilty of it as well so it's just one doom scroller to another

i wasn't a week ago i wasn't even in that trap but now all right man well i hope um hope you stay safe over there uh obviously thinking of contingency plans um texas is here for you that's all i'll say i appreciate it but we all gotta be worried about even maybe more dire situations but yeah let's not let's not go there yet so yeah i appreciate that always i know that texas is there i got fomo still about all the good stuff you guys are doing over there so we'll see all right freaks go follow maddie on twitter at crypto underscore voices check out his quarterly update porkopolis.io that's a new brand that's the new site it's not porkopolis economics.io just porkopolis.io uh there is porkopolis economics.io

as well i think we'll take you there but there's a lot of different ones but yeah porkopolis.io that's the main one all right sweet we'll get into the naming of it next time we talk yeah no problem all right go enjoy your friday night all right brother as well have a good friday good weekend peace and love freaks