TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #337: Q1 2022 Monetary Base Update with Matthew Mežinskis
Episode Date: June 8, 2022Join Marty as he sits back down with Matthew Mežinskis of Porkopolis Economics to discuss the Q1 2022 monetary base update. Follow Matthew Mežinskis on Twitter Read everything discussed at: Porkopol...is Economics Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl Upstream Data
Transcript
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what's up freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce this rip of tftc sat back down with
our good friend maddie zinxius from porkopolis economics and the crypto voices podcast we do
this podcast quarterly matthew updates the global monetary base and then we talk about it that's
what we did today touched on a bunch of other interesting topics including the possibility
of a free banking system emerging
on top of Bitcoin.
The prospects
of a deflationary price
environment and how that will affect
the economy. Maybe you'll have to work less in the future.
This is a good thing. I think you guys are going to
enjoy it. Long rip, great rip.
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Enjoy the strip, freaks.
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.
If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
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.
Here we are.
A week later than expected, you were under the weather.
But another quarter has passed.
And we meet yet again to give the world an update on the global monetary base.
Matthew Mazinkshas, how the hell are you doing?
Marty, my friend.
Doing well, man.
Doing well.
Summer is here.
No clouds in the Baltics.
And yeah, doing fine.
Much better this week.
And glad to be back at it.
I haven't done a pod in a while.
I haven't done an update on the monetary base in a while.
So always good to be back here with you, my friend.
well and very much looking forward to the chat well the pleasure is always mine you've updated
your your camera setup here it's it's very crisp glad to hear that what are you using
uh this is a sony a7s3 okay it's quite a good one it's quite a good one it's not the uh it's
not the a1 or anything the most top top of the line but it's definitely it's a solid versatile
video and
point-and-shoot camera, but
it's obviously
much better for video. It's very
solid. You're coming in crisp. I'm a little
jealous right now. We need to update our cameras here
in the studio, Logan, just to let you know.
What do you guys have rolling?
We just got some cannons.
Some cannons!
Cannons are fine.
They're fine. I mean, there's
video here. People can see me.
Yeah. Not as crisp as you, though.
logan let's pull up uh we're gonna start this on a light-handed note here light-hearted note
we do deserve the the bear market here this is what something that you wanted to start with we
had the the winklevoss twins and their their band mars junction they they posted a uh a mic check
i thought they were going to have original music it seems like their cover band are playing some
police here
in this warm-up. Logan, let's play the tape.
Alright, that's all I can take.
That's all I can take. Turn it off.
Stop it.
That falsetto,
man. That falsetto
that I think it's
Tyler was going for.
And
Tyler...
What's the other brother's name?
Cameron.
Cameron.
He's just playing power chords.
I mean, he did have a solo at the end of this,
but just pure power chords.
You're on the East Coast, my friend.
Well, no, sorry.
I'm sorry.
You're not on the East Coast.
I'm not on the East Coast.
You were on the East Coast.
You're closer to this than me.
I want to know,
are people going to this?
You're here to the ground here.
What's the word in the grapevine?
I don't know.
I don't know what the word is.
The word is, I heard they sold the show out, and while they were playing the show, Jim and I got social engineered, and some of their IRA products got ganged, some of the coin in their IRA products.
So maybe the brothers Winklevoss should be focusing on their core business instead of this.
That actually happened?
I think so, yeah. I think I saw something of that nature on Twitter the other day.
yeah well
there's something to be said
about you know if you just hit so many
home runs in your
young career
as these
bright young gentlemen have done
I guess
at some point you just gotta
gotta try something new
do something a little different
they went
for it man they went for it
they went for it I mean
And they, I don't know if they still hold, but at least at one point, they publicly announced that they wanted to hold 1% of the total Bitcoin supply, 210,000 Bitcoin.
No, I believe they still do.
I'm sure that would have been a whale alert long ago if those coins had moved.
But I'm fairly sure that they did a Shamir secret share, I believe, across all the main banks in the United States with their keys, as far as I know.
is that overkill uh it's well it's a bit interesting in that you would put your keys
all into a bank um that's one thing of course there's redundancy there and it's i i guess
it's not major banks i heard this in regional banks mid-level banks they had all around but
in different safe deposit boxes and of course if one gets compromised they can go to many many more
yeah
Mars Junction has 1% of the total
Bitcoin supply
Mars Junction
I hope I get that rich one day
where I can just pay people to
come listen to me sing
it sounded like the actual
police record
was playing they were just like singing
along with it
and it sounded like they just don't care anymore
yeah
no we're doing right there so do we deserve this bear market are we officially in a bear market
would you say that was a great uh tweet there sorry uh autism capital autism capital yeah
but um no i don't worry about that stuff man i don't worry about it uh your listeners shouldn't
worry about it no investment advice right but um you know this is why i track things like the
monetary base enjoy it have fun with it try to see where we really stand uh in the monetary world
and the rest will come to us i think yeah and so this is why we meet here once a quarter to talk
about the now porkopolis economics uh quarterly monetary base update uh bitcoin has fallen two
spots to the ninth largest monetary base with gold and silver included uh in that monetary base
calculation they were bitcoin was number seven after q4 2021 obviously we were hovering around
all-time highs in the middle of that quarter so it makes sense that if we fall about 50 percent
that bitcoin would get knocked down a couple notches but before we get into the details of
the quarter-on-quarter changes in the monetary
base, you were just in
Oslo, right? So I think
we're not giving investment
advice here. Bitcoin is a
tool that empowers individuals
the world over. What was your
experience like in Oslo, and were you
educating people about the monetary properties
of Bitcoin there?
I was, yeah, a little bit, best I could.
We had a nice CBDC panel.
A few
people, Odell was
hosting that, Janine was on that.
who actually I just interviewed yesterday.
She'll be on the pod.
And it was just really simple, short,
could have been much, much longer as always.
I like to talk about this stuff,
but it was only 20 minutes.
So it's very, very, very, very, very basic.
But yeah, the topic was CBDCs,
the dangers of CBDCs.
And CBDCs are sort of all the...
The tyranny that comes with them.
Well, yeah.
And they're being quoted a lot.
Apparently, there are some 100 central banks
that are interested, fascinated by the idea of a CBDC.
So we just wanted to talk about what that really meant,
where that fit into the actual money supply,
what that actual money supply looked like
if CBDCs are going to be a thing anytime soon or not.
I gave some opinions on that, which we can talk about in a second.
And yeah, just some of the dangers that come with them
because this would be something that would be on a central bank level,
something that they can turn on or off at whim.
And people should be aware of that if they think this is going to be
some tool for financial salvation or financial freedom
or financial uh uh what's you know efficiency especially if you are a dissident or someone
who's trying to work yourself out of an oppressive regime uh to help people that are suffering from
human rights abuses across the planet um so kudos to gladstein for making it happen i was i was very
actually happy to you know be a part of that as he said it was you know the first cbdc panel at a
humans right conference so that was cool um you know but this this stuff is you know uh bill
browder who is has always interesting things to say about russia uh he you know billionaire investor
from uh that was in russia in the 90s after the collapse of the soviet union he was not at the
human rights conference that he usually was because davos was a little bit later this year
um he was funny and uh he said he gave a video address and he was like um you know they say that
the oslo freedom forum is like the davos for human rights unfortunately i have to be at the
davos for anti-human rights while i while uh while i'm missing you there and and uh you know and
that's that's true he was in the real davos which was you know he's always getting more and more of
of a shit show every year um so you know he was there he was he gave a message um that just
talked again about everything that he's doing to try to stop oppression uh around the world with
his magnitsky act which we don't have to get too into there's definitely some things there that i
wouldn't agree with as a libertarian but as far as you know putting a stop to just these crazy
the kleptocrats and dictators that want to come to western countries to you know sit on their yachts
or send their kids to school in western schools and you know enjoy all of the nice things about
the western world which they claim to hate in their home countries which they rule with an iron fist
um actually i think that's quite well a well intentioned i think uh it's not going to do
anything to like stop the war in ukraine for example but i do think that we as like a society
whether you're in france germany spain italy wherever you know if you want crooks and and
backwards dictators to come to your shores and have their kids go to your school and uh and all
the rest um you know you can let that happen that's been going on now for decades uh but i
think we're we are at an inflection point where uh people are standing up at least in europe and
they're saying like look just no more this is way too backwards it's way too uh paradoxical that
you're having these people come in and just enjoying everything that we have to offer in
places that by and large respect human rights um you know we might not agree with everything the
system does but by and large these places agree uh you know western they have western values like
you know if you're not going to adhere to that in your own country and then we don't want here
So I do think that visa control, passport control, residency control, you know, it harkens back to things like immigration issues that you'd have in the U.S. for different reasons.
There's good arguments on both sides with borders and immigration and stuff libertarians take.
But regardless, specifically what's going on in Europe, specifically with these kleptocrats in North Africa or the Mideast or in Russia just coming and hanging out in Cannes or in the Italian Riviera or in Monaco, that's just got to stop.
Do I think that's going to be done in a completely transparent and great way that's right for all the taxpayers? Probably not.
But I do think, like, this is pretty interesting stuff that's happening with politicians having to directly answer to their constituents and saying, like, why are you allowing this to happen again and again and again?
Where just these absolute crooks and kleptocrats are just hanging out, you know, enjoying the fruits of our labor, enjoying our sunshine.
And then they just go back and they're just murdering people, raping people, all the rest back in their home country.
So it's interesting.
it's interesting the discussions i know you have at a place like uh oslo freedom forum
yeah there's hypocrisy on all sides i mean like you said we have it
here in the united states i mean the big one of the big news items of the last couple weeks has
been nancy pelosi's husband uh caught got uh wrapped up in a dui charge in northern california
got a little too tipsy in wine country driving around napavala piss drunk uh apparently he hit
a car or was involved in an accident who knows who hit who uh but there's rumors going around
that that dui charge is going to get swept under the rug um so you have the pelosis
nancy being one of the most powerful politicians in the united states uh actively insider trading
against the american public during the day and then driving around piss drunk at night with
impunity um there's a spectrum to this obviously they're not raping and pillaging individual
americans but and there's this two-tiered system that that exists throughout the power structure
of our world 100 100 on that side i mean when you look at that when beating 90 of the market and
you know her visa connections were clear and all these other things i mean it's
it's embarrassing um so yeah no i mean i i don't think there's an easy answer to any of this i mean
as a as a libertarian as a classical liberal as someone who's uh fan of you know freedom as a
bitcoiner uh we just got to keep doing what we're doing educate talk about the good things you know
they tutor our morals yeah and i think i think you know i think things we're definitely in a new
we're definitely in an inflection point new world here after ukraine it's huge i wanted to ask you
we talked about it a little bit last show i know you have a lot of guests and listeners who probably
disagree with our views in eastern europe but uh did you get did you get positive feedback
you get negative feedback mixture both so you were on after you were the immediate episode after we
had the dude who writes a serious report uh he's an english gentleman and he he gave the
basically what the case that there was a lot of uh instigation from the west encroaching
on um on russia's borders with nato um uh what am i looking for bases and all that and
he gave the instigators perspective on that and then you came and gave the the european perspective
and obviously so there's mixed reviews my conclusion after having those back-to-back
episodes um and the reaction to those is all fucked like we just said like there's there's
a spectrum to this obviously uh putin the putin regime is on one extreme of the spectrum and as
i articulated the last time we spoke like i'm not happy at all with the leaders that we have here
in the united states and in the west and their provocations and i think people like yourself
myself most importantly ukrainian russian citizens just get fucking thrown in the middle of
these proxy wars that at the end of the day individual russians individual ukrainians
individual americans latvians um just want to raise their families live a good life and
and live an honest life and we're thrust into these geopolitical dick measuring contests between
psychopathic kleptocrats
again that exist on both sides
of the aisle
I do think that's why we focus on
Bitcoin because it helps us get away from
these people from all angles
so
yeah mixed reviews
a lot of people
really appreciated
your perspective I appreciate your
perspective because I
again like we discussed last time you were on
I am that American
is pissed off at his government for
I would like to apply a Ron Paul foreign policy here in the United States where it's like, hey, leave everybody else alone and just focus on fixing our problems here in the United States, which are pretty material and seem to be mounting day by day.
I think meddling in other people's affairs is just making us worse off in the long run.
yeah yeah i mean we don't have to rehash the ukraine thing but i can say first of all
completely agree i mean i'm a classical liberal libertarian here in eastern europe you know on
one of the fronts of russia and belarus and all the problems um so i've thought about this a long
time i've had a lot of friends over here and i think i said it i said on most shows or interviews
like europeans classical libero-europeans they have very different views than my typical example
is the texas libertarian which you know now you're out of jersey you're out of new york you're in
texas uh you have that that view which i understand very well um you know don't even need to describe
it everybody should know when i say texas libertarian what that means so good uh it's
totally good and i think that um there's no problem keeping with your principles staying
consistent and you know as a libertarian from a small country that's suffered from those proxy
wars from those occupations uh indirectly you know my family is uh of immediate latvian descent
grew up in the states went back afterwards and now you know shit's happening again uh this is
all like super real for us and not just me being a foreign latvian everybody knows it here people's
grandparents shipped to siberia whatever we had all this shit we've gone through all of it
so the fact that it's going on again that they're trying to do some imperialism again like we're
just going to stand up for it but that doesn't mean that you know if you know i see interesting
things happening in a libertarian party in the united states um you know with the mises caucus
like that doesn't mean that uh people can't uh rise up gain of gain uh followers and people
that believe in their ideas and change policy and i'll be fine with it i mean the united states
once we leave nato i'd be fine with it uh we have enough power and will and strength here now
uh i think to defend ourselves which is very very good um and as for the argument which i don't know
who this gentleman is that you're talking about i didn't i didn't see the episode or anything but
uh if i presume it was the art of the typical argument about nato encroachment um
i don't want to rehash all that but should be obvious now after a few months
it's very interesting what's happening in europe in northern europe um in particular you have
sweden and finland who are ready to join nato after literally you know sweden 200 years of a
neutral foreign policy. Finland famously avoided occupation, unlike the Baltics, which did not
avoid it. They avoided Soviet occupation, won the Winter War, stood for peace. They still suffered
greatly. I mean, if they had taken the deal that Stalin offered them, they would have
theoretically lost less land and lost less troops. But you never know if Soviets would
have invaded later. So they actually stuck up for themselves. They rose up and gave the Russians
an unbelievable fight in the winter war uh to start a world war two and they were kind of
neutral as well had this sort of was a term they don't really like this fin inlandization which
was basically a completely neutral and also slightly communistic view uh where you really
accepted communists and soviet views as something that maybe should be thought about and researched
and everything so a little bit communist defense uh just because they had to be they had to be
where they were in their history like their geographic location and everything yeah they're
on the eastern border of russia correct the western border western border yes western border
border yeah thousands of yeah but you know thousands of miles thousands of miles of border
with russia and so i will debate anybody about this i have no problem debating the nato expansion
thing i think i said it on the last show with you as well like you know this aggressive nato
expansion where this you know thumb in the eye of the russians the baltics were the last ones to
come in really the last like big countries or countries that were like kind of close to soviet
type occupations yeah there was like croatia and north macedonia came in later but the baltics
and poland and um you know hungary these types of nations they came in which i hungry a little
it earlier but baltics and and uh czech republic slovakia they came in in 2004 like that is a long
time ago that's plenty of time for putin to think if it was really nato that caused him to somehow
invade a sovereign country and you know people that were like young infantry men and women now
were barely a twinkle in their father's eye when the baltics came into nato so this is nothing new
this is nothing that caught him off guard and back to the elephant in the room here the amazing thing
of the last three months it's like finland and sweden they're going to join i mean turkey their
turkey is going to yield to them and that they want to join everybody wants this sovereignty
they have agency to choose their own security like they don't want to deal with this shit it's
modern you know this is 21st century 2022 this is you know this is this is real for them this
is europe we want freedom we want normalcy we want free trade and all the rest um but you just
can't be going in and causing you know rapes pillaging and murdering sending you know washers
and dryers back to east russia uh just because you want them and just because you want to dominate
ukraine point being it's obvious it's not about nato if it's about nato if this nato is such a
big deal for putin why isn't he going and invading finland right now finland's joining nato stop him
go in go go make a provocation a nato country cannot join if it has a provocation with another
country so do it putin should go in cause you know as he as the soviets did during world war
to cause you know dress up a border guard in uh in russian uh in russian clothes uh say that that
border guard was shot um and you know and then that's a provocation for you know for entering
or starting something start a provocation absolutely that like why not do it and the
answer is obviously he's not going to do it because it was never about nato it was never
about this western encroachment it's about putin being a crazy kleptocrat who wants to dominate
ukraine and he wants to dominate uh this former soviet space that he knows is still
relatively corrupt and that he can you know take their oil and resources and all the rest and their
wheat and their grain so i mean it's you know but anyway the the point is i would be totally fine
if the americans got out of nato and i think a modern classical liberal position would be
you know have them get out of nato have local alliances only you know i mean but we we need
the alliances like the baltics need it um poland you know hungary's got their issues with their
with orban he's a bit he's a bit crazy these days but you know the czechs the slovaks uh romanians
bulgarians croatians all these people they want normal lives and now you include the scandics
into that like they're they're not ever going back to the days of world war ii so i'm actually
very heartened to see the alliance get stronger from that side as someone who holds you know a
Latvian passport as someone who's a European also with an American background also as an American
um I'm totally fine if the Americans would like leave the alliance uh I would also say good good
luck making that happen politically as we know uh there's too many crazy interests that are going to
try to assert themselves and it's very that's a whole nother issue which is bad it's absolutely
bad um but you know yeah that's my whole maybe it's wishful thinking but i i really
i mean there's so many factors here and so many moving variables of play number one being like
you make the argument that europe and the west sort of shifted leverage in putin's favor with
idiotic energy policy over the last two decades like there's i would like to see like as
maybe i don't ever i don't know if maybe i am libertarian i've never described myself i don't
like to throw a label on myself i do think maybe this is libertarian i'm just maybe i'm just being
like a hard-o trying not to put a label on it but i do believe free markets can
liberate the world that's why i focus on bitcoin predominantly here in this media platform that i
have and i don't think free markets particularly in energy were able to flourish throughout europe
over the last two decades and that shifted a lot of leverage into putin's hands as he has control
the fuel source of western europe and i think one can make a very strong case that the invasion of
ukraine would have been significantly less likely if if putin didn't have that that chess piece to
play of having all the leverage over europe's energy sources um it's obviously the the invasion
has created a energy and food crisis um or exacerbated an energy and food crisis uh to a
point where um people are having to buy gas and oil and rubles and they're they're having to
pretend like they're not doing that by buying russian petroleum products from from india or
go into the middle of the sea and buy it i i think again i i think we need to liberate markets
from these central planners whether they be in russia and ukraine the rest of europe here in
the united states and just let let us peaceful citizens interact with each other and conduct
commerce with each other um i don't like just personally i don't like the the ginning up of more
um saber rattling on the war front in terms of alliances and focusing on a solution via force
with strengthening nato and stuff like that i think what europe should do what the united
states should do is realize that they made very strategic very large strategic errors
particularly via energy policy that has shifted leverage into putin's hands and instead of trying
to brute force and exacerbate an already terrible situation of war and potentially push the world
in the world war three like western leaders should be a bit introspective and uh own up to
the mistakes they made on a policy from a policy perspective and try to fix that um to hopefully
mitigate um any potential escalation of physical conflict moving forward but it doesn't seem like
that's happening at all and the western government seemed to be doubling and tripling down on idiotic
energy policy so that's where i stand right now yeah it's hard to um it's hard to not see
politicians not taking the mantle here beating their chest showing this effect sort of
intellectualism and this faux leadership like uh unfortunately this is what politics is sort
of geared to right like should be typically dealing with these big outside issues but
unfortunately you've fucked everything up uh over the last 20 years as you've alluded to all of
these different things from energy to uh to labor to commerce whatever and um and now this war gives
politicians an excuse to do more bad things so i understand it i mean you know it gives
it gives someone like trudeau who literally just imposed financial armageddon and martial law
with citizens like the next week to go to europe and act like he was some champion for freedom
uh because he sent you know ukraine some some vests or whatever so um it's not it's not an
easy solution but it is also you know it's not a view that i take and whatever we can move on to
the to actually i'm talking about something more concrete like the well i think this provides a
segue yeah yeah i think it does but i but it's also an opinion of mine basically and that you
know if you go back to this idea of just okay europe europe has always suffered from wars and
infighting and all the rest um we're not at a place where we have like uh private insurance
private defense contracts we're all rich enough to have our own sovereign flag you know eight
billion sovereign flags not just 200 we don't have to outsource things like you know we're not
in the position where we don't have to outsource things like military and political decisions for
you know things that we don't want to partake in so we're very very far from that whatever that
utopia might mean and i know we never get to a utopia but we're never we're very very you know
it's 100 years thousand years we're very very far from it today so focus on what you can that's
concrete that's bitcoin now regarding the political stuff i would just say um yeah i'd just be you
know i would implore because i know probably i i assume as you said it's mixed reviews but i would
assume a lot of your listeners are these libertarians who why would they care at all
what's happening in europe and whatnot and i fair enough i mean i no problem with that i would just
say you know try to be sensitive to people that are suffering um it's not it's not the united
states's fault what vladimir putin is doing it's just it's just not and um you know i can provide
books and links and all sorts of things to talk about this 20 year thing but from the beginning
from the beginning they had started this uh the election in 2000 was basically set up for him to
win and there was been there's been no legal election ever since by an independent fact
checker and all this is the rep so the democracy stuff in 2022 is just it might not be working in
the united states as we want it definitely not working in russia yeah i think i mean i think
you'd have to be an idiot not to concede that fact yeah so it's it's you know we're a we're a
long way so that's that's about it really yeah you also think the interesting question would be
like say united states get that gets that right say we get a proper scaling down of government
right i mean how likely is that i hope it is not sure but let's say we get a reasonable
not crisis-induced uh libertarian party mises caucus uh just explodes in popularity they say
we get a moderate reasonable scaling back of military u.s troops in germany come home lots
of things happen where the united states uh shores up its troops literally and its budget you know
economically great question would be at what point does the united states ever come back if
their european friends uh screw things up again or a group of european friends such as you know
or enemies such as russia russians just coming in and doing the bad things that they're doing
uh it's it's an interesting question you know because i i don't think it's needed at the moment
like i said i i think the libertarian thing to do the classical liberal thing to do uh thomas
jefferson said i'll trade with everyone alliance with no one he also started the whiskey tax and
did a lot of other bad things uh you know if we're if if you really think that you can get
to that ideal that classical liberal idea that american idea whatever that is great uh i just
wonder how how that how the american society would react if europe falls apart again and we
probably will with something it's not going to be as bad as the nazis but look i mean we had
had to come in as an alliance uh to stop uh for the nazis you know history history could have been
a lot different if we'd even gone farther i mean again i'm speaking from an eastern we suffered
both from the nazis and from the soviets so you know don't forget like churchill wanted to go all
the way to moscow but uh but they uh they decided that it was it was not worth the cost and um
russia's never been this i mean we russia suffers from a hundred year problem of communism just
moronic stupid people that uh thought that they were being righteous and legitimate and they just
they tore down generations of people
so that's going to continue
like I said
I would absolutely
be glad if Americans could shore up
their resources and
go home and clean up
but I don't know it's weird
it's weird there's going to be
it all comes back to energy
like energy is the base
of
human action
literally
if you want to get to
the the bare minimum like you spend energy to go hunt and eat like that is the basis of human
action and i like we like what the fuck happened in 1971 for some reason we went off the gold
standard and idiotic energy policy began to follow from that and i don't i don't think europe is
going to be in a good position until they again show some introspection and realize that
their energy policy has put them in a very precarious and vulnerable situation it doesn't
seem like i mean germany the economic powerhouse of europe seems to be doubling and tripling down
shutting down nuclear power plants in favor of unreliable wind um and like and that's the other
things i've been having a lot of conversation i went on a libertarian focus podcast the other
week. And even though I'm very happy to see that the Mises caucus has taken over the libertarian
party and jolted some life into the libertarian movement and actually brought some power to
that perspective in the political landscape here in the United States. Again, I don't think we
solved this by getting a libertarian in office. I don't think we solved this by getting a Republican
or a Democrat in office
or voting our way through this.
I do believe the Heikean view
of we're not going to,
I think you need to fix the money
to fix the world
and you don't fix the money
until you take it out
of the hands of the government.
So even though there's great things
going on in the Libertarian Party,
I think it's a losing battle
in the long run
because they're just going to be thrust
into the administrative state
that is pretty,
it doesn't care who is in power.
And in that hierarchical structure at any given point in time, the administrative state just views those politicians as a facade for the public to look at and interact with.
where that's, again, why we focus on Bitcoin,
because you actually take the most important tool
that humans use, money, out of the hands of the government
so that you can then begin to take steps
towards fixing these structural, systemic problems
that exist throughout our global economy.
And then that's why, like, a libertarian podcast went on.
It was like, stop, like, debating Democrats, Republicans,
and other libertarians
about making policy changes
go fucking build the world
that you want to see and Bitcoin provides us the opportunity
to do that
what was the response?
it was
open to it
that's the thing most people don't understand
that Bitcoin is this open source
global distributed network
that you can plug into and
fortify
at any point that you
decide to
Um, and I, I think there's, um, I think I did have a bit of a breakthrough there where it's like, let's stop going to Vegas and trying to gin up support and create solidarity within the libertarian party so that you can then go up against the Democrats and Republican on the national stage.
just like don't even play that game just come play this game that's completely separate from
that system which is bitcoin and you'll find that the obviously the most positive externality of
that is you get better money which allows you to facilitate more peaceful and direct economic
activity and then you have the positive externalities that fall from that which one of
the first and most profound externalities is the the impact on energy it makes energy particularly
stranded a waste energy more profitable which allows you to bring more abundant energy to the
world which over time yes we're not going to solve this problem overnight uh will will lead to less
conflict because people have the bare necessities that they need to to fulfill the lower end of
maslow's hierarchy of needs and so when it comes to trying to fix this problem via washington or
via the eu or trying to shake putin or take putin out or whatever like i think it's all
noise at the end of the day and doesn't actually have us making steps in the right direction
whereas bitcoin uh is that mechanism through which we can begin to carve a path in the right
direction amen brother completely agree with you yeah and i'm i'm actually very glad as well that
any uh libertarian uh libertarian sort of thinker or even ron paul people that might be asked by
professional news agencies to come on their shows or even their youtube channel that none of them
will go on rt anymore so that's good for about the whole 2010s they were all getting on rt
because rt was loving their views against the big bad u.s government oh my god you guys have
no idea what you're doing please stop it well and now people see what are you know rt is no
different than npr with those people claim that they hate so much so my god come on tftc or we'll
have a level-headed uh conversations about this because it is there's you know one of the favorite
buzzwords of the show is nuance there's so much nuance to this and it's not something that can
be fixed overnight but that's why again i like to focus on bitcoin because i believe could be wrong
i don't think i am but i believe it provides us with the best mechanism to separate ourselves from
that geopolitical proxy war that that humanity is suffering from 100 100 it is interesting i mean
like you know david friedman called it the hard problem and uh i never used to dwell on defense
uh the issue of national defense and again we just don't have this eight billion sovereign flags
private defense free market a very low cost energy sort of world that we want yet so where we are
right now it it it does yield different reactions and perspectives from many classical liberals or
people or bitcoiners or whoever and uh i i know that you know again i know this is a very u.s
based audience but you're gonna hear many different views on defense from european classical
liberals european bitcoiners and i got i got friends from the swedish macy's institute that
are sending me like swedish video like swedish propaganda videos of their military with like
the swedish like glory music viking music and stuff you used to tell me that everybody else
was the biggest statist of the world and now you're sending me this stuff and they're like
well in this case i understand you know it's that's one thing i worry about though is like
the fog of war i grew up in ohio man i never thought about you know the things that my
the people that came before me had to deal with in europe i never had to experience it of course
we protested it and tried to understand that stuff in the late 80s to get uh to get freedom
for eastern europe but now that it's coming back that that freedom is in flux and threatened again
directly for poor ukrainians who never quite got out of it you know baltic's got away thank god as
fast as they could from any sphere of influence which apparently some people in the u.s think we
should we should have under putin but again i don't want to get back sucked into that rabbit
hole but uh you know i just never had to think about it until now and now you when you're here
you know you have your family here your daughter here your uh you know extent some extended family
think about what might happen if you would stay and fight if you would go um we've had these
discussions for years and years but when it actually comes down to it and you see the
just the horrid horrid uh conditions that they're dealing with in ukraine it definitely makes you
think and like i said there's it's not just me it's not just people in the baltics i mean you
know swedes fins everybody's thinking about it differently now over here so it's it's a very
different conversation uh than you probably have if you just keep it within you know
thoughts on ukraine from afar with a bunch of i'm not i'm not trying to sound pejorative but
with a bunch of tech
libertarians
I mean
you're gonna get
different views
you're gonna get
vast views
so
I wish we had it man
I really do
I wish we had that
that world
but
I'm
I'm all for
Bitcoin
getting us
where we need to be
but right now
here in 2022
it's
it's
it's definitely
thought provoking
if not much worse
than where you live
yeah
yeah
it's all fucked man
i mean i mean curse you got the chinese proverb slash curse may you live in interesting times and
as time goes on the times only get more interesting and where we find ourselves today
transitioning into the digital age and this hyper-connected world that we live in and the
i mean humanity trying to come to grips with the pace of growth i believe is the pace of change
maybe not even necessarily growth in and of itself
is
forcing us to attempt to
rewire our brains rather quickly
which as animals
as chemical beings
as
animals
it's hard to come to grips with
that pace of change and
make clear
cogent
assertive decisions
but
I think we'll get there
again that's why we focus on bitcoin it's not going to fix everything overnight but i
again believe it allows us to take steps in the right direction i'm taking the first baby steps
that hopefully will lead to um something that makes the world a better place for your daughter
my son my child that i thought was going to arrive last week but seems to be a bit stubborn
um you gotta make these these small steps so that they can they can run to bring a cheesy uh saying
or they're gonna make a good bitcoiner with that stubbornness it's important yes yes it is
important well i mentioned about the world just yet i mentioned a segue earlier and what i wanted
to segue to is revert back to what we were discussing earlier which is cbdc's and so
viewed as a segue because with all this going on and obviously we have economic sanctions against
russia and the financial global community seems to be bifurcating and the davos class seems to
think that cbdcs are a good way to prevent kinetic warfare or use cbdcs to punish people
in the physical world and what's going to happen if CBDCs do come to market. I'm a bit skeptical.
I don't think the administrative state has the technical capabilities to actually bring it to
fruition. Obviously, there is a counter example to that in China and their social credit system
and everything they have going on there. But how would CBDCs, let's run down the thought
experiment of them being successful how would they affect what you do on a quarter by quarter
basis with your monetary base update yeah good question totally agree with you and uh if we can
go to it's wait uh i know we got to talk through this for the radio for the pod but
tweet 15
tweet 15
first of all you remember I think
it was
I gotta write this stuff down
I always say but
every episode
it was your
I think it was your pod where I first started
to talk about it one of the first interviews we did maybe the
first interview we did 2018
uh was it started 2019 i'm not sure um where i think it was 2018 uh i said then i continue to
say now i'm extremely skeptical about cbdc's i don't think they work economically i don't think
they uh like you just said could work technically you have massive risk factors there you think
about all the threat mitigation that bitcoiners go through like you think the state is going to
be able to handle that to be able to hold that candle even close to that um so i've always been
skeptical about the technical sort of uh adoption of cbdc's and on top of that you got something
that's much better yeah i know we're bitcoiners here but you got something that's much better
and easier to use in the form of stable coins and stable coins are gonna be a thing they're
gonna try to regulate first that's what i said like four years ago in our first interview
and that's what's happening so cbdc's are uh still very much a technical
marketed sort of thought experiment worldwide worldwide now it's yeah it's 100 central banks
are researching it all the rest china started it with the beijing olympics all the rest
um let's let's let's go through a few things here with this slide so
this is the good old global monetary base. Everything in the world, whether you have
an account, whether you have a stable coin, anything but Bitcoin or a dollar bill that
you hold in your pocket or a euro or a yen, everything is fiduciary media, which means it's
not money that settles immediately, ultimately the core of the financial system. Everything but
Bitcoin, gold, silver, traditionally, historically.
And today, base money being those notes that the central bank prints.
Also, they print some money for, a lot of money, for the banking system.
Those are called the bank reserves.
Those two things together in the current modern financial system, that is the monetary base.
That's the ultimate settlement.
That's how the system settles.
That's how banks settle with one another.
That's with each other.
that's how uh you and i settle with our proverbial coffee shop when we buy that coffee the system's
the the transaction is done fully final if we hand over a note that is legal tender uh printed
from the government so that's what this slide is i gotta work on the contrast obviously
read uh but this one is there's two you can see two different blobs there obviously growing like
crazy and the actual amount that they grow is about 13 percent per year since 1970 so that's
one that's about one percent a month compounded gets you to 13 percent a year not 12 so one percent
a month uh compounded since 1970 gets you some from something that was you know a couple hundred
billion dollars equivalent and i'm not talking just dollars here this is worldwide figure this
50 central banks a couple hundred a billion dollars in 1970 to 30 trillion dollars today
and that's a lot of money okay this is this is cash money this isn't elon musk borrowing
on his tesla shares to buy twitter uh leveraging something you called fiduciary media everything
is fiduciary media except for base money this is actual money cash money it's a lot of money all
$30,000 billion, $30,000 billion of actual money.
Now, not all dollars.
Some is yen, some is euros, some is yuan, Korean won, Argentinian pesos, Brazilian real, and all the rest.
That's on this chart, all right?
This is the printing press of the central bank.
This is base money.
We've talked about it now for many, many quarters.
This is actually the 16th update.
So the fourth full year doing this, uh, happy to show this to everybody because this is
it.
BIS is going to show you this.
IMF is not going to show you this.
This is the one, right?
This is the proverbial printing press of the central bank.
So the wholesale money is the, is the bank reserves, right?
That's basically how the fed really gets money into the system, uh, or any central bank.
Okay.
that's when they're buying typically government bonds and uh when they buy those bonds they take
them out of the system but they buy them with money that they just created to get into the
system so that's how they increase the money supply uh on a on a quick way on a fast way on a
high powered way it's called high powered money so that's the light shaded area those are bank
reserves or wholesale money none of that is going to be cbdc it already works it's electronic
does banks the big banks probably control 75 to 80 percent of the monetary base anyway
of those bank reserves just think about that you're talking about a handful of banks
i know this is a fact for the u.s and i presume it's a fact for you but i don't know for sure
because i don't publish at least i haven't seen the data but all of that white uh lighter shaded
area right so it's like 21 trillion dollar equivalent 21 trillion dollars 21 000 billion
dollars worth of base money all right which is the core of the financial system it's how banks
settle with each other um that is controlled by a handful of banks in each country okay in each
market in each currency market so why would you need a cbdc for that it already works it's not
like everybody knows their federal reserve board governor at the big bank jamie diamond gives you
know anybody from the new york fed a call anybody from the federal reserve board in washington dc a
call it's not a problem like it's not a mystery who these people are they all are working you
know this is something that Rothbard has been writing about many people write about it's been
going on for decades and decades like that's not the issue so that CBDCs are not going there it's
not going to be wholesale bank money currency that we're talking about we're talking about CBDCs
we're talking about the darker shaded area on that chart which at present is about 9.2 trillion
dollars a lot of money nine thousand two hundred billion dollar equivalent of cash so that's the
actual cash like the physical cash money all around the world floating around and under
mattresses and in safes and in grocery tills and all the rest that's that's money in the system
that's what they want to be the cbdc all right so whatever bloomberg talks about whatever cbc
talks about whatever the Federal Reserve or
the Bank of England talks about.
They're just blowing smoke up your ass. They have no
idea actually how much
money is in the monetary
base. So here it is. This is the answer.
It's a lot of money. And I
said this at the Oswald Freedom Forum as well.
I ask
you a simple question, Marty. Do you think
for both of those items, is that chart
is it going up or is it going down?
Is it going up in a gentle direction?
Is it going up quick, fast?
Which way is the
going someone describe it as hockey stick growth yes yes so number is going up there all right this
is what this is the only thing that they know how to do and cash is a huge part of society like
you don't have to wax and wane too much on this but on this particular point but like you just
so here's the thing actually odell did a poll it's typical we knew we knew that the poll would
be taken basically asking okay so how many people are you actually using physical cash today and it
was the vast majority a few vast excuse me minority a few people in that room raised their hand when
he asked that question and i understand that but the thing is they're not representative of the
globe and they're not representative of just billions of people that would be destroyed if
you tried to just overnight shut down the system go to some mysterious cbdc based on your phone
system of money it's not going to happen anytime soon it's not going to happen the numbers are
out of control in the favor of paper money and paper currency and no matter how much they're
trying to regulate it shut it down we were in norway of all places i mean norway is famously
over the last 15 years trying to be the cashless society.
Of course, they can because they have about $220,000 worth of pension funds
sitting in every citizen's account.
$220,000 per citizen is about the pension fund size of Norway.
It's about $1.3 trillion.
That's on the Norwegian Central Bank's balance sheet.
So they actually have a very, very small monetary base in Norway.
It's actually the smallest of all 50 that I calculate, typically.
Sometimes it fluctuates, but it's the smallest.
But they have a huge line item of real assets, unlike you and me, who I'm not even getting any Social Security.
But you, Marty, you're not either.
I mean, there's no money that's in the pension funds or any unfunded liability account of the United States government.
so when people say like your the social security is bankrupt in in the u.s it doesn't mean that
they're taking in less money than they're earning in taxes they are and they have been cash flow
negative since 2011 but what it means is is that the money's gone like the the money when people
say that social security is bankrupt it actually has been already lent out to another branch of
government military agriculture department whatever and it's been spent so any money that
would need to come back into this i can't even remember the number right now actually of what
the social security unfunded liability figure is our pension fund our quote-unquote pension fund
united states it's trillions of dollars i think it's between like seven and nine trillion or
something like that yeah trillions of dollars and that's not there it's literally money that
has to be taxed twice it's just sitting there it's like the government owes that money uh to
itself so that the social security department is owed that money from say the military or from some
other branch of the government but it's not there either right they only make money and the government
makes a shit ton of money every year in taxes right it's like four trillion dollars i think
maybe more now might be a couple year old figure actually but trillions and trillions of dollars
it's the biggest organization in the world that collects money forcefully or not forcefully from
anybody. Okay. It's massive, but it goes out right away. Immediately. Social security has been
not cashflow positive since 2011. So why do I bring all that up? Uh, basically
even a place like Norway where, um, or I should say, ironically, a place like Norway is the only
country in the world that really has a strong pension fund. That's like actually has hard at
They have hard assets in there. They have oil assets in there. They have a decent amount of gold on their balance sheet. They have actual assets for their constituents, for the citizens. That doesn't exist in the United States. It doesn't exist in many, many Western European countries.
and sort of doesn't exist anywhere else in these kleptocratic countries so there's not actually
money there uh having a digital currency would um and so here's here's the here's the rub of why
this isn't going to work economically uh the banking system needs deposits to work okay we
Let's not talk about whether it's a fraud or not lending money in the banking system.
The banking system needs deposits to be profitable.
If banks don't have deposits, they can't loan those deposits out and make money on the interest.
It's just not going to work.
The idea of CBDC is we remove physical cash from society.
That physical cash, which is on the central bank's balance sheet right now,
on the central bank's balance sheet is $9 trillion globally.
that would then switch to this sort of these digital currencies that could be much more
controlled they would argue efficient but really it means controlled sensible turn on turn off
tell you if you've had too much alcohol uh plug into every vendor's uh every vendor's digital
currency account so basically there's no cash that's sitting in a grocery till there's no cash
that's sitting in safes or under beds we get rid of that also we can control interest rates that
way but you know let's not worry about that everything is is controlled at the central bank
level it sounds like a communist you know manifesto it sounds like a communist dream
and it is but there's no way especially in the deep markets of europe and the united states
there's no way it would work because what it would do and all the papers acknowledge this by the way
all the papers on cbdc's by central banks they all acknowledge that it's a tremendous challenge
or drag on the financial system's profitability if you were to have deposits leave the banking
system just like hey you know i got i got paypal i got venmo i got my banking app whatever it might
work might not work might not be that good but you know at least i have that right that's what
the average person is saying i'm fine with it but if you come in as the central government and say
hey we got a central bank account for you it's gonna be much better uh use it i can in fact
we're making you use it uh that that money does go away from the banks it means that the deposits
that hold with your banks it goes away so that's a massive drag on the financial system which is
why it's never going to work in mass in capitalist societies the only society it might work in right
now with any legs is china because obviously the communists they don't care about their people
they're they want to control their people and anyway it's an extremely digitized payment
processing system with uh with uh tencent and alipay so um that's the only one which maybe
they can make it work because anyway they have all these communist style resources and they don't
have a fully private banking system uh so that's where we'll probably and everybody knows that's
where we are seeing some innovation, let's say, in CBDCs.
Yeah, CBDCs, to put it another way,
as succinctly as possible,
they just cut out the commercial banking system,
which is what allows you to go take out loans and take risk
and get access to capital markets
to go operate as an entrepreneur,
as a capitalistic entrepreneur throughout the economy.
So if you're going to replace that deposit system with a direct connection to the central banking system and use that as near access to the monetary system alone, it completely cuts out all those services that the commercial banking system provides the world.
exactly and they know this they know this is written i mean this is the discussions they're
having this is the crucial discussions but they're blowing a lot of smoke you know it makes news
stories and make bloomberg's nbc all the stuff the numbers show that it's never going to work
that way first of all cash is way too hard to take out of the system i mean so many people
suffer india tried to do it by the way in 2016 they took out two bills two types of bills
i can't remember which ones uh because like a 500 rupee bill and
yeah something like that right and they wanted better digitization serial serialized bills uh
sort of things that you can digitally check easier with those bills that's what they wanted to do is
control measure right completely messed up the indian economy for a few months it was down from
i don't remember the exact numbers but it was way down uh collapsed the money supply in like
half in a few months and now three years later it's like triple so they didn't keep it down
it didn't help sort of banks sort it was still there's still physical notes they replaced it
with but it didn't like help banks sort of get a better judge of who needed the bills where the
bills were going that was the idea okay it might have helped a little bit but it's not like they
kept the money supply down it's three times more than it was in 2016 the indian rupee in physical
currency so it's just not going to happen it's not going to happen the numbers don't make any
sense for cbdc both on the physical currency side actually mattering for a society transacting
which society which is mostly needs to just needs to do that daily trade you know in and out of
physical cash like you know maybe in certain western places we don't have to do that we can
afford to just wait a little bit use paypal venmo or you know eventually we're going to use lightning
things like that it's just there's no way that the vast majority of the world is going to handle
anything like this cbdc and and here ties it back now to what i was talking about with the uh
with the unfunded liabilities the pension funds all these other things the state can't manage any
of those assets and central bank won't help it either so there's no way that like that that money
will have to be will probably be issued and then uh in return they'll buy more bonds because of it
right because that's what that's the only way you balance the central bank balance sheet is you
you issue something you print it out of thin air and then you take something out of the market
which is typically a government bond we can actually uh talk about why they do that and
why it affects interest rates but just in pure mechanical form that's what happens so they can't
manage any of that stuff they can't manage pension funds they can't manage like you think the bank
is going to be you know just like the state bank the central bank is just going to be some
new innovative amazing manager of a pension but the only country that can do this is norway and
that's because of the oil it's because the history is because the amount of population
the geography all sorts of things it's scalable in norway it's not scalable here in the united
States or... Not in the United States.
Not in Europe wide.
Did you see that interview? You saw that
interview with Christine Lagarde. Amazing.
In due course.
In due course.
In due course.
I used to think she was smoother in
these interviews. She was speechless.
Well, let's give credit to
the moderator of that town hall meeting.
He put her feet to the fire.
Yeah. Who was that guy, by the way?
Some Dutch guy. I don't know.
That was solid.
That was solid. She was a speech. She could not explain how that balance sheet is going to be normalized, how it's going to come down. And as we all know, because we actually follow this stuff, and I'm sure any listener to the show knows, it's never coming back down. It's never going to be normalized. This is the new normal, and it's going to keep being the new normal. Inflation, inflation, inflation. That's how it works.
Well, another good segue, you were saying we can explain how the Fed creates interest rates.
So people say, all right, the Fed will come out and they want to raise rates 50 bps.
They don't just go into a computer and say, all right, now the Fed funds rate is 50 bps.
You were mentioning with the creation of money and the purchase or selling and taking money out of the system of bonds,
they interest rate target. So they attempt to either create, if they're lowering rates and
they want to target a lower rate, they'll create money and then they'll buy these treasury bonds
from the commercial banking system and attempt to get the Fed funds rate at that level. They don't
set it, they target it, and then they use the creation of new money and the purchasing of
assets to get to that rate. Is that a correct explanation? Absolutely. And I always take it
one level deeper, I say, why did they do this in the first place? Why are they buying government
bonds? Why don't they buy gold or real estate? They used to buy gold, but why don't they buy
real estate? Why don't they buy corporate debt? Now, they're starting to do that now, but let's
put that aside still. Why don't they buy stocks? They could. They could buy anything they wanted.
The reason, let's just take it to the deepest level. Why does the central bank buy government
bonds the reason is is because they are a buyer that if other if did not exist if that buyer did
not otherwise exist the price of their related company of their sister government the price of
their government's debt would be higher it'd be higher it's a hard thing to understand sometimes
interest rates have an inverse relate uh the price of debt has an inverse relationship with
interest rates right so the interest rate is lower the price is higher it's more expensive
okay but if the price is is uh lower the interest rate is higher or if the interest rate is higher
the price is lower the value is lower so what they are doing why does the central bank buy
government debt it props up the price because typically they go down right they don't go up
it's only done once in the 1980s blah blah took interest rates 20 percent typically the rates go
lower and lower and lower typically what does that mean it means the price of the debt is going up
means it's higher than it otherwise would have been if that buyer of government bonds was not
in the marketplace so that's really like the core of central banking right there that goes back to
british times like the sovereign being bailed out by the banks uh and monopolizing the banks
what the bank of england first modern central bank it's just to prop up the government it's
to prop up government it's to make government debt more expensive than it otherwise would be
in a free market and that typically means higher price means a lower interest rate so i hear about
lowering rates lower lower lower it's not about like gearing up at its core it's not about you
know gearing the economy up and making rates cheaper for all of us so we can get the economy
back on track and all that it's it's just to make government debt more expensive than otherwise would
be what another way to put that is to make it look better than it is like so to artificially
give it what the market would deem a higher uh rating in terms of like triple a double a triple
b yeah precisely to be a buyer of last resort to be a uh to be a buyer that just would not exist
in the absence of that monopoly.
You'd have a competitive market, a free market.
You'd have more arbitrage situations.
You'd have more call-outs of bad organizations,
like you do on a local level.
Because remember, still local governments
can still go bankrupt, and they do.
State governments can still go bankrupt, and they do.
The federal government never goes bankrupt
because it's always supported by the Federal Reserve.
And that's the same as any other modern economy
is supported by its central bank.
But really what it means is it's core.
It doesn't mean economic growth.
It doesn't mean full employment.
It doesn't mean low inflation.
It means at its core,
the reason they buy government bonds
is to give it,
precisely as you said, Marty,
to give it,
to just make it look better
than it otherwise would.
That's why they buy it.
There's no other reason for it.
It's not,
that's the core.
That's the core of the reason.
And that's what their balance sheet looks like.
So that's what you're going to start to see
with more easy easily printed digital money would be you would issue it and then as you issue that
you would buy more government debt so it'd be an even easier way to do that but of course all it
comes out with all the orwellian things as well bells and whistles that we all know would happen
but there's just no way man there's no way they're going to pull it off um
the pressure is huge it's massive yeah so it's amazing how much they're talking about it uh
i know it sounds like i'm dealing in free real estate here i'm not putting money on it or
whatever but i've said it for years i don't see it happening uh in the united states in particular
the dollar has too much to lose as far as uh just where it is right now it's certainly not needed at
a bank level right so i'm not that well the banks hate the idea of it right because they get cut out
of the whole situation yeah it's it's in all the papers no no no it's not a everybody knows it they
all know that it's challenged deep down like they know that that they can't make this thing
profitable for the banks
if we were in a
monopolized communist
Orwellian type of a
situation where you have
CBDC on a
central banking platform
a central banking app
yeah
imagine the app the Federal
Reserve will create did you see the
I mean
for all the shit we get the Federal
Reserve I do love the St. Louis
Federal Reserve database
but did you see the article they came out with
this week
comparing the price of a carton
of eggs as measured in
dollars versus Bitcoin
they tried to dunk on Bitcoin
they did
the time frame was January 21st
or excuse me January 2021
through April of this year
and they tried to dunk on Bitcoin
because Bitcoin obviously was volatile with the price
movements but if you look at
the overall inflation rate
of a dozen eggs as measured in sats it was something like 44 and the dollar inflation
rate over that same time frame was 77 and they were like look at all this fluctuating volatility
in bitcoin but it's like at the end of the day you had a higher inflation rate and then they
allowed you to to zoom out on the chart all the way back to january 2015 if you did that the price
of eggs in bitcoin fell by 99 and it rose by 19 dollars so they seem a bit confused and in their
messaging and attempts to
attack Bitcoin.
Looking at it right now.
Moronic. I mean,
there's no hope for these guys. There's no hope.
I mean, the only way that they keep it on
as they get on is because of that monopoly
privilege. That's all that comes down
to it.
That's all there is to it.
So a lot has changed
in the central banking system
since we last met. Obviously, we've had
interest rate targeting,
the federal reserve targeting a higher interest rate we had quantitative tightening begin within
the last couple weeks here and obviously that's having a massive effect on the monetary and
banking system and there's we had a negative gdp print in q1 of this year it seems like
with all the data that's been rolling in month on month since that gdp print came in it's looking
likely that we'll have another negative gdb print here in q2 2022 inflation still rising you have
the fed trying to tame that inflation what number one is the fed doing from a monetary policy
perspective how would you describe the mechanisms of what they're doing and number two how would you
describe the predicament they're in in terms of gdp falling inflation staying elevated and
um seeming like it's not going to come down anytime soon and the decisions they have to
make later this summer or into the fall well you saw was it bullard uh before
a week or so ago uh who um one of the governors who after they were talking about okay we're
going to have to, uh, eventually hike even more, uh, again, you know, take some base money out of
the system in order to increase interest rates. We're going to have to do that, uh, a little bit
more this year, uh, that will help to curb inflation fears might not curve actually inflation
price inflation, but it might curb inflation fears. And that's what we might have to do.
and then bowler just said like a week or two ago it's like oh yeah but after that we'll we can
start talking about another cut again they're already talking about a cut while they're talking
about increases so uh it's both sides of their mouth as always and i don't actually have any
more uh you know i'm not ready to make any other predictions you know as i am like with the broad
stuff about the trends of base money other than that but i will say uh it should always be we
should always be very clear about what this price inflation stuff means and in my opinion it means
absolutely nothing uh just like this article you just pointed out about the eggs which i'm looking
at which is hilarious in bitcoin terms um you gotta like john williams status shadow stats i
know you probably say it a lot on your show marty but um i will never i finally get into a point
by the way where i'm going to start doing some youtube videos and i have a good charting engine
that's coming and i have a lot of good data that i've collected over the years just like this
monetary based stuff and i really try to dig into a lot of these money supplies what it means what's
the actual growth i might compare to gdp and other things the population and all the rest
uh but i say all that just just to point out that i will never ever in a billion years have a cpi
index in one of these charts. Never. And I just don't think it's worth the time of anybody to
try to decipher it either. I mean, if you're going to read something from the Fed,
it's going to be gobbledygook that's absolutely going to support their position.
And if you even try to see, like, I remember talking about one of these times how just
hilarious how there was like a Bloomberg article that tried to decipher the two different types of
inflation like had tried to tie them together because there's like one that's from the bls
and one from the fed they're they're quoted differently they're defined differently of course
any sort of you know be proper be proper on our terms here right so the austrian traditional
definition is an increase in the stock of money that's what i track with monetary base the
traditional inflation this stuff which really they've been really going hard since like the 90s
that's when we started doing the price inflation targets and stuff this stuff is just made up i
I mean, it's literally filet mignon and Cornish hens in your hedonic of your meat one quarter,
and then it's ground chuck the next.
I mean, they're just changing the hedonics, the underlying variables of these systems.
And it's just a simple index.
It's free real estate.
No one can check these things.
It's not open source.
no one has any idea what these things mean and john williams himself has said and he continues
to say that it's double it's it's at least double the real inflation the real price inflation rate
of goods has to be at least double but i would even take it a step further and just not say don't
waste your time with the stuff because it's much more informative to look at real asset growth look
at look at the price of gold look at the stock of gold uh look at the stock of the monetary base
if you want to look at gdp that's another one that's like very iffy fine look at gdp but don't
go much further than that like look at stock prices uh actual stock prices that you can verify
with an index on an exchange that's traded and we know it's traded okay those can change
in definition for sure but it's a free market that like is a relatively free market right so
those are relatively strong price signals yes yes look at the bitcoin price look at the stock of
bitcoins. Those are the things that really always interest me. And I just think it's noise, man.
I mean, how many times have... You and I talked about this, or you and I'm sure plenty of guests.
And it's not the right definition. We've lost that battle, unfortunately. I always try to say
money inflation versus price inflation. I try to be specific. I forget plenty of times, but
it's just not the right definition it's but but i think we've lost that battle inflation is
typically defined as the central bank defines it which is a general increase in the price level
but the problem is you just can't define that cannot define that and if they define it they're
going to define it to their whim not to yours yeah who was the off street was it mises who said
inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena that was friedman friedman yeah
yeah yeah so what he meant was price inflation is always in everywhere a monetary growth inflation
phenomenon which is what i like to follow and what i'm trying to calculate in that monetary base
those numbers that i was telling about that 13 percent per year compounded figure that's
monetary inflation that's monetary inflation that always in everywhere will cause price inflation
Yeah. I don't want to be that guy, but I want to bring it up. Obviously, we have attempts at quantitative tightening right now and a lowering of the monetary base. The nature of credit markets specifically is going to curb the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world's ability to do that for a prolonged period of time.
considering the supply chain
problems that exist
throughout the world
creating very
very dire
supply side problems
for people to get
essential resources
and the fact that
new central banks
are at the revert course
and begin expanding
the monetary base
even more
because as you've
described
it's their only way out
does the word
hyperinflation begin to
seep into
your mind
impossible to predict
that's why I said I don't want to be that guy
but
there's a social aspect
to it too so if you think of
Bullard, Jerome Powell
the Federal Reserve Board here
Christine Lagarde
over in Europe
it's like there's
cracks in the
social aspect of central banking
that are beginning to show at town hall
meeting in the Netherlands
which Christine Lagarde was nervously laughing
and just hand-waving the ECB's future movements
to unwind that balance sheet away.
And then we have Jerome Powell here
saying that he's dead set on curbing price inflation
here in the United States via interest rate policy.
And it's going to become glaringly obvious,
I think, at some point later this year
that even though they attempted to curb that price inflation
with aggressive interest rate hikes
relative to what the Fed has done in recent decades,
that's going to prove to be ineffective
to curb the runaway prices in food and energy specifically.
And at that point, does the public go,
oh, shit, these people don't have any control over this?
And then does the social aspect of hyperinflation begin to creep into the situation where people begin to panic and part ways with their dollars and euros as quickly as possible to get the assets they need to survive?
yep i think that positive feedback loop is inherent in any system it certainly is inherent
in a banking system uh would not be inherent in a 100 fully reserved banking system although i'm
not an advocate for that or care i guess one way or another it could could work in a bitcoin world
might not work in a bitcoin world uh i'm a fan of free market systems right where you have the
market forces which are going to if one bank decides to aggressively lend or be aggressive
in their behaviors other banks would quickly keep that bank in check and other assets on them
whether it's gold in the vaults bitcoin uh you know in the wallets if they can um so that would
be the ideal system i guess for me what i'd say is and with this system that positive feedback loop
is massive because you have this government that we've talked about the central bank relationship
between the government where anytime that there is a crack they the solution is paper over it
literally and figuratively so you know again i'm always hesitant to say that there comes a point
but you are right uh that that would exactly be the scenario it's a positive feedback loop
that feedback loop is exacerbated under this monopolized system more than it would be under
any free banking system, more than it would be under any Bitcoin system. It's certainly more
macro as well. So if you had a free banking system where one town decided to go crazy on
real estate, that would typically be an isolated thing, or at least, yeah, it would typically be
an isolated thing. It's the idea for free market banking system. Here, it's global. As we talked
about the reserves, all this stuff, when you're talking about the interest rates, all that money
that flows in and out, it's flowing out of just a few banks. It's like a handful of banks, less
than 10, say for 75 to 80% of those reserves. So it's extremely centralized. It's extremely
top down and those are all recipes for monetary disaster if that positive feedback loop begins
it's just it's just again look at the numbers look at the trends look at the trajectory
those things i know you're not a like a doom and gloomer here and i'm not either like we are
optimistic about bitcoin here and i do think bitcoin is going to play a role which we can
get to um but it is it is very dangerous what i will say as well what i wanted to say about this
point is for all the problems europe has with wars and all the rest you know the germans in
particular they know the dangers of hyperinflation like they really know it like to their core um
and and that is partly a saving grace i think of europe of the eurozone system you know gold is
actually a mandated part of your eurozone system uh there isn't uh there are different sort of
the different things that that europe has that the united states doesn't there's a bit more checks
um of course not good comments uh which are not not not positively worsened comments
not confidence inducing at all yeah not confidence inducing from the leader of said bank
um nor really good legislation pieces have been coming out lately uh so those yeah there's a lot
of negatives in the in the negative column even though i do think that as a whole the people do
understand in europe uh really how bad things could get so you would think that they would
try to hold their leaders a bit more accountable to that but um you know again i i just this is
something i cannot make a prediction on i don't know the time no one knows for sure no one can
predict hyperinflation that is something that is uh it's a it's a monster that can just come at
any time it's happened hundreds of times in the last 30 years yeah it's a social event horizon
right again there's obviously the mechanical expansion of the monetary base that comes into
play but it's talked about a lot on this show because i mentioned it as much as possible but
many people in the mainstream and in the outside world completely discount the social aspect of
hyperinflation there's it's a it's a confidence game as well and it is absolutely a confidence
game because of that monopoly like if you didn't have that you wouldn't have this
it's shenanigans
data and everything else you just wouldn't
it's not something
inherent to free markets right like we don't have
to worry about this in any other product
why do we worry about it with our banking product
it's from that side
it's just so I know
I know I'm speaking to the choir here I know that I am
please dear listener I know that I'm
speaking to the choir well I don't think so because
because I agree with you
I'm actually partial towards how
Finney's view of Bitcoin's future where you
have a free banking system that is built
on top of
a Bitcoin standard
where I think a lot of listeners
are believers in
fully reserved Bitcoin
backed global
banking system.
But I do think there's going to be
a
free banking system built on Bitcoin
is enabled. And it's actually something
I wanted to bring up with you because you were in Oslo and
having talked to
Odell about the experience there
and what people were talking about.
Chami and Mintz were a big discussion
there, and I think as a Bitcoiner
looking at what Eric
Siria and Obi
and Justin Moon are building with the
Fediment protocol, that provides a mechanism
that could have a
free banking system flourish on top of Bitcoin.
Yeah, well, I mean the
mechanism
of Lightning in
general is is i want to call it fiduciary there's a quote it's actually literally just talking about
with rodolfo uh recently this week see if i can find it i'll pull it up here for you
but um i have this quote say from peter from like 2018 on lightning in general which applies to this
um i'll pull it up but but basically the idea is that yeah first of all first of all broad point i
don't even i would even you know be more agnostic as you said like i totally think that that finnian
view could happen totally think that it could happen with this uh with this system of balances
that uh that can be transported bitcoin-based balances that can be transported outside of the
main chain under different rules different circumstances different users different use
cases um absolutely a believer that that could happen and if that does happen uh it would be a
unique new type of money that had never been seen before because i do think that the it's not quite
accurate to call the to call lightning a fiduciary system it's also not quite accurate to call it
um it's not it's it's certainly not the rules of bitcoin so peter todd i can't even find it right
But Peter Todd said in 2018, quote, I still have safe clothes, basically said it's a middle ground state where it's not quite a claim.
It's also not quite under your control, the balance.
It's possible if the sender really, really wanted to attempt, although he would be penalized, it's possible that he could maybe succeed in reclaiming the payment.
That was sort of the, he was, it was a threat about senders reclaiming.
That was the discussion.
It was four years ago.
but um that idea applies to all this stuff uh that can that can be built on top and i i think
it's a good it's a good description uh all right so your deposit account your bank account a stable
coin which we haven't talked about yet all of those things are fiduciary media they are managed
by a third party all that fiduciary media means it's a money and it's fine to call it money no
problem like paypal venmo just call it money whatever you wish go crazy all of that stuff
is fiduciary media it is man is media that is managed by a third party
on your behalf to settle some are better than others some can do quicker than others
but it's not base money okay so base money is those dollars base money is gold base money is
bitcoin this system is very interesting i think that could happen all of these systems on on
lightning and um it's not i would i would not go so far yet to say that it's fiduciary media
but it's something it's it's probably something different it's probably something new and unique
and it's a payment that would not have existed before and if you wanted if you really wanted
to get back to base money if you're worried for some reason first of all you don't need to have
even have many funds on there at all and if you wanted to get back to base money bitcoin it would
take a matter of seconds to minutes to do so which is unlike anything that you can have
in the current financial system so so this is a good shit this is a good change in your mind
sorry is this a good change in your mind or good evolution absolutely yeah i know i mean so again
to be fully agnostic which i really am as far as how a free market banking system could go i'm not
an advocate for having a free market system that's definitely like fractional reserve and
you have people that argue about this stuff like you might have a free market system you might have
a narrow banking system you might have a fractional reserve system you might have a fully
reserved system the the rub is none of that's going to happen anymore and it's been dead for
100 years because of central banking so it's really just mental masturbation at this point
anyway that's why i don't like these fractional reserve arguments with austrians i know you're
not going there and i agree with you 100 with the way that you put it with with the finnian view but
it's just mental masturbation it's never going to go anywhere uh it's a dead it's a dead idea
um because we have these central banks that are fully in control and fully monopolize the system
only way is that hayekian sly roundabout way where we can get around the state money and that's
obviously bitcoin the next step uh do we go back to like this fully anarchic free market system
i don't know what do you think i don't think anytime soon so it's again it's built on top
of bitcoin it's something in parallel that probably is more free market might be black
might use that word black market but it's it's a system that's in parallel for a while yeah i mean
i think the mechanism is certainly there to produce that anarchic system you just described
yeah it does
do the social
tendencies of the
market
lead us there
that's the question
do people want that
who knows
the beauty is
like
we're having these
tools built that
will
allow people to go
explore those options
if they so wish
I think it's like
the discussion
you know I mean
it's like
this is deep
deep
we're talking about
deep deep security
deep levels of
freedom
gatekeepers
you know it was a gary north quote i loved a while back gary north
rest in peace who just hated bitcoin he thought it was a total ponzi scheme
libertarian i don't know if listeners might have read him interesting writing but uh
he said in one of his speeches which is not a unique really thing to him but talking about
academia and ivy league and banking and all this stuff it's just like all the gatekeepers are still
here, but the walls are down, you know, so the gatekeepers are going to hang around,
but you can literally walk around them, you know, into, into, into the, the, into the
castle, into home or went to wherever you want to go.
I mean, they're, the walls are down.
So that's really cool.
Um, it's absolutely not going to change.
Doesn't matter.
Like Loomis regulations, uh, legislation doesn't matter to me.
I don't think about it and worry about it.
i think this is something we really need to if obviously bitcoiners like to talk we're in a
more narrative is very important but i think in terms of educating individuals outside the bitcoin
bubble and or earnestly trying to explore bitcoin as a solution is to highlight what you just did
is that the walls are down and again like like i was expounding on this libertarian focus podcast
a couple weeks ago like we don't need to play within this mechanism anymore this this administrative
state like we can the walls are down and go walk around them and do it over here it's just
again getting a lot of social talk in this podcast like just getting it through people's thick skulls
that you have the ability to take this particular action
and focus your attention and your work and your life force here
as opposed to trying to fight an upstream battle
with an impossible battle that you're never going to win
with the administrative state.
It's just trying, how do we?
And maybe it's not the responsibility of Bitcoiners,
individuals like you and I who believe that
this is the right way to go how do we convince more people or do we have the ability to convince
them maybe people just need to come to this realization on their own and it's not in vain
i don't think you know we i don't i wouldn't call it a responsibility but i would call it a
privilege i mean it's not in vain to do this stuff for sure yeah yeah i always love these
conversations should we
get back to like the
monetary base what
should we highlight
q120
21
do you like the
info
i do i do i like the
new design overhaul
matt and i were
talking on last week's
rhr he's very happy
that you're
rebranding the
porcopolis economics
over crypto voices
he always tries to
tell me this i'm like
Dude, you know that I don't care at all.
I appreciate your enthusiasm there,
but long before it was a crime
to label something crypto,
I just still don't care.
But it's still there.
The podcast is still called Crypto Voices.
I mean, it's a sister brand still there.
Much to it, I guess.
So, like I mentioned earlier in the conversation,
Q4 2021 to Q1
2022
Bitcoin fell
from
the 7th spot
in the world monetary
base
standings to the 9th spot
can we look at
18
18
yes sir
it's a very divergent
chart there what's going on here
yeah so this this is oh yeah it's a bar chart for this uh for this forum uh but let me just
describe it i would encourage listeners to check it out but this is a this is i think it's called
a tornado chart so on the left you have gdp per capita of all of these countries and it's not all
countries right so you have the eurozone is one block you know you can think the united kingdom
i guess there's one block there's many countries in that but it's it's the uh it's the currency
blocks right on the on the left and the right uh gdp on the left and the black gdp per capita and
on the right is monetary base per capita monetary base per capita and as number one uh as we talked
about there um is norway so the monetary base is minuscule like i don't know if you can barely see
it yeah that's 1600 you know i'm just gonna say dollars no understand when i say that it's not
dollars norwegian kroner it's danish kroner all the rest so 16 1600 equivalent per person in norway
okay and again that's cash that's norwegian kroner per person all right but they have that 1.2 1.3
trillion dollar sovereign wealth pension fund sitting on their balance sheet as well so they
don't there's many reasons why they can go for this sort of cashless society and they can try
to do this virtue signaling and all the rest the esg and all the rest it's you know this is this
scandic way right i highly doubt that they would do that if they didn't have this ridiculous pension
fund that has if you look at any other uh any other bar there to the right this would be dwarfed
okay switzerland is number two by the way it's 94 000 per person but obviously swiss franc is a
huge currency. It's traded everywhere. It's traded in China. I mean, Swiss francs is a huge
currency. So obviously, Swiss francs are not all in Switzerland. Neither are the dollars. But still,
it's a way to look at it. $94,000 per person in Switzerland. Norway has $1,600. But if you look
at that pension fund again, it's $220,000 per person in Norway. It's just insane. It's remarkable
that they've done that all the rest but you got to think about these things when you start thinking
about like what is gonna what a cbdc is gonna look like in uh in all of these countries i mean
it's just there's no good asset that you know those central banks can try to manage and work
uh hold something together nor is just very very unique all they're going to do is as we've talked
about ad nauseum here is they're going to buy government bonds make the government look better
than it would otherwise look if the central bank wasn't there and put money into the system and
take the bonds out of the system therefore increasing the price lowering the rate lowering
the yield lowering the interest rate so norway is a very unique beast very interesting beast there
uh very small uh base money per capita compared to uh like the wealth of its of its people the
size of its economy, which is the largest economy per capita in the world. So one of, I should say,
I don't know if there's maybe a European union one and I'm going EU wide there or Eurozone wide. So
anyway, sorry, another tangent. Um, so, so you have that there, you have the USA is about $18,000
per person is the monetary base, $18,000. Just think about that. That's not $18,000 in your
bank account that's eighteen thousand dollars the cash absolute cash money um of course the
us dollar is global currency the world's quote reserve currency other central banks like to
hold dollars all the rest so there's many many dollars that are outside of the united states but
you know that's a lot of money that's a lot of money per person that is uh that is printed and
you know
a country of
330 million people
yeah
I will
I will leave it up
to the listener
to think if that money
is like
you know
if that's indicative
of how
the average person feels
that you know
if they
if they feel that like
they have
the resources
to merit
you know
that much money
well
I mean
I'm sure you've heard
the stat
that gets thrown around
often
your average American
I believe 60%
probably more now
I would imagine today compared to when
the stat was popular a few years ago
60% of your American
citizens couldn't afford a $400
emergency expense without going into
debt. No savings, yeah.
So
I doubt if you were to poll your
average American
man on the streets, they would feel
that $18,000
is indicative of
yeah it's massive it's massive i mean why why would you have this money other than to be
sitting as base money somewhere close to your control i mean i guess what you know
so money should be right just that think about think about that eighteen thousand dollars and
yes i understand the number's probably lower because uh because it's an international
huge portion of those dollars hundred dollar bills are more outside the u.s and inside the u.s i
understand but nonetheless nonetheless i mean that's that's uh yeah that's just i mean even
if it's off by a factor of 10 your average american still be like yeah yeah yeah four
hundred dollar expense yeah 10 that's a good way to put it jesus so and then another one obviously
which is interesting which is crazy is japan uh a little bit down the list as far as the economy
goes um and then put that number in the uh description there but it's i don't know 10
uh oh okay actually the economy is huge gross right it's like the third biggest economy in
the world uh if you count eurozone is one block it's the third biggest economy i believe and
third or fourth and but per capita way down all right this is interesting because japan is famously
been printing money for 30 years to get themselves out
of the Nikkei bust.
And $45,000
equivalent
yen per person
in Japan. Very rich country,
very expensive country.
I'm not sure.
Very terrible demographic situation
over there right now.
I'd like to talk to some Japanese as well to feel
how they feel about that. Again, base
money, you should at least
have a pretty good portion
of that in your coffers in your private coffers ready for as you said emergency expenses for your
family for heirlooms passing things on for your nest egg savings it's a hell of a lot of money
and all that money is in japan by the way that yen is not like unless you speak japanese you're
not doing business in japan right so it's 45 000 worth of yen that they have per capita it's a
massive balance sheet, as you've
asked me about before. Sometimes it's been number one
in these quarterly updates.
They're printing money. They've done it
for 30 years. They continue. Again, why
would we expect anything to be different
as time goes on?
I think it's an interesting one.
You can't expect anything
because, again, like you've
described, the mechanisms of the way
this monopolized
monetary system and this
wedding of the central
banking system and the governments that are printing
all this debt, mechanically
this can't be unwound.
Mathematically,
mechanically, no way.
Not possible.
What do you think about
so we talk a lot about inflation
in the current system, the modern system
and a lot of people
wonder about a Bitcoin system
if it would have deflationary effects.
What do you think about
about that as time goes on i mean i believe i uh i believe that and i think jeff booth price of
tomorrow the point he makes in that book is very enlightening where we've had especially in the
tech sector in terms of software and iphones and computers and the productivity increases that
they've brought us and their relative price compared to decades ago we've had extreme price
deflation in those areas despite the monetary expansion that the world has experienced over
the course of that time in parallel um and obviously we've had stock real estate inflation
to healthcare, education, whatever,
to counteract that deflationary pressures
in the technology sector.
I don't see why moving to a sounder monetary system
or a sound monetary system
wouldn't bring those deflationary pressures
to those parts of the economy as well.
I mean, I'm a believer that stocks, real estate,
education, healthcare are being artificially
propped up prices, at least, of those services and goods
because of the monetary expansion.
Could be simple understanding.
Maybe there's more nuance that I'm not seeing, but just...
No, agreed.
It's absolutely going to be the case.
It was the case in the classical gold standard.
Prices generally fell over a few hundred years.
um you know in the u.s pre like worldwide classical gold standard but in the u.s
uh in particular but other countries as well with these types of gold back
uh gold based dollar or pound uh norwegian kroner based systems so prices did gently fall and it
would be i think very good to get back to that but you always get this uh weird concern from
people that that would like somehow be a bad thing if we had definitely falling prices i mean it's
bad for it just forces lenders to be more risk averse with because it's bad for lenders at the
end of the day right no yeah so yeah well it's bad it's potentially bad for borrowers actually
um so now like now would be a good time obviously with inflation if you could get money by bitcoin
right you take a loan that would be great thing because you don't have to pay that
uh loan back in this fixed lower i mix that up it's bad for borrowers so like if you're
going to borrow money you got to be sure that what you're going to bring to market is going to
outpace that deflationary pressure does booth think that um i don't know it's opinion on
I'm wondering if you know
because some people think that there won't be
lending
in this type of market
or it can't work
do you know his opinion?
I can't speak for Jeff
I don't know his exact opinion on that
but
again if you play this
I think it's interesting because
like one of
another objection let's say
uh i think it's related but it's i think it's easily solvable as like some you know
uh like these free bankers right like selgen white as far as i know they would think that
if you get into a deflationary uh price a price deflationary uh system and you don't
don't necessarily have other inflating factors to counteract that and you did have inflating
factors in the gold systems right because gold unlike bitcoin was not fixed it's still it is
fixed in the ground but it still increases you know every year yeah miners would go out
mine to go out and mine asteroids whatever you know alchemy i think is i think actually i know
for sure i remember talking about this with adam back like gold has been created it's extremely
expensive to do it but gold has been created in a lab so it can be done regardless you can create
gold if you want um you can you know you can mine more gold you can get gold so there's an
inflationary pressure population all the other things they wonder if it becomes too awkward
if it if if deflationary pressures uh uh still counteract that and then you get to the point
where your labor uh would like what would you do like you know do you have to give price cuts
to profitable good companies and my opinion to that is absolutely wrong way to look at it
you'd fix it on the supply side wouldn't you i think you'd be even simpler you just let them
work shorter hours like in the like today it's okay work the same or harder and we'll give you
wage increase in a currency that's inflating and the other scenario it's like we're all being more
productive and better go into your life i'll pay the same work less i think that's a simple answer
to that but um i haven't heard any if anybody's actually addressed it that way but i definitely
think that um that's the goal right it's like we want a machine not in a dystopian ai way but we
want machines we want technology to help us it's obvious that that's happening in the current
tech world even amidst this inflationary monetary inflationary pressure and price inflationary
pressure um but in a deflationary or a no inflationary environment of bitcoin you would
just have the ability to have the same output have the same growth you still have population
growth still have all the rest but you just work just work less so less people reading more books
toiling in the land
sounds like a great
future
yeah
I don't know
what others are thinking about that
but I think that's the case
and I do think that you still have lending
but like you said it would just be
more risk averse
borrowers you'd have to be much
more careful as a borrower
imagine the business
yeah
businesses would switch to
like a bootstrap model
which is easier in today's
day and age in the digital world. It's
significantly easier to bootstrap
a company and provide
utility to the world. Obviously
with capital intensive hard
asset endeavors it's not the same
case but
much harder to bootstrap.
Yeah bootstrapping as in using
other service providers to get started
in your endeavor.
Yeah, or just running as lean as possible until you get traction using cash flows and profits to reinvest instead of going out and getting debt.
Yeah.
I think it's great, man.
I mean, all of these things are fantastic.
We got to keep promoting free banking.
We got to keep promoting free markets.
It's not going to happen.
We know this.
the hard problem of defense is hard
the hard problem of central banks
is hard
to get around but
that's a good way to put it
like you said
just keep educating the fact that
the walls are down
and then
that's where I think the hope
lies
and end it on a white pill
on a hopeful note
we can do it
You can do it today.
You're listening out there.
Download a Bitcoin wallet.
If you're a merchant,
the tools that allow you
to receive dollars
and auto-convert
all those dollars
or a portion of those dollars
into Bitcoin
that will allow you
to accumulate capital
over time
so that maybe you have to work
less in the future.
It's here today.
You can take advantage of it.
It's at your fingertips.
Software.
Open source.
You can download it.
Begin using it.
It's a decision.
It's a mental decision of recognizing, like we said,
that the walls are down around the administrative state
and central banking system and the parasitic federal governments
around the world.
Again, I will echo, I don't think we're going to fix our problems
by trying to play within that administrative state.
I think we have to build systems in parallel that are completely disconnected from these hierarchies that have led us to these dire situations.
And Bitcoin, I think, is the most potent tool and mechanism that allows us to do that.
So that's why I focus on it.
And I have quarterly conversations with great individuals like Matthew to just keep drilling, drilling, drilling.
Me more.
Guess what?
Base cash.
Base cash.
Keep that in mind.
this is hey
anybody listening out there
this is a propaganda channel I'm
propagandizing sound
money and built on
a free and open source software I will
be open with that I
am driving propaganda
fix the money fix the world
Bitcoin fixes this I'm gonna go up
Bitcoin is free to money
these are my propaganda slogans I
will the way CBDC
is are never going to work the money supply
doesn't show that they're going
any way to doing a cbdc it's not going to help the banking system you can unplug from all that
and have basic basic cash which you can what was it the iroquois that was going 11 generations
how far were they seven generations seven generation thinking yes i heard that from you
that's a great point uh completely rewire your brain for those things because that's how it was
done in the past gold and silver basic cash shells beads things before that never really
reached full basic cash but that's same idea you need something oh one more thing sorry
it's tangents again one more you need it you need it for two reasons one is that heirloom
xabo wrote about that a lot in shelling out one is the heirloom one is passing it on
that's why you need basic cash you can do that with fine art you can do that with property
you got to get a fiduciary involved with property right you got to get the legal system
stuff who knows if that property is going to hold value plus it could become a liability for you
depending on the maintenance management all the rest so it's an heirloom that's what shells and
beads and all the rest were used for primitive basic monies to gold silver not a bitcoin
absolutely it's an heirloom that's a main point like that's why you do it that's it's for
heirs it's for passing on your savings to future generations and then the next is if you have um
any concern with your trading partner on a non-local level so if you're going outside of
your home where you're not going to see this person ever again outside of your home area
right so if you're you know the west indies or something trading spices like you're never going
to see these people again at best next season you got to get the gold you got to settle on
more even if you're 80 settled in goods 20 settled on margin with gold or silver like that's why you
have this type of cash and uh those are like the real real reasons and those things still apply
today so bitcoin can get you that international trade with people that you're never going to see
again unbelievably fast utxos renewed destroyed and renewed again every 10 minutes it's really
remarkable there's no other money like it in the world so keep all those things in mind that's why
i'm doing the base money stuff it's it really is like like golden silver and thank you for doing
the base money stuff i think it's important work and i do you said this is four years in now
i think if you keep up with this porkopolis porkopolis economics is going to be one of the
go-to economic data repositories on the internet because people need this good information like
we've said many times throughout the years that we've been recording these episodes quarterly,
nobody's getting this information. Nobody's gathering this data except for you.
And I think the quality of the data is such that more and more individuals will realize
that it is quality data and more eyes are going to be driven to it. And it will be used to drive
home the argument that Bitcoin is better money and the central banking fiat monetary system that
dominates the world today is failing and making the world materially worse off so as i do thank
you come on i have to thank you much appreciated love what you're doing as well always happy to be
on look forward to the next one i mean it's already end of june so it's gonna be uh it's
gonna be coming again but then you gotta wait a month the central banks take forever all the rest
well yeah so that's what i was gonna it does take time to do this but it would be cool
if central banks make it possible to like release these numbers like the same day like gdp and
inflation or no way no way that korea still hasn't given me uh march yet so they're all different and
at the end of the day you do want like i thought about doing it like kind of as a running thing
i could give you right now in june i could give you like a lot of stuff from march i could also
give you u.s through may korea would only be through february but the better way is just to
wait that full month when you know china doesn't come out for a month better way is just wait a
month and then freeze it at most all of them end of march of course the bitcoin data i pulled to
the present like i pulled to you know whenever the block yeah yeah and gold silver as well
a little bit into the nitty gritty of the
methodology
we're at block 739,910
right now
I saw it
the day ahead actually
it was May 4th for a while for the next halving
it was May 3rd now
on the block clock I saw
interesting because we've had a downward difficulty adjustment
looks like
we should have one today actually
it should be relatively flat
as well
I didn't obviously look into it or anything
but I'm surprised about it
alright well
it is
approaching evening or probably is the evening now
where you are
it is indeed thunderstorm rolling
and summer storm
well you go enjoy the evening with your family
I've enjoyed this conversation
all the best to you absolutely enjoyed it
all the best to you you have a major
life event coming
Matt super happy for you
massive awesome
enjoy it
best to the wife
best to the fam
thank you sir
I'm preparing for
very little sleep
over the next couple
six weeks
I mean
I'm still adjusting
with one and
woo
you got
you got your work cut out
for you
yeah it should be fun
luckily
my wife's mother in town
so she's gonna help out
the first couple weeks
so let's
shout out to
my mother-in-law
thank you for coming to help
100%
all right we'll do this again next
quarter peace and love freaks
