TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #358: Q2 2022 Monetary Base Update with Matthew Mežinskis

Episode Date: September 15, 2022

Join Marty as he sits back down with Matthew Mežinskis of Porkopolis Economics to discuss the Q2 2022 monetary base update. Follow Matthew Mežinskis on Twitter Read everything discussed at: Porkopolis Economics Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl Upstream Data CrowdHealth TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

what's up freaks it's your boy marty here to intro this rip of tftc sat back down with our good friend matthew mesinxius from porkopolis porkopolis economics for a quarterly update on the global monetary base but as always we drift into broader economic discussion philosophical discussion. Always a pleasure sitting down with Matthew. This is a good one. Almost two and a half hours.

It was two and a half? Yeah, almost two and a half hours. Good rip. Enjoy it. It was brought to you by our good friends at Unchained Capital. I'm pointing

at their offices. They're right down the hall from me here at the Bitcoin Commons in Austin, Texas. But Unchained's going to help you eliminate single points of failure in your custody model if you're holding Bitcoin

on an exchange it's a single point of failure that exchange can get rug pulled they can rug pull you they can get the government coming say hey don't let this person move their bitcoin another single point of failure is holding your bitcoin in a single sig wallet if you lose your wallet your backup your shit out of luck single point of failure drain the exchanges make sure that you have a secure setup for your bitcoin unchained has their two or three multi-sig bolt in which you hold two keys, Unchained holds one. If you have control of your two keys, you always have the ability to move your Bitcoin

even if Unchained gets wiped off the face of the earth. They will teach you how to recover your Bitcoin with your two keys without their help. But if you're ever in a pinch, you only have one key, they have their key, which can be the second in a two or three multi-sig quorum to move your Bitcoin. Reach out to their White Glove Concierge service

to get set up if you're a high net worth individual if you're a business that has a sizable Bitcoin treasury. Don't take security lightly. Join a team at Unchained to make sure that you eliminate those single points of failure. They also have a lending desk, an IRA product. You can move your Bitcoin into an IRA with keys that you control as well.

Go check out all this at unchained.com. If you have the ability to put in a promo code, use the code TFTC. You'll get $50 off the whiteboard concierge. The whiteboard. It's a white glove concierge service. We're not whiteboarding here. They're putting on the white glove.

And they're saying, here, let us take you to a secure land. Unchained.com slash concierge. Check out that service. This report was also brought to you by our good friends at Brains. Come tomorrow. I believe it's tomorrow. Either tomorrow or next week. It's not going to be Slush Bowl anymore.

It's going to be Brains Bowl. Brains is the team behind Slush Bowl. They've been running it for some time now. Now Slush, formerly Slush, now Brainspool is the oldest mining pool in Bitcoin's history. It's been around for over a decade now, which is incredible to believe, incredible to see. They have this Bitcoin mining handbook, which I wrote the foreword to. Important thing to say with the transition from Slush pool to Brainspool, nothing is changing. All the historical blocks will be the same.

You don't have to do anything at the pool level. You're good to go. It's just a simple name change. they had their brains os plus firmware which allows you to stack more sats with your hash if you have an asic that's compatible with brains os plus firmware you're not using it you're an idiot uh because you're leaving sats on the table and only idiots leave sats on the table so um idiot proof your mining operation if you have asics that are compatible brains os plus firmware download it stack more sats elongate the life of your asics just be smart don't be an idiot go to

Brains.com, B-R-A-I-I-N-S.com. This trip was also brought to you by our good friends at HODL HODL. HODL HODL is here to bring you a lending platform that's no KYC, no AML. It's peer-to-peer, and they have low rates. The lending rates on HODL HODL are relatively low right now if you go look at competitors as well. So if you're looking for a good rate and you need liquidity and you don't want to sell your Bitcoin, you go to Lend.HODLHODL.com,

And what you do is you find a peer that is looking to lend Bitcoin. You put your Bitcoin up in a two or three multi-sig escrow. You hold one key. The counterparty in your loan holds another key. And HODL HODL holds the third key. You don't have control of your Bitcoin in that quorum because obviously you don't have two of the three keys. However, since you do have one key, you have visibility into the loan. So you know that while you're paying your loan back, you're going to get your sats back at the end of the day if you do that.

Because you have visibility into the two or three multi-sig escrow. wallet. Uh, if you're looking to get yield on stable coins is what happens. You put Bitcoin up, uh, as collateral. If you're a borrower and you get stable coins in return that you can then go spend. If you have stable coins like a liquid tether, and you're looking to get yield on that, you, uh, put them up in this peer to peer marketplace to be lent out with an interest rate that you attach to it. And then you can, uh, get your, your capital plus interest back and using Bitcoin's native multi-sig properties to make this happen. Go to lend.hodl, hodl.com to check this out this trip is also brought to you by our good friends at upstream

data upstream data is here to take care of all of your mining needs whether you're an at-home miner somebody who's a hobbyist miner using natural gas like myself or a large utility provider or upstream oil and gas operator upstream is here to build the tools that you need for an at-home miner they have their black boxes which allow you to plug a black box in to your house so that you can mine at home and you put the miners in the black box you shut the door and it doesn't make very loud noises like asics and open air do it also controls the heat and so you can stack sats non-kyc aml sats from the comfort of your own home they're selling bundles if you use the code freaks now well for the black box only if you use the code freaks you're gonna get five percent off

the black box but if you want to get a bundle you can buy a black box and upstream will also acquire ASICs for you that you can purchase via upstream um go to shop.upstreamdata.ca to check that out use the code freaks to get five percent off the black box and then if you're on the more industrial side of things they have their their uh their why can i think of this their hash huts uh 50 kilowatt 180 kilowatt 900 kilowatt um i have a 50 kilowatt hash hut that i've been using flawlessly for almost a year now. The only time I ever have to shut it down is when I need to change the oil in the generator.

I've had, outside of the oil changes in the generator, it's been 100% uptime. I'm extremely happy with the hash hut. So go to upstreamdata.ca, tell them that TFTC sent you. If you do decide to purchase a hash hut, the team is going to take care of you. They're getting you generators, data centers, miners, and then they're going to help you get set up.

Makes it easy. Let Upstream do the hard lifting for you. Last but not least, this rep was also brought to you by our good friends at CrowdHealth. CrowdHealth is here to really change the healthcare game, right? Health insurance is traditionally opaque. You typically get a bad service from the hospital providers and everything tends to be more expensive than you think it would be, even if you have insurance. CrowdHealth is here to change that model.

It's not health insurance, but what it is is a different way to approach health care. Me and my family are using CrowdHealth and what we do is we pay a monthly fee that goes into a health service account of a bank account that we control and we build up our basically our account month in and month out. And then on top of that, a portion of our monthly payment is getting put into Bitcoin as well. So we have cash, U.S. dollars and cash, Bitcoin sitting in two separate accounts that are gaining value. And if we ever have a medical need, we pay the first five hundred dollars of our medical expense and then it goes out to the crowd health community and we crowdsource our our health care costs.

Not only is that a new model, not only doing are they doing that on the funding of your health care, but also the crowd health team. You're going to get a dedicated health advisor or health advocate, excuse me, that is going to work on your behalf and you're going to be with them throughout the duration of your time as you're using CrowdHealth. And then they're going to go and negotiate with you, for you, with the health care providers that you're interacting with, which the insurance companies are terrible at doing. They don't really care about getting you the lowest price. The typical health insurance industry isn't. CrowdHealth is. They want to negotiate prices down. It's good for you.

It's good for the doctors. the doctors get paid quicker. Uh, and if you're really into Bitcoin for the sovereignty and you like having control of more control over your wealth, CrowdHealth makes a lot of sense for you too, because it gives you more control over your healthcare. You get more options. Uh, you get more visibility into what's going on and you, and you have people that are advocating for you. Um, so go to joincrowdhealth.com slash TFTC. Uh, the first thousand signups for the Bitcoin community are going to get $99 a month per person for the first six months. It's a really good deal. So go check it out. Join crowdhealth.com slash TFTC. Enjoy this rip with Matthew.

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. Yeah, I need to dry out. I'm drying out right now. It's 9.30 in the morning.

Matthew asked me if I was drinking alcohol. Now I'm drinking coffee. No shame in that, my friend. not at all no it's good to be back I'm finally settled back in Austin after a summer away in the summer of travel back in my king bed of comfort it's nice in the morning now the uh the oldest is coming into bed at like 5 30 sleeping for an extra hour he kicked his little brother in the face today that was uh that was a bit of a moment oh you said he was uh he was crawling out of the crib now so that's a little bit of a little bit of more action for you yeah

these days he'll climb out of the crib go into the refrigerator he'll get a yogurt pouch and then he'll walk into our room and slap it on my chest and say open this for me i love it man it's it's beautiful it's a beautiful thing very happy for you yeah well it's coming for you soon sooner than you think so prepare yourself one is good for now one is very very good we just got back from the grecian island of uh santorini actually which was lovely and uh did a little did a little swimming saw some friends it was good yeah what's the vibe like in santorini uh you know it's just not reality uh you know people splurging and uh enjoying their their uh last bits of summer here and it's it's not uh it's not too much of a crazy

party island actually it's more like a couple's place romantic sunset uh it's beautiful you've never been no never been yeah i would recommend that all the grecian islands as you probably have heard they have their different different flares each one but santorini is uh one of the more i think memorable ones and i haven't been to that i'm looking to roads in santorini but it's we've been back a few times there's direct flight here from from the baltics to uh to Santorini, so that's always nice. Yeah, I'm not well-traveled in that part of the world. I've been to Spain, France, and Latvia.

That's the only, I mean, and if you count my connecting flights in Norway and Sweden, I've got those stamps in my passport, but I need to expand my travel over in that area of the world. It was great to see you in the Baltics, my friend. It was absolutely fantastic. How did you like it? I loved it. It was even better than the first time I went in 2018.

Yeah, that's when we met the first time. Yeah. I mean, shout out to the huddle huddle team, Max, Anna and crew. That's I think the most high signal conference in the world right now. Glad to hear it. Glad to hear it. Yeah. It's a great, uh, it's great little conference. Absolutely. High signal, good people, good fun. Uh, we had some good convos and I, I enjoyed, I enjoyed seeing you there. I enjoyed seeing your, uh, you know, chatting with you at the bars and then you know your irish goodbyes seeing you the next morning

you got irish goodbyes when you're when you're jet lagged in the uh the prospect of getting back to the u.s and having your two children thrust into your arms and your wife saying hey i'm going on a trip for a few days now because you've been traveling for so much yeah you don't want to you don't want to miss those flights but uh no it was uh it was fun oh that's something you wanted to touch on was the uh the last panel the conference. I was up there with Giacomo, Zuko, Peter Todd, Eric Voskuhl, Paul Stork, and myself. And you were aggressively texting me while I was moderating the panel. I loved it. I was, I was very proud of you and happy that you, uh, you got my texts into you.

Uh, you got my texts into the panel there. I, uh, I appreciated that. I think, uh, it was, it was a quick reaction from the panelists to be moving on to different topics but uh i thought if you wanted to we can kick off we can kick off the the base money discussion for this quarter with that because it was it was relevant to what they were discussing i actually liked a lot of the topics they were talking about in that panel so if we don't talk about anything else first it's fine yeah i like the i thought the panel was interesting what you uh moderated there first things first your mic's getting a little staticky right now did you touch something i i did not but um are you hearing it on your end no i sound just fine on my end you need

me to reconnect or something let me see is it is it coming in on all levels logan we're hearing it on our end but and we're live now right yeah are you well we're not live we're gonna pre-record this and then then send it out so it's not like we're on twitter or youtube or anything well at least you got that that at least but um are you recording locally i'm not i am not this time uh so it's just on staticky yeah i didn't change anything at all let me you want me to try to let me just do you want to i don't know i don't know if i reconnect yeah come come out come back in

because we can know you guys for your edits i'm sorry wait let me just let me just try to reset the audio you're great now it's good now yeah it's perfect now okay i can i can also next time if that does happen i'll try to reset the just the audio connection without logging out fully but if you keep this it's going to be very entertaining for your listeners yes yeah you know we we don't edit much here so we probably will keep it but the uh yeah that panel was great and again that's again why i love the conference specifically because max will structure a flow of talks that are a bit controversial and that's what we ended on controversial topics or unpopular opinions in bitcoin and i think what you were texting me

about is the cost to attack the Bitcoin network. And you referenced Bitcoin's overall market cap in the grand scheme of the global base money as a sort of cost to attack the network. Yeah. Yeah. We can start with that one. I guess it's easiest as it's the thing that I'm most adept at, but I thought there were some other actually interesting parts of that panel maybe we can touch on one to hear your thoughts but uh regarding the base money stuff and just regarding the political the political risk to bitcoin there this is a discussion that happens a lot it's always happened and the way eric phrases it which i think is pretty pretty correct i mean it's uh you know satoshi has talked about it in some other ways i don't know

exactly if eric's model is original to his work but the way he always talks about it is a is the you know the censorship risk from the state of blocking transactions uh from miners that aren't basically kyc'd or allowed by the state right and as long as that risk and censorship uh grows there's going to be a cost to bitcoin transactions that will grow for those that want to get them into the next block and um there's a word that he uses a lot and most economists talk about it and there was a few different offshoots of this word on the panel i'll try to keep it germane to why i was texting you about it but the word that is used a lot is seniorage Right. And senior age is basically the definition of the cost that it takes for an issuer of money to print or issue that money versus the face value or the par value of the instrument that they're issuing.

I mean, so as most people understand, most people can kind of think about, I mean, he was even quoting whatever the official statistics or some statistics he probably heard from the treasury, right? It's like, you know, a half of a cent or some cents on the $5 bill versus how many cents on the $100 bill. That's like an actual printing cost or whatever. But basically, I'll know that there's no cost to what the state does when it prints money, right? They just print money. They issue it into the economy. some of that is physical currency some of that is digital currency in the form of the reserves that banks hold with central bank both of them are based money it's the research we do we've

talked about it every quarter on your show um but the uh the difference between the actual cost and the face value is seniorage for the state right it's basically free revenue for the state and as we know that the cost is it's basically rounds to zero with the fiat world because there is no uh there's no gold in the system there's no workarounds with gold that they have to use uh these days so what i was aggressively tweeting you about while they were talking about this because you know of course they still kind of argue about it they're talking about it the panel like what's really the cost of the state how much value does it have what how much is it how much is it going to really cost to attack bitcoin and my tweet or my text to you were just to say i don't

necessarily know the cost where the state will really get aggressive on Bitcoin. But I can say that if you look at the value of Bitcoin versus the value of all of the monetary base in the world, which is basically pure seniorage, Bitcoin is a rounding error, which as I have said this many times on here, probably I've said it on my quarterly updates, but 30 trillion, which actually is down to like 28 trillion this quarter because the dollar is just screaming but whatever 28 trillion 30 trillion depending on the value of the dollar itself that's wittgenstein's ruler right the top 50 currencies measurable in dollars 30 trillion dollars that's basically zero cost for the state to issue and that's the unamateur unamortized total value of money that they've

issued basically throughout all time you know includes the bank of england bank of the federal reserve uh european central banks um collectively so it's 30 trillion and then i i threw in their gold like if you want to say something that actually kind of has a cost or should have a cost it would be their gold holdings and they hold 2 trillion in gold about 1.1 billion ounces of gold collectively worldwide so you know roughly if you want to talk about senior age 30 trillion minus 2 trillion of gold. So it's 28 trillion. I know that gold has nothing to do with money legally anymore. It's not everybody should know that since 1971. Statutorily, there's no connection between gold and fiat money. But it's still something of value that central banks hold

on their balance sheet, presumably for some reason. They haven't sold all of it. And most they're actually buying more now. Notably in certain countries more than others. It's also possible that the US has sold a lot of its gold to keep the price down. That's a whole nother story regardless what's reported it's about two trillion dollars equivalent of gold and they have printed physically and digitally 30 trillion so that is the definition of seniorage and i'm pretty uh not pretty i mean i'm 100 confident in that number and you don't really hear that often so you know i think eric said you know financial incentive there's your financial incentive and i agree and and um so that's kind of just what we can dig into a little bit more like because you

can talk about when you talk about money like you talk about the fiscal spending the taxes the stimulus all that stuff the debt the government generates then you talk about the monetary policy which is what central bank is in charge of and nobody seems to uh want to calculate that global number which i'm happy that we have we continue to track but that really is as far as i can tell as far as you're talking about the it's not what it's not necessarily what it's going to cost the state to kill bitcoin but that's their that's their free lunch so to speak that's their seniors right it's 30 trillion dollars you know minus roughly 2 trillion in gold which they have countering that on the balance sheet but everything else buying a government bond

buying a corporate asset even buying real estate is you know we've got mortgage-backed securities still held by the federal reserve in the amount of like some two trillion dollars uh those assets were purchased costlessly they were purchased with seniorage and so when bitcoin becomes large enough to threaten that seniorage uh i don't know when that will be not sure if anybody knows when that will be but that's when they will probably start doing these state of tax that eric eric talks about censoring transactions kyc and all miners doing all the rest but the action if you want to actually put a number on what represents the seniorage full stop globally to central banks they have about 30 trillion 28 to 30 trillion let's say

in seniorage versus bitcoin which is now sub 500 billion in market cap value so that that's that's the numbers that i was just trying to to put out there and i just gave you a long-winded explanation to start the morning for you so no i love long-winded explanations uh and your mic starts static getting static again so while i respond to that if you try to fix that also you want to see your beautiful face so if you move your mic down a little bit um i don't know if that's possible or move your face to your left but in the context of this conversation it's when we talk about the state attacking bitcoin you mentioned one way in which they can do it which is completely kyc-ing the mining pools and having them kyc their individual

miners that's why it's important to make sure that we have hash rate distributed geographically and hopefully have a material amount of hash rate that is um not pointing to pools or pointing to dark pools uh but i think the the crux of the conversation was around the state's ability to 51 attack the network and that's something we didn't really dive into and er i mean eric responded like i brought it up like what is the logistical possibility of the state actually waging a successful 51 attack because yes we and talk about the overall amount of monetary base that they have. Like you mentioned, $30 trillion, that is what they're protecting as the free lunch that they have

to attack the network from a monetary perspective. But do they have the ability to acquire the ASICs, acquire the energy, acquire the infrastructure, amass all that hash rate, and then successfully attack the network? And that's where I'm a bit skeptical because you have that cost, that $30 trillion. You have Bitcoin's market cap at whatever it is, $350, $400 billion right now. But beyond those numbers, you also have the cost of acquiring the energy, acquiring the ASICs, acquiring the infrastructure. and then again what i always anchor to is like the logistical nightmare of coordinating all of that and i just find it hard to believe that the state could do that yes they can go to these big

warehouse mining operations here in the states and elsewhere throughout the world and try to physically confiscate them and coordinate globally between governments which don't seem to be cooperating too well right now to attack the network but and that sort of discounts the ability of anybody running those operations if they were to see that type of attack coming if they really cared about bitcoin they could just self-sabotage their operations and essentially destroy all their asics and let the miners outside of themselves sustain the network and let it live another day um that's what i actually like what is a logistical feasibility and i brought it up on stage is if the governments were truly worried about bitcoin which considering its

relative market cap to the global base base money right now uh maybe they're not incentivized and they're not too worried about it um but they did have a china specifically did have a unique opportunity to attack the network. Last year, when they kicked all the miners out, you think if they were really smart and were viewing Bitcoin as a threat, the Chinese Communist Party would have confiscated the A6 at the border. They would have had 40 to 60% of the hash rate with which they could use to attack the network and levy this 51% attack that we're talking about. So yes, there are these hard numbers that you are digging up and that we're discussing here but then there's like this intangible uh coordination that has to happen on the back end as well which i'm a bit

skeptical uh these governments would be able to to follow through with but eric would rightly throw that back in my face which is never underestimate your enemy yeah if you're if your threat model is relying on your enemy's incompetence it's not a good threat model um i agree with that and i also agree with your points uh we can we can throw out some numbers though regarding the ongoing cost which i think are helpful as well so that's overall seniorage that was the point that i wanted to make right was that uh that's why i was you know was throwing those texts your way was that it's look this is what it is it's 30 trillion that's what they've issued basically at all time throughout the modern era uh you know but as we know the united

states government is for sure the largest empire that's ever existed so you can you know that's 20 of the monetary base and um like those are just real numbers it's the accumulation of all modern money print that is existed uh throughout you know the modern era but if you talk about uh so that's the money side that's like that's what fills the gap for governments uh as i said in the other presentation i gave right so the central bank is this first for the state second for the banks that was a great presentation by the way if you freak thank you haven't watched it yet go find the live stream thank you the live stream cut off a few things i watched a little bit later but i guess they'll put on they'll put on a more uh like solid piece by piece probably

presentation uh you know recordings at some point as well but yeah thanks for the thanks for the shout out um but but we can look at at the fiscal side too and we can only just look at the united states because i haven't done this worldwide it's a it's a clusterfuck of data out there for government fiscal government fiscal budgets hard enough getting the monetary data but if you just look at the united states um so what the government so it's like why you know why would the government to want to kill bitcoin right if if uh if we had a little bit better society than we have now what certainly what bitcoiners want right is that bitcoin overtakes all fiat money is like the base of the world and we scale it how we scale it you know you probably know it's not my thing to really

i don't really care how you scale it you do everything from centralized exchanges to fetty to the lightning it's awesome i think do all of it but um the the next important thing probably to look at is that ongoing sort of threat to the government and so from there that's the fiscal policy right so it's tax and spend and i was looking at the numbers i can give you some concrete ones as well the worst it's ever been was i like to look at things trending 12 month basis always so like just roll it always look at an annual number so the year of covid right with all the stimulus all the policies this is u.s only now this is just u.s federal government uh the year of covid so between march of 2020 and march of 2021 was uh you know year ending march

2021 uh you're talking about three and a half trillion dollars of tax receipts which by the way just think about that number three and a half trillion like there's no company in the world that makes even yeah i don't know i don't even know like 100 billion would be insane can't even be that that that large it's a massive number right that the u.s government just takes in from tax receipts a year 3.5 trillion dollars um they spent about 8.4 so you were 4.9 trillion in deficit that year that was a that was the record it's down now now that their tax sheets are actually way up uh as of june 2022 they finished at 4.8 trillion in tax receipts and they spent 6.8 so that's a deficit of two trillion and there's deficits by the way they add the national debt

so you could still have a free market a free society that still has governments you know we're not going to get to these anarcho-capitalist city states anytime soon but let's just imagine that we could seriously impair the printing press of each government central bank you can still have a government runs deficits they just have to uh they just have to fill those deficits by issuing debt to the market and people got to want to buy that debt and that's where of course the monetary policy comes into place as i always say i think i've said on your show as well like the best bid on government debt is from the central bank central bank owns about 30 percent of the government's debt in the united states about 30 percent so 30 cents of every dollar that the

central bank is issuing in debt or sorry that the treasury the treasury is issuing in debt is bought by the central bank in some way shape or form and it's much higher in some in japan correct what's your correct and more yeah i don't actually know off the top of my head but it might even be like 40 there there are um i think switzerland is even higher now a lot of these countries that have had to pretty switzerland for odd reasons it's had to actually devalue its currency because it's getting so strong but um these places that have had to do stimulus print whatever in the mostly modern developed countries yeah it can be up to like 40 upwards of 40 the u.s is like 28 at the moment so 28 30 right and but if you took that away if you took that bid

away from the central bank to buy that deficit you know treasuries would be priced worse we'd have more competitive market and you know it'd be more difficult on all of us but uh you would arguably of course have you know in the absence of this monopoly of the central bank seniorage but just free money that they can print right you would have a more uh competitive government all the rest we don't get into all this like theory of these things but just looking at those numbers right the fiscal numbers then if it was that it's worst ever of like almost five trillion dollars in deficit they added five trillion basically to debt in one year the covid year now they're adding about two trillion let's put that in context like what

was the debt in 2008 before we started oh like 10 trillion probably not even like uh i think it was like 10 to 12 maybe and so like in one year we had a 50 percent of government debt here in the states that took if we're using the creation of the federal reserve as the benchmark it took 95 years to get to 10 trillion than we did exactly exactly we we we did uh i mean it's it's 30 trillion now the debt is 30 trillion so it's gone up uh yeah 200 percent in in 15 years on the eve of the financial crisis it was just under 10 trillion just under 10 trillion dollars so that's pretty wild that during just covet alone the united states government pumped in another five and some of that was bought up by the central bank which is expansion of the monetary

base it's the free money that's the seniors it's all the rest right uh but you know you can actually sustain that in the market i'm not arguing to do that i'm not talking about covid policy or anything i'm just saying you look at those numbers they're more and more massive each year simply because of the seniors right the seniors that eric talks about and other people talk about that's the risk to the government but on an ongoing basis even that let's talk about this rounding error again and this is the more get back to your point about how how much would it cost them to really take down bitcoin if they're spending upwards let's say of eight trillion a year or now they're spending about seven trillion right now they're spending they're earning less in taxes but they

become federal government united states spends on a trailing 12-month basis seven trillion dollars it's an insanely high number from a fiscal side bitcoin's security budget bitcoin's revenue plus transaction fees on a trailing 12 month basis is 13 billion 13 billion dollars that's if you took every day the block reward plus transaction fees and just roll it the price of that day like that that's another trailing 12 month figure i like to look at so that's still a rounding error because is a rounding error for the beast that is only the United States government alone. It's a gnat on the ass of an elephant.

So it begs the question, right? I mean, I think it really is a rounding error. I think these people like Gensler, you know, I mean, just, you know, egomaniacs. Like, did you see, by the way, that he recommended Bitcoin to be under CFTC? I did. I did. It was a couple of weeks ago.

Which I thought was interesting. pivot from his side i don't really know but i anyway i don't pay attention it's it's just that you get all this i i said this in the talk as well just not to go into too many things but you talk about you hear these things about cbdc's all the media all the news all the hype all the rest it really is a net on the elephant's ass i mean there's so much other stuff that they're doing i'm not saying it's right i know i know the ethos of your show most of us don't believe that it's right but bitcoin is so small still in 2022 compared to what they're doing if you had actually look at the hard numbers so i don't think first of all i don't know how hard it would be to

actually attack if the if they can spend you know if they could just easily spend a trillion in one year right quote unquote easily and bitcoin security budget budget is 13 billion i don't i don't know um but i'm saying it's certainly something to think about they certainly can walk it like china they could walk into every miner that they can find and say you know give us your equipment or kyc your transactions or whatever you want to do um i certainly agree with you though it's coordination problem and all the rest so we're certainly on the radar and even at the same time of all those statements bitcoin is about the 10th largest currency in the world wildly because all of the other currencies are so bad there's such junk compared to uh you know

the top 10 and even the top 10 aren't that great right the top four really stand alone the dollar euro yen and the yuan so all of that said uh yeah it's still a massive rounding error those are the types of things that's really the seniorage but really it's just that monetary base like the real real uh unamortized unamortized number because you could still live in a world where like i don't know maybe bitcoin is getting a government see what's happening in canada now a little bit maybe maybe you really do get some influence and um i'm not again i'm not saying i rely on this like this was kind of peter's point and eric was pushing back like you know if we had apparently we voted for the dollar right apparently voted for the euro uh that is precisely why bitcoin exists

i know that we i know that obviously we didn't do that and i think he believes that as well but that is precisely why bitcoin exists because we can't you know money is just completely co-opted by the state we can't we can't have apple issuing fiduciary media that we would all trade around like a cash or or google or whatever we have gift cards gift cards is about the closest you can do amazon gift cards like it's pretty damn good but still even there you can't can't really send that around easily um you know unless someone has an account they really really care about being paid back an amazon gift card but like that you know that that's that's the point that's that's that's what they're protecting it's a it's a it's a huge number on an annual

basis a huge number on an amortized total basis and Bitcoin's a rounding error in both of those so it's still it's still certainly like you know it's not without risk for Bitcoiners yeah but

let's let's dive into this scenario where it isn't a rounding error anymore is what was our peak 1.2 trillion market cap at that point Yeah, I don't know the actual peak, but let me check really quick. Definitely over a trillion.

Yeah, at that point, maybe bigger than a rounding error. Let's say we, hypothetically, we get to double that, triple that, and we get to like the $5 trillion range. We get to eat up, or not eat up, but get almost on par with gold. What's gold at right now, like $12 trillion, $11, $12 trillion? $10. $10, yeah. So you get to $5 trillion, you get to half of gold's market cap.

Is that when they begin ringing the alarm bells? And there's so much, because there's so many, again, going back to like the intangibles too. And that's the other, like, because all these fiat currencies, the monetary base, that make up the monetary base, which you have been calculating for some time now and we will dive into eventually. And I think we've discussed this before too,

but when it comes to fiat monies, there's two aspects of the feasibility of these things staying reliable. Into the future, you have the mechanical aspect of how many units there are floating throughout the market at any given point in time. And then you have the social aspect, which is the people who are using these units that are floating around actually having confidence that they're good money. And that's one thing I wonder, particularly considering the state of the world as it stands today on September 13th, 2022, September 14th, whatever the date is, is how I think there's a big blind spot. not only in Bitcoin because I think it's a bit contrarian to Bitcoin

and this would feed into Eric's very good prognosis of never underestimate your enemy. But with that being said, it feels like we're in the middle, maybe the beginnings of a collapse in confidence in these institutions that control these fiat currencies. And if that is the case and confidence continues to wane moving forward, considering the state of energy and food particularly, does that leave an opportunity for Bitcoin to sort of leapfrog these currencies on the social aspect of things where people begin to trust it more than the dollar, the yen, the yuan, the euro? i absolutely think it does absolutely and i mean like the again just try to keep it with the with the hard numbers and like talking about these things um when you talk about the compounding

growth effect which i think both einstein and jefferson said it's the eighth wonder of the world like it can move very very quickly it's an exponential effect and you know like we were just saying you can have 10 trillion in national debt sub 8 trillion before obama comes in even and bush of course even i don't know if he doubled it but he took it way up from there and then all of a sudden here we are you know only 15 years later you got 30 trillion in debt you know you have 8 trillion being pumped out in one year in stimulus spent and spent from like the largest government in the world right uh markets typically tend to move in these power ways or these exponential ways where basically

that tail event still have talks about right that tail event takes over and things just change very very rapidly i think you're going to see that in my part of the world which we'll talk about later if you want with uh the quote-unquote second most powerful army in the world you know getting north korean ammunition to try to take over a country here in 2022 um which of course the Baltics and Poland where I am right now we're like the most uh vociferous and angry uh defenders of Ukrainian freedom at this point because it's just it's just governments are just losing their mind and Russia's a kleptocratic government anyway in mind they still had on and off a top 10 currency in the world the ruble even now I think it might still on paper be even even though the rubble's

not a freely floating a freely floating rate so that just shows you how again top heavy it is with those top four currency and yeah it doesn't have to be in the um in the quote-unquote like liberal the west or the liberal democracies of liberal societies where this stuff needs to take hold i of course would not be like that happy if it's like only being used in these more uh let's say like bad pr countries right where there's like the corporate press in the u.s can just say oh bitcoin's evil bitcoin's bad you know we've gone to silk road to like degenerate governments and stuff of course bitcoin's being used because precisely because those countries are horrible and bad and people need to transact and survive and take care of their families and

all the rest so like you said like you were starting to say before there's there's so many issues all these different vectors uh it's it's going to be i think hard to parse through this stuff but bitcoin certainly has a toehold that i think uh is extremely interesting obviously we've never had this as far as a free market money at gaining a toehold uh against fiat currency in the last hundred years you know we know what happened with with e-gold and all the rest and some centralized institutions that try to compete liberty reserve even choms original uh e-cash yeah all got he all got cucked um yeah it's it's very interesting like particularly here in the u.s right now like you have again talking about the the biggest empire

um that dominates the global economy and the global monetary system like we had president Biden earlier this week, yesterday, and the day the 8.3% CPI inflation clip comes in, which I know you hate, but that's what everybody's anchoring to here in the United States. Everybody seemed 100% confident that it was going to be lower than 8.3%. And it came in at 8.3, markets tanked. And while that's going on, you have Joe Biden, probably not even realize what's going on as he's speaking, um, saying that we're taking care of inflation. It's going down and, um, it's just not materializing. He's draining the SPR, um, uh, strategic petroleum reserve.

It seems like that will be officially tapped out at some point next month, at which point, see, that's what I like, again, anchoring to the social side of things. Like that's what I worry about this winter. That's what, uh, I know we had one conversation in Riga at least about what this winter is going to be like in that part of the world and there's this weird maybe it's a cognitive dissonance here in the united states where i think a lot of people here think the energy crisis specifically

is isolated to to europe because of the natural gas situation and the inability for germany specifically to get natural gas from russia right now and then it feels like i could be wrong but And it feels like over here in the United States, everybody's like, ah, it's just like not a problem over there. It's just a problem over there. It's not a problem here. But people are severely discounting the fact that gas prices here in the United States are artificially being driven lower by the draining of the strategic petroleum reserve. That'll end sometime around the middle of next month by most recent estimates, at which point you're not going to have that flood of supply hitting the market. And at the same time, we're getting deeper into fall, getting closer to Thanksgiving and Christmas, which are heavy traveling seasons.

And I think we could just see, like, right now, gas prices here in Texas are under $3 a gallon, which was not the case earlier. Insane, man. That's so low. you guys don't even know yeah but no i i know you're you're going on a different point well you can see like the the spr gets drained and you just like slingshot up after that because the the supply shock is going to be so great and we're embarking on these idiotic energy policies where the biden administration isn't uh issuing new permits to go drill and even if they were to issue new permits, uh, because of the demonization of oil and gas, the drilling teams, um, have

drilling companies have not reinvested in their equipment. And so you have a scarcity of actual drilling equipment, even if you did want to go drill for this stuff. So what do you, what are your thoughts? I guess we can take this. Um, what are your thoughts about the meme here in the United States that inflation's going to taper significantly. The demand destruction that the Fed has been trying to induce will be successful, will bring down inflation as we move throughout the year. But it just seems like on the supply side, particularly of energy, and then energy is key input in food and it's moving to food as well. But that's simply not going to be the case. no i don't think it's going to be the case at all i think for sure europe's going to lead that

as record inflation and euro is showing that with its weakness but um the again you you said it i don't really like looking at cpi and everything but uh the amount of stimulus that continue is continue to be put in the system the amount of lack of supply for energy that is in the system which is a fault of all western governments as we know government policy usually mucks things up that the free market could do better on its own um again i'm not particularly aware on all of the inputs as you are much better as far as the u.s side but again back to europe jenna was not fully your point like again i'm not saying that the u.s is going to be so much better but um you know germany like just decommissioning

their nuclear reactors 10 years ago after fukushima france not recommissioning theirs they got like i don't know how many we're talking i was talking with michelle uh uh and riga about this i mean there's just like everything should be full go for energy and it should have been for a long time and this is just you know this is the lobby this is the this is the corporate press this is everybody trying to say we need to do a particular thing because certain influencers at the top say that we should do it just not how the free market would work right free market would always find the uh the lowest cost and the uh the best price and best quality that they could could offer so um i think that we're finding some political impetus to

change things particularly because of uh just the blatant uh again i know there's a lot of texas libertarians that disagree with me but like over here you have a blatant violation of a country's sovereignty and that is showing western governments hey actually you fucked up that you're so reliant on this animal of a kleptocratic dictatorship uh to supply you with 40 of your gas germany and all rest. So that is going to be a positive in the future. But again, pendulums swing, right? So they're not going to get it right in the future. They're still going to spend too much more, even if they rebalance the energy mix next year to even some more carbon, right? It's still, they're not going to get it right. They're still going to mess it up. They're still going to spend

too much that, you know, at least $2 trillion a year in the United States case, tax versus spend, deficit um or spend versus tax i should say um two trillion for uh shortfall all these things obviously continue in my mind to uh bode well for bitcoin and that's another thing i showed in the presentation like look just look at the units right oil uh interestingly over the last 15 years as far as consumption goes it's pretty lockstep with population growth it grows about 20 percent in the last 15 years both population and oil uh you know and gdp is up 80 percent but that's again wittgenstein's ruler you got all these different currencies you got inflation there that you got to back out price inflation that is um you know was it really 80 percent growth you

got the dollars dominance in that exchange rate and all the rest and then the base money stock is up 650 so like those are the things that bode very very well for bitcoin but uh but again and i said that in the presentation regarding the gold part like we thought that we would have won the game 10 years in the stagflation of the 70s i've said this a lot as well probably in your show like we all thought we would have won in 1980 if we were gold bugs and we didn't they stepped in and paul volcker took rates to 20 and you know the rest is history we're still in this 40 year bond bull market um because you just keep going closer and closer to zero uh as far as the 10-year uh treasuring stuff goes and of course yeah they're trying to now prick the inflation bubble

maybe this will be the one where they have to um they have to really really continue to raise rates i know that they're doing that right now but like they have to be really really hawkish um i don't think they'll be able to succeed though there's just shown that uh again even in what was supposed to be the start of the great moderation. Yeah, it didn't bode well for gold over the next 20 years. But over the 20 years after that, gold still is up, you know, 35 bucks an ounce back in 1971. Now it's 1800 bucks. And yeah, that's not like a fantastic compound growth rate. But that's also if you look at that year on year, that's, that's well higher than population growth. That's well higher than probably even GDP growth. I think it's probably at least six,

seven percent compounded per year uh you know we have very difficult measures to really really act you know smooth out and it's just very difficult to measure price inflation other than looking at a few of these certain units and um i don't know i just i think that that's what's so beautiful about bitcoin is that is that it really it's just an escape hatch to all that uh so again i i didn't Maybe I dodged your question a little bit about the next 12 months specifically regarding the U.S. because I'm not following that as much. But in Europe, it's going to be very, very tough. We are going to rebalance, but it's certainly the pendulum will probably swing in some crazy way. And there's going to be a lot of corruption from that and more fallout.

Probably some, you know, SJW activists come in and try to do more. Greta Thunberg gets even madder. You know, it's just, it's not going to change, right? It's not going to change the main picture of why Bitcoin is helpful for this situation. and fiat money printing is harmful yeah now we're going back to like interest rates and powell and company trying to be modern day volkers i think i saw um some estimate i think wall street's uh pricing in the probability of a four and a half percent federal funds rate by march 2023 at like 70 percent or something like that which is insane which gets to another

question with and you had the ecb come out last month and they raised rates by 50 bps over there like that so that's sort of the rock and the hard place these central banks find themselves in as yes they can try to be vulgar and they can try to tame inflation by raising rates to to certain points but at some point due to all the debt and the and credit in the system push comes to shove and you have a credit crisis so i think that's the question is where does that credit crisis start and what is the inflation rate at that point like so that again going back like the social aspect like we could find ourselves in a situation this winter january February 2023, where the energy problem isn't solved. The food problem is beginning to rear

its head as something that's just as bad as the energy problem. You know, the Fed at that point, probably around three and a half to 4%, maybe the ECP bumps up and is above between one and 2% over there. And there's going to be something going to break in the credit markets at that point i would have to imagine and if inflation's still high there is a credit crisis that is beginning to rear its head and they're forced to turn the printers back on like what the fuck does that do yeah and they already are at that record high as far as the central bank as far as the u.s goes and the others as we just talked about are probably even higher we got 28 of the whole government debt is owned by the central bank means they that's senior age money that they

printed to buy that government debt it's out in society if you're going to increase that more i mean again you were in an invisible place we just it's never there's no ratio that compares to that ever uh it's never like we will central banks take over 50 of the economy 60 you know what's what's going to be that number where or the debt i should say which is like the government economy right? Are they going to, you know, what's going to be that limit that's going to trigger some default or some reset? And as you said, that's precisely what triggered the crisis in 2008 was rising interest rates were at all-time lows. The maestro, as New York Times, Tom Woods likes to say as well, the New York Times called Alan Greenspan the maestro, for getting out of the

dot-com September 11th crisis, lowering rates to all-time lows like 1%. In the early 2000s, they raised them both the fed and the ecb precisely uh before the financial crisis debt becomes too expensive you can't pay your interest payments um i mean we've already seen just insane i'm sure you've seen it the twitter screenshots of like the estimates of what the annual electricity bill is going to be for some of these businesses in the uk it's just like it's close your doors bad i mean there's no way that they can't uh if they're gonna if they're gonna have to deal with russia in this rock and hard place situation that they themselves uh they put themselves in all right the only thing that they're going to be able to do is

to subsidize and to print and to save all of these businesses which again it's not going to be good for their currency and i hate to sound like a doom and glimmer there because really i'm not i mean i believe that the market will work itself out here and generally liberal societies will improve um you know it's just it's very hard when you look at these like very very broad broad macro things and it's hard to not be depressed with the picture because it's so insane the numbers are just so insane i was looking by the way uh uh i reminded myself because i forgot the latest figures so apple in 2021 was 365 billion in revenue and exxon was under 300 billion some the biggest companies to an 85 billion the federal government is now taking in five trillion dollars

in tax receipts right now i'm not saying that all that money is like completely malinvested most of it is yeah i mean when you compare it to like the products that apple and exxon are putting out there right it's right nowhere near right you're not getting quality for that that's bad no you're not and what is that discount factor right so the actual value of the product uh you know the roads whatever hospital maintenance all this nonsense they always tell that we have to have a state for these things but anyway uh point being it's insane it is at an insane level that we just could never imagine even like i said 15 years ago this is that senior age that they want to protect they could still do these things in a free market you could have a revaluation of the debt

discount government debt uh get to a free market let bitcoin as base money take over and let uh the free market value you know let interest rates go up let people default let things get reset and let's just say that you know at some point no one's gonna no one's gonna buy government debt like the levels that central banks have been buying it at in the free market i think that's wishful thinking at least now in 20 at least for this cycle certainly for the next cycle but i think we're looking at the next 10 years um with like the digitization that will continue to come uh i don't see how bitcoin doesn't succeed and again i i like you i don't want to be the person that says you know we're just gonna underestimate our enemy that they can't

spend to kill bitcoin uh but there's just there's no other there's no other alternative there's no other escape hatch well i mean i don't want to get get called a fed post or anything but like you have to think in their minds these at the top levels of these governments and central banks i mean they have to know that they're fucked and so again going back to the social aspect like maybe i mean for their sake for their heads like i mean you have i mean in france i saw a clip of their finance minister was getting heckled or italy it might have been i forget it was one of those countries was getting like like violently heckled to the point where like he was his safety was in danger and at some point if any logical human is sitting there and just like looking at

the numbers and looking at the math of having to pay back all all this debt that's been accrued at some point it's gonna be like all right it's literally impossible i don't discount there all right i wouldn't discount there being a scenario in the future where just due to the fact these people want to self-preserve they go all right yeah we fucked up like if you guys want adopt bitcoin go for it and try to rebuild from there um yeah yeah there's a lot of alternatives there's a lot of uh i just said there's no alternative uh bitcoin tina right but the um i mean that there's a lot of possibilities a lot of vectors here that are coming at uh the situation there could be different outcomes so like you know unfortunately we had very

draconian things covet canadian truckers dutch farmers you know these things that just sort of They come in, they go out, more excuse, the Overton window gets pushed along and, you know, it's difficult, right? Those are the very, very negative vectors. I actually think regarding, again, we can go deep philosophical if you want on this. I know I keep coming back to the war here and I'm telling this much more than you are. But if you look at all of the fuck ups and the corruption that has happened with Western governments in connection with Kremlin, which is an absolute gas station, petrol state,

um you know they they don't have private property rights they don't have liberal democracy and again i know probably a lot of listeners vomited the word democracy even on your show right if you want to be like if you want to go at full and cap if you want to go at full um you know just just just thinking full deep philosophical conversation we can have those conversations i'm talking about like in 2022 right i think that a very positive thing that's happening right now is at least people realize that if their governments aren't looking out for them regarding uh defense and energy they're gonna have to look out for themselves and governments will have to do that repenting at some at some point here at least in europe i'm not sure about

the u.s but at least in europe and that is a very very good thing on top of the fact that we're fighting now for for ukraine and you know it's not it's not uh it's not the u.s or nato that's like coming in there with troops it's just sending weapons which is not illegal you know occupying a country is illegal sending weapons is not illegal and these type of things are actually going to you know you got volunteers the foreign legion all that stuff it's very very good for us like because this is you know i said this on peter mccormick's show over the over uh the summer like this is what we lost a hundred years ago we lost this to i'll bring this all back around what i was saying with the with the other negative things that are happening with covid and everything

else but like look at the big picture like a hundred years ago we just took a massive turn for the worst as far as like the western world goes like liberal world uh like the bolsheviks came in everybody uh thought they all right let's just like give it a go in eastern europe and then And the ones that wanted to get out, like Poland, the Baltics. Sorry, do you want to say something? I said, didn't we have like JP Morgan financing the bullshit too over here? Oh, yeah. I mean, it was absolutely corrupt from the top.

I mean, it's just like in all war, right? You get people that are skimming on both sides, right? Hedging, financing on both sides. So that's horrible. That corruption is bad. And so that's, again, is a negative vector, just like COVID, just like the Canadian truckers. so this is a hard thing again for like someone maybe sitting in oklahoma not texas let's say on your show listening i think we're far away from ukraine we don't help these people like

they got into this themselves all the rest um there is at least a spark of like liberty which should not you go back to defense like national defense and stuff you know that that's an interesting discussion as well like david friedman called it the hard problem and it is a hard problem um we don't have those private defense contracts private defense agencies private insurance all the rest that can rectify when your you know private city state monarch encroaches upon your rights if we ever get to that whatever if that's if that's what you think is the is the end ideal um there's no start date there's no end date to this stuff is my point and we had particularly in my uh neck of the woods right we had we're as neutral as

Sweden small countries used to be big in case Lithuania and Poland uh if that means anything being a large state but we used to be big throughout like the whole medieval times then we weren't Austrians Russians carved us up whatever and then uh you get to this like world war ii state where basically the nazis uh start first the soviets come in and take you over then the nazis come take you over then the soviets come back take you over the only countries uh that recognize that didn't recognize this occupation were the united states which is the only countries all of the western liberal countries like france uk uh i don't know about if spain did but italy did you had like the you had uh the flags of these independent countries flying during the

Soviet Union, not recognizing the occupation of the Soviet Union, but still it wasn't enough. We still fell behind for, you know, 70 years. And really for a hundred years, we just let this mad Bolshevik experiment run wild. And I really think that this time, you know, again, if you were a gold bug in 1980, you thought that like, we really were going to see the, the, the light of day, the free market, you know, gold was de-pegged from governments, gold was flying 850 bucks an ounce it was really really going to be great didn't happen so i'm not saying it's going to happen this time necessarily with bitcoin but bitcoin just gives us that extra toehold that extra rung on the ladder to hold on to something where we have private property if we

have to flee we can flee then all the rest like i still think you're going to have to have people rally in different different governments for free societies because we just didn't have that 100 years ago i mean we did we just didn't have it we had uh particularly 70 you know 70 80 years ago with world war ii we just had we let the iron curtain fall down we're seeing it again with china like and i have nothing nothing bad to say about the chinese people i'm talking about the chinese communist party this is the same exact story i mean it's already happened with hong kong all those all those student dissidents are in jail in hong kong hong kong's done right but uh taiwan is next and what's going to be next after that i don't know seoul are they going to

go like hey just we're going to let them go down you know those are those are going to be the difficult questions and i think they're actually positive rallying cries if you can just go from the the aspect of like private property i think that's like a really really um important thing to to rally around and that's just not happening in ukraine right now like i'm following all these views like this counter offensive now that's happening in ukraine like people are just coming out in the streets and just so unbelievably tearfully joyous that they have been rescued it's literally world war ii stuff that they have been rescued from these people that are deporting cash trading raping pillaging sending washers back through belarus these people have no they

they don't have paved roads some of these people in russia like it's it's medieval stuff that's happening there so from that side i think it's very very positive i think people will be reminded how important liberty is um but again like you said there's gonna be bad people financing things on both sides the schroeder it's called here there's a word for it the schroederization of europe where you have you know gerhard schroeder you know this former uh pm in uh in germany he's basically you know he's basically completely corrupt in bed with putin and he's not he's not it's still the germans still haven't uh risen up and and and tried to to stop all those people who are just just in bed with like literally a murderous tyrannical government i know that the

u.s has its fair share of bad bad apples to say at least with their politicians we got to do the same there we gotta do the same i mean gotta do the same our president and his son i mean we're not allowed to talk about oh yeah it got that's unbelievable completely censored on all the social media platforms and the mainstream obviously didn't cover it but did you see sam harris's response to uh oh my god to uh yeah i forget what podcast it was on no it's uh it's those two comedians good guys yeah i'll find it in a sec that was just insane that shows you right there that's like from the horse's mouth of just you know someone who's such a virtue signaling uh do-gooder democrat you know even if he has dead bodies in his basement i don't care

it's like yeah i mean it's very obvious he's i mean they've got financial connections in china and russia which is like really mentally perplexing considering like the posturing i mean i don't joe biden's just a literal puppet here they jack him up with some steroids to to gloss over his dimension and send him out to say things he i mean yeah he's not shaking hands with invisible people yeah um yeah it's a very interesting time to be alive to say the least yeah but but i but just to wrap it up kind of the broader point i was trying to make is like yes it's gonna be very very it's it's very unfortunate that we had just all these horrible horrible encroachments of the government over the

last even just last two years right i mean let alone everything that's happened since 9-11 but over just the last two years it's gotten pretty insane uh i think the corporate press is maybe getting a little bit reflective after COVID, but not too much. Didn't that wacko from CNN, he got fired, didn't he? Stelter. Yeah. His name's Stelter. Yeah. A fat pussy.

That's what we refer to him as on this show. Yeah? Nice. I loved Russell Brand's impersonations of him. Pretty funny. It's hard to believe he's only 35. He's like our age. He's 35? yeah he looks like he's like 50 oh my god he's on some government recommended food plan that's for

sure jesus 35 yeah he's he's he's eating off the uh the ansel keys food pyramid he's taking indeed indeed but yeah so like there's always gonna be these cross currents uh there's always gonna be these like really really bad vectors that are come gonna come from this but i have to believe that like especially this time and this is why i'm actually so optimistic about eastern europe like you do not know how united we are for freedom over here in light of the ukraine situation like again if just to try to i know we have a large american audience here and i'm very aware that a lot of you like don't support nate or whatever like i would totally support you know texas secede from the u.s all of the rest of of uh new let's say non-new england which is like

probably still the most european supporting uh swath of the united states seceding from nato from the u.s whatever do what you got to do in the u.s but actually in here in central and eastern europe like poland baltics romania bulgaria finland sweden like sweden and finland joining nato then you know you want to say that was nato encroachment that started this war and like vladimir putin's like oh well you know we don't have a problem with finland joining nato it's okay like it shows you that it's not nato what's the problem we talked about this on our show we're not we don't have to go back and do it again i think we talked about this last time but um it's it's obvious that the bigger problem here is that there are really bad people in the world

and one of those is leading a former large empire which was marred by 100 years bolshevik bullshit you know marxist ideology there's one thing i was reading recently uh oh what's his name magnus phil magnus you heard of him no he's a libertarian uh scholar commentator he writes a lot of articles in different publications read some of stuff he says very interesting if you look at the um you look at the footnotes of marx before the bolshevik revolution and he was like literally a footnote in in uh in history like this sort he's looking at footnotes and sources of authors throughout all of like the digitizations of books and stuff he's got just really really good really strong historian libertarian uh academic type and basically marx was a complete

which we all actually knew this because we had seen how horrible uh this ideology had gone in soviet union which is something that libertarians like to forget about and even somehow support putin which i just can't even fucking imagine but uh bolshevism and marxism basically are completely aligned marx was a a nobody in the literary economic world before 1917 and it was The fact that Lenin, Trotsky, all the rest, they got a toehold in this former, you know, this rebellious, you know, taking over the old world, Tsarist empire, that that's where the sort of the revanchist Marxism really started. There was no real, like, it wasn't like it was practiced in Western universities. Marxism wasn't like wrote about, thought about, talked about. It was like kind of a cranky idea.

And so it's really interesting to think about just that we think that the Soviet Union was founded on like some really noble, thoughtful idea. But if you look at the actual sourcing, the actual footnotes of books, and people that were reading and talking about things at times of Marx, Marx was a very low, low, almost unknown writer at that time. so it was literally just because the soviet union decided to go for it and adopt these ideas that the that all of a sudden more papers start to be written about marx it's like you know this vomit reinforcing cycle right that all's okay we got a big state we just took it over a blank slate let's give it a try and they literally fucked the world up for 100 years and my point you know where my ancestors ancestors came from where a lot of americans ancestors came from central and eastern europe and this is what we're doing we're still dealing with it so i think from that side even with all the government encroachment all of the problems i think that the fight for liberty here

is actually uh is very very important i think it's very sad for what's happening for ukrainians in particular um but but i really do think that uh that there's something good there that the west or liberal societies can can look toward yeah that's what because i agree i mean this is if you zoom out take a 30,000 foot view and look back a hundred years in history to today like we're still still dealing with the problems that the bolsheviks and marxism wrought and in your part of the world and it's crazy to think like holy shit we've been dealing with this for a century and as we move forward as this liberty movement in eastern europe picks up and people become more emboldened over there and are at the point of enough is enough we're not going back

we're not uh because i agree i mean russia uh putin is a kleptocratic leader who wants to bring more socialists to the seats of the world same with the communist chinese party like i don't think i think we should find a way to not have them succeed um and we should work towards that as vigorously as possible it's like how how do we do that like if first let's just imagine a world in which liberty wins out in the next decade or two and we have this massive moment in humanity where we have a retrospective like hey the last 100 120 years um has been an anomaly a smear on human history moving forward how do we prevent like the the footnote author from taking over again and reinserting these terrible ideas because they're trying to bring it here to the united

states i mean that's what biden was championing yesterday on stage was the inflation reduction Act, which is a complete Orwellian doublespeak. It's not going to reduce inflation. And it really was just a Trojan horse for the Green New Deal, which is instituting these socialist, Marxist, central planning initiatives, particularly as it pertains to energy here in the United States. And so that's, I mean, that's what I worry about is that we've had this silent color revolution happening here in the United States where, I mean, Yuri Bezmenov came, the Russian defector, and warned us in the 80s, like, hey, they're taking over the university system. They're going to- Totally right. It's 100% right.

Yeah. They're going to destroy the nuclear family. They're going to try to take over the education system. They're going to create racial strife and everything he protected in the 80s has come true since since that interview he did. And it's I do think here in the United States that the fire of liberty does still ring strong in many people, certainly not everybody. And certainly I wouldn't even say a majority of people here. But there is that intolerant minority that have that fire of liberty deep down inside of them that will fight to. ensure that we do not repeat the mistakes that the Marxists and the Bolsheviks did a hundred

years ago. But it's just, yeah, we're caught in this weird inflection point in human history where we're literally in a battle for liberty in the digital age. And maybe that's a good segue. I mean, I know we mentioned it on the last show, but that was a big focal point of your presentation. in Riga is the next attempt to attempted land grab in the realm of control in the digital age is CBDCs. I know you're adamant that you don't think CBDCs are viable just because they cut out the private banks, the commercial banks. And it's just not, it's not going to be feasible from an implementation perspective but it's funny like we have a lot of the the well-respected macro talking heads here in the united states like i tweeted this out uh last week uh i was listening

to the macro voices podcast with brent johnson for santiago capital both of who have been um pretty big bitcoin naysayers over the years and the conversation was really good up until literally the last two minutes where they talked about brent's dollar milkshake theory which i'd like to get your thoughts on um just in and of itself but it basically came to the conclusion over the course of an hour-long conversation that like hey this is not how monetary system should be run like having all these different central bankers around the world manipulate policy and interest rates and monetary supply is creating these massive negative externalities from misallocation to capital and they didn't say it explicitly but in a roundabout way they said

hey like this is not how we should be running our monetary systems and then the last two minutes they're like we need to transition to a new monetary system cryptocurrencies are probably the future and they essentially conceded that cbdc's like the governments will figure out how to implement a cbdc that we transition to and i just found it extremely contradictory that they had that hour-long conversation where they both came to the conclusion that central banks and governments are messing up and mismanaging these systems yet they're going to create the solution that we move to that that fixes their previous mismanagement yeah the classical liberal libertarian no-coiners are the biggest enigma of them all i think um we have enough you know

things to deal with and uh ideologies to dispute with you know between libertarian circles ourselves but the fact that you cannot look at a completely anarchic uh exogenous currency that the security is built within itself outside of uh anything that the system that you know the institutions that you know we say most of the time they screw up and we need to change anyway the fact that you cannot see that is a good thing it starts first of all i just don't even waste my time too much with those people that's my first response regarding cbdc's i mean just very quickly there's a few things still i think back to the uh geopolitical stuff that i wanted to mention as well but um when you were talking about like what's another way that we can solve this and like keep

the spark of liberty going uh the back to the cbdc's quickly though the um i started on your show i think it was the first time i came on your shows 2018 i always tell you i should write this stuff down but i don't that uh stable coins were going to be the low-hanging fruit and that was going to be the thing that they were going to try to regulate first and they were going to work better. And they were, uh, CBDCs considering how central banks or sorry, how central governments try to roll out, you know, healthcare systems, uh, planning of cities, things like that. You know, they usually are very, very slow, usually screw up, usually have to restart like 15 times and are always restarting. They never get it right. Right. So that was the main thesis then. Yeah,

it was free real estate. I didn't like make a big bet. I didn't proclaim it to the world, But I said that in 2018. And I will continue to say that because, as I said in the presentation in Riga, you have the Bank of Japan, top four country in the world, top three economy in the world. So there are very few countries with a clear use case of CBDCs that said that in a report two months ago. and just very very quickly if you think that the cbdc is going to compete with the physical cash that is out in the economy right now you don't know the numbers you don't know what you're talking about physical cash grows over 10 percent doubles every seven years uh population doubles every 50 years and the physical cash rate that i just quoted that's a blended compounded that's my research very strong like very weighted very uh like deep number, 10.4% globally of physical cash, all physical cash that's current, that's printed in

the last 50 years. That's rising. That 10.4% is a rising number. Population is not rising. That doubling every 50 years, right? 1.5% a year, that's declining. So how are you going to tell me that CBDCs are first of all going to compete with the other, only the only other retail instrument that first of all, you know, central banks, yeah, they have succeeded in monopolizing this, but they were far from a, uh, it is true that they actually did create it. Kublai Khan created about a thousand years ago, paper money, but using paper instruments were far from like a monopoly of, of, of central banking for centuries. Right. I mean, that was something that all banks were using free banking, all the rest we've talked about. So you cannot tell me that

even this paper, I'm not saying that paper is like the best thing ever. Don't get, don't get me wrong, but I'm saying this is a retail tool that they've been using for a thousand years. They've monopolized it fully for the last 50 years. It's growing, it's doubling every seven years. And you're going to tell me that this CBDC is going to compete with that when you can't even run, you know, healthcare websites? Like, there's no way. There's no way that it's going to go.

So that first thing has got to compete with its own digital, its own physical cash, CBPC, as I like to say. I get, I see 50 emails or 50 articles a day on CBDC. no one except for myself apparently writes anything about cbpc the stock of cbpc so it's massive it's huge they're going to have a very very hard time even competing with that market of retail cash which they issued today second thing of course as you said is banks are going to hate it first thing central bank exists for the state obviously to fill that deficit as we talked about printing but the second thing is the banking system itself bail out all the rest

stimulus they uh they love to support their banking friends banks love to support the central banks there's just no way that central banks would support it if if their own that's the only other if they're not going to get it from the the addressable market of a cbdc if they're not going to get it from physical currency the only other place to look is bank deposits and if you're not going to get it from bank deposit or sorry sorry if uh if you're going to have to drain bank deposits that by default makes banks less profitable less lending less interest all the rest it's very very basic and that's in all the papers it's not like anything I'm even coming up with that's in all the papers as the risk the main risks to CBDCs and then the Bank of Japan of

course just said that there's very little use case for it so I see no I just see no no progress coming from cbdc um i was talking with uh with uh drew from uh was it citadel what's his mining cathedral cathedral yeah sorry um great dude been on your show right he was in riga and he was thinking how maybe they would try to do airdrops cbdcs for energy subsidies could happen could happen totally but again even if that's an imagine go back to what we're talking about here if if you're talking about an instrument that is going to reside either in a commercial banking app then it's just a bank deposit it doesn't you can call it anything you want it's just there's nothing different than printing money and putting bank reserves in a bank and then banks issue and

manage fiduciary media on behalf of the people still centralized regulated not that great bitcoin much better um if it sits in a cbdc app then it's actually cbdc you know it's kind of like of course you're not gonna control the keys or anything but you're actually gonna have digital cash that's there it's nowhere else um it would be like physical cash but that's there's just i see no way that any of the major countries except china which doesn't care about profit and is communist but even then uh i see conflicting reports coming out there about the progress of that in china uh there's no way that uh the central banks themselves can show that they're competent in managing a retail instrument. You know, any centralized government authority is

competent in managing anything that's public facing, you know, that doesn't face their cronies and backdoor lobbyists and where they can go out and deal with it. So I just don't see it. I just don't see it. And that's my story. I'm sticking to it. It's been four years. We've been hearing about CBDCs. Stablecoins, you know, if you want to go stablecoin route, buy a stablecoin, use it, pay $10 transaction fee and come back to Bitcoin at some point, just hold your base money and then start transacting on Lightning or FedE or whatever. But it's just, there's no, stable coins are much more efficient from that side. I mean, like let, let Tether, let Coinbase manage the reserve of assets. And by the way, you're not going to have any stable coins in any other currency besides

the dollar because all other currencies are, well, as of right now, the euros, as you mentioned, is changing but i think still the swissie is negative all the other currencies are negative so as far as their main base rates so you can't even really make a stablecoin project functional uh in other currencies besides the dollar because the dollar is the only currency where you can actually issue the media that is the stablecoin take the money take the other actual money whether you get it from a bank deposit or whatever from your investors in that stablecoin invest that into a an asset that pays interest i.e treasury bonds typically what they invest in right not always but typically uh and take the spread like regular banking that's just stable coins

is the definition of regular banking that you know is not regulation pie it's a combination of a euro dollar because it's outside of the federal reserve system but it's just banking and uh you're using a currency that pays that pays an interest rate so stable coins are working and they work better than cbdc but a cbdc is just there's no economic model for cbdc and you know ask india about digit you know when they cut out that uh money supply in end of 2016 they cut out uh those two no five hundred dollar rupee and or the 500 rupee note above it was like 200 and 500 priced with a new 500 new thousands like that or whatever it was uh the black black money and digitization more digitization were the literally the stated goals of that and now

over 3x higher in their physical currency cash so physical currency they're not getting away from anytime soon people actually do need it and it's part of many low income business models you can talk all you want about uh dark money and tax evasion and all the rest but people literally need it cash right now to to feed their families and bitcoin of course is going to fill that void eventually bitcoin is the same type of cash it's based money it's going to be used digitally no way a cbdc it's gonna be like different key management if it's even key it's just gonna be it's just gonna be nonsense we know this we know that it's nonsense 50 articles a day on it it's insane bank of japan already tells you that tells you that there's no use

case for cbdc yeah my right that was like the big uh really the jarring point of your presentation with the cbdc's particular you had the um the google searches for papers on cbdc's working and then um for not working you couldn't even find the bank of japan one um yeah it's weird why why is this a big meme right now that's actually another interesting theory that's been floating around tell me is that like the goldman sachs of the world and jerome powell aligning more with them than say the uh the davos class um they're seeing this meme for cbdc's come out of that particular organization and this central planning of energy markets and food markets and pod life. And that one of the theories is that Jerome Powell, um, uh, being advised by

like the Goldman Sachs of the world is driving these rates up to sort of throw a wrench in the plan of, of the Davos class to really drive home that, um, what they're trying to do is, is not good for humanity um tom wongo from the uh goats guns and gold podcast oh yeah i've heard of that i've never uh never really followed he's saying that jerome powell is going against this uh cabal so he's saying yeah that's his that's his theory well and look the dollar is as everybody says right the best looking horse in the glue factory it's always been known that way and like it's it is a store of value they still have not gone negative good for them for not doing that all the other big governments in the world have done that japan for 30 years now so yeah and swiss is still

negative by the way so the swiss franc is negative why would you have a swiss uh even a swiss stable coin because it's negative um like the fact that you know you're going to make your banking system even less competitive by withdrawing deposits to put into a digital zero percent cbd cbdc coin it's even more insane than that so uh that's interesting that uh i mean yeah the u.s stands alone in many ways and uh no matter what you want to say about any level of government still the u.s support uh for ukraine and liberty in that respect is still huge just to bring it back to that so look america we're always we're always pushing the envelope i'm proud to be an american here in europe and always like people thought i would be like more liberal meaning socially liberal and

stuff when i came to europe and uh i still remember those conversations the other days i'm like no pretty much gone uh i mean a bit more libertarian but you know in those days you'd say like uh fiscally fiscally conservative right socially liberal fiscally conservative and um and that was the case i mean we're still we're still winning overall in our policies and we're doing uh pretty well again i'm not talking about all the bad policies and stuff i'm saying like we just do things quickly and just get done with it right like um as bad as some of this sjw stuff is and people like uh sam harris i think get the point on some of that and the arguments they have with like jordan peterson and uh and uh some of these other guys i'm blanking from the intellectual

dark web all that weinstein and yeah all these guys whatever and he's he's he's a milkshake of bitcoin theory himself not red wine scene but his brother his brother his brother eric yes yeah he doesn't quite gauge theory it's going to be like a gauge theory thing i've read it man i've read gauge too i still don't even understand what it's yeah i'd say but uh you described on a roger once uh still happy to be schooled on that but i'm pretty much going to stick to the point that you cannot calculate a basket of prices because it's completely arbitrary arbitrary doesn't matter how you want to do it you cannot cannot calculate it everything is always as misi said ordinal with money you can only do it in one direction um it's just nonsense i i just don't think that

you can ever find a way to accurately measure cpi there's even like multiple measures of cpi within the government itself in the united states so again conflicting views lots of vectors all that stuff um god i lost my train of thought i was going with that well i was just gonna say yeah go ahead go ahead go with the basket it gives i mean just from pure information theory perspective like information you'll never be able to collect it quickly enough and adjust everything on the go no you have no and you can't you can't standardize for the the main benefits all the benefits that the internet and the worldwide web has given us since 1995 versus every analog delivery of the good beforehand right i mean there's just there's so many things

that come into the picture every year and you're gonna you know even if you try to like okay we're just gonna look like eggs and oil and gold or something i mean it's just just doesn't work that way like you know your health care costs are different than my health care costs and your education costs for your kids are different than mine and there's just no way and it's still back to that point in uh in brooklyn one of the new york fed uh governors was talking and like just a couple years after the financial crisis look you know cpi is actually not that high you know you have to look at the price of iPads and everything. And one heckler from the crowd is like,

you know, I can't eat an iPad, mate. And it's just like, it's the same thing again and again and again. It's just, it's obvious. And by the way, we all should know, those that are classical liberals, right? The economy does always lower costs. We do live better than we lived in medieval times,

no matter where we are in the world, right? Got better healthcare, better education. And it doesn't take like a week for us to, you know, hunt, kill, uh, cure and store our food. You know, we can go in a matter of minutes, get some tasty breakfast and coffee. So it's just, uh, it's, uh, we're, we're living way better. We always do. It's just a question of how much of that largesse, that malinvestment that we talked about, that

$8 trillion of spending. and this is part of their you know uh this is this is part of that that racket that they're running how much of that we're just going to let uh you know take off and of course obviously bitcoin is bitcoin is a curb on that yeah i mean that's unfortunately one of the biggest tools that the state has as an argument is like look you're living better than anybody 200 years ago which is inarguably true but it's like it's in spite of everything they're doing that's what they're able to sort of ride this wave of technologically driven deflation and say hey we did this and it's like no and we did this in spite of you and that's where i think a lot of

people get caught up mentally as they see like oh i have an iphone i have an ipad i the teslas exist um like you said we can package and ship food better than anybody i can go on amazon and get something here in six hours like of course things are better but imagine how much better they could be if we didn't have to do all this in spite of a government printing and misallocating trillions of dollars year in and year out precisely precisely precisely and i really do think the u.s is uh is pretty strong in that she's always leading the way and like i remember what i was gonna say about the sjw stuff like there's a lot of crazy stuff and i really do agree with like rogan talking about i mean we talk about like sports and uh like the trans issue and like just

not to get too deep in the social weeds here but i mean you know what's a man what's a woman like when you're even talking about like competition you can't even get that straight like it's insane i mean it's just insane having men fight with women or women fight with men and rogan's obviously making that point but okay let's leave those harder course sjw ideas aside even in the last like 10 years i don't know this was like a decades debate in the united states i mean obviously more than decades it's forever but uh the gay marriage uh law like i think it took when it came up it took like just a matter of years during the obama administration to pass and be done we got okay gay marriage is legal of course our hardcore libertarian values would tell us that we don't

want the government involved at all versus you know in marriage let that be an issue for you know the church or whatever how you want to do it i mean don't tax me differently if i'm married or uh straight or gay or if i'm one kid or two kids kids like you know why why why would that matter if you want to go really hardcore on the principles but look i mean the u.s is is strong as far as like leading the way with with a lot of social issues i know that that's a like it gets really hardcore with that sjw stuff that nowadays and from what i follow from us podcast um but uh i still think we're going to lead the way in the right direction with with a lot of those social issues as well yeah the sjw stuff too there is shout out libs of tiktok just

it's hilarious that she gets picked on for just simply resharing um these crazy mentally ill people um talking about how they're trying to uh essentially uh mind warp our children and i i do think there is a a quiet uprising of parents particularly who are being like all right this is too far like you're not you're not gonna try to convince my son that he's a girl and not tell me about it like there's whether you're and this is even in my circle of my extended family and friend groups from philadelphia which is an extremely liberal city and they a lot of the people um in my immediate network are extremely liberal but even them are like all right don't fuck with my kids um and so yeah putting tutus on my boy at you know five years old and you know

just proclaiming that this is like completely normal yeah yeah yeah the whole pronouns thing i mean it's again it's good back to yuri bezmanov like he just confused the fuck out of people yeah that's a problem that's a problem all that stuff and i absolutely would say i'm on the side of someone like jordan peterson there when it comes all just the insane uh route that sjw and the takeover of like liberal academia and all that stuff and again i i think we can we can keep all those things aligned with like these classical liberal ideas um liberal values like we'll sort shit out the government has way too much control over this stuff it shouldn't matter it really shouldn't matter you know any color any race any sex um we should all be treated the same

by the government if you're going to have a government the fact that you discriminate the government is precisely the institution that is doing the discrimination whether it's for tax or for other reasons is precisely the problem and i think that probably it probably will change it just has to change there's no way that you can keep going down that path and be successful society yeah it's collapsing under the weight of its own insanity um which is good but there's obviously going to be chaos there but yeah and eastern europe is rising i've said this on your show as well like look the skeleton key let's get look this is okay it's obvious right eastern europe central eastern europe it's 99 white okay it just is uh uh the literally you could have three

americans play on your euro league basketball teams that was the max that would be like the only black people in some of these eastern european countries like it's these are white societies uh it just happens to be that way it also happens to be that way by the way because of the soviet union because the soviet union was a closed society you could not leave the soviet union the berlin wall right you could not leave these closed awful societies and the skeleton key for all of this sjw race-based economic bullshit that the u.s liberal elites are spouting the skeleton key lies in eastern europe we are doing better than ever as free societies than we ever did under the soviet union and we were all white during the

soviet union we're all white now nothing has changed from our whiteness from our race the only thing that's changed is our economic system in place our social and state system and apparatus in place we had the soviet union fucking awful i can't believe anyone would even defend putin trying to bring it back bring back uh the great you know russian russian bear of uh of the of the east and all the soviet nonsense that they you know red soviet flags that are out there all right we had all that it was awful we were generations behind the united states which is very mixed uh racially society we were all white we were all white in eastern europe all right it's just flat out we were all white so this you cannot say that it's race-based problems for people that are

behind economically in the in the united states you just cannot say that because we were all white and we were generations behind you and now we're not and now we're not the only thing to change is we're not in the soviet union anymore that's the only thing our race didn't change we didn't become more sjw you know whatever you don't have to bring up sjw at that point right it's just so it's just the skeleton key is here in eastern europe and this is why we are fucking so strong right now and rising is because like like we're not going to go back we're never going back to that we know how bad it was it was a state-controlled system we're never ever going back that's why i'm so relieved of the resolve that's happening i'm happy that sweden and finland

are joining nato you can see that it wasn't a problem right again i don't want to mix things I know people get triggered by the word NATO with perhaps some of your listeners as well, but look, people are just keep it to the economic. People are shaking the fist of the sky. Keep it to the, keep it to the economic stuff.

And you can see that we don't want it. We don't want it. None of us want to be oppressed. We want freedom. It's fine to help out your neighbor for freedom. It's sad that sometimes a big, large government will have to do that. But you know what?

Big, large governments forgot about us 50 years ago. And we're not, We are not letting that happen to ourselves again. So I have huge faith now in like the human spirit and freedom, liberty, all that in Eastern Europe. I think it's really, really strong. It's really good.

The only people that are shouting Nazi and bullshit and all this, like just, you know, just trying, you know, just pulling their hair out are the Russian propagandists. Russian, Russia has no free media at all. They haven't since 2000 when Putin came in. He took Boris Berezovsky's channel, or sorry, Kuczynski's channel in 2000.

Boris Baragofsky's channel, both of these oligarchs got him into power in 2001. They haven't had free media for 22 years. So look, they're the only people that have to reconcile with their own boogeymen and skeletons in the closet from Bolshevism, but none of us do. We're running fast away from it. So I'm super actually, point is,

I'm super encouraged from all of these things. This is the world that I'm living in where I'm talking to you from right now. Super encouraged from these things, encouraged for Bitcoin and whatever. I get on these rants. so yeah i love your rants and we don't have to harp on the sjw thing but i do want to wrap it up with like that's the yeah go for it most confusing like because i really like the way

you articulate it like it's just a pure economic system that is the problem and that's the one thing that's extremely dismaying in the united states today is that you have these movements social justice warrior movements and this conversation this framing of the conversation more importantly of it's us versus them it's the magabros verse antifa whatever it may be and they all both sides think the other is the driving force behind their strife and at the end of the day it's the state and the economic apparatus that it has erected slowly but surely over the last century and the people in control of the state again it doesn't matter if it's a Republican or a Democrat in office at any given point in time

over the long arch of history here in the United States over the last five decades. The state, again, is filled with a bunch of bureaucrats at the end of the day. It's an administrative state that doesn't really care who's in power at any given point in time. They just erect this frame from which they force the plebs to argue with it. And I'm just trying to, the plebs need to break out of that frame and realize it's the people creating that frame who are driving the strife that you feel in your life. It's not your neighbor down the street who voted for Trump or your neighbor down the street who thinks that we should have universal health care.

it's the the state ruining um the the economic apparatus from which we operate with it and 100 100 and for me it's very simple like i'm again i'm i'm more on probably ukraine twitter than i am on bitcoin twitter these days uh just it's close to where i am whatever you don't have to like it you don't have to deal with it you don't have to listen to me but i am i am actually so encouraged by the resolve that I see there. Uh, and I think that we all can take comfort in that. I wonder though, from your side, again, cause we talk about this, we dance around it sometimes, uh, you know, being where you are, the Texas libertarian crowd. And I know that you're very open to all ideas and you push back on all ideas, which is great, but we were talking in the

bar. We didn't get too deep into it, but I don't want to put you on the spot, but you were talking about, again, let's just bring it back to the pure war Liberty. Uh, like to me, this is the big issue right i even though all the stuff you said is 100 spot on to me like these are just fly on elephant ass problems for what us is dealing yeah the us is complaining about compared to what we're dealing with right here in eastern europe so did you have any conversation about that did you i thought you alluded to it at the bar when i was speaking to you a little bit that maybe you had talked to some people and heard some interesting stories maybe about about the war there and about like what the ukrainians are fighting for and because obviously all the

latvians are going i'd like to fight and support and everything else yeah i mean no no i definitely got the eastern european perspective on it and yeah again i'll just go back to like what i have been saying with our conversation just like it's all fucked like i do think um it's all just incredibly fucked but again like we're just talking about economic solutions to this problem like i really wish that fucking germany and the rest of europe didn't fuck up their energy policy because they shifted leverage in the putin's hand so like yes russia putin specifically is a kleptocratic dictator who's trying to um brute force his ideology on that part of the world and if he was successful in that we'll try to move outwardly there and it's like

i think they're i don't think i think this war can drag out i don't want ukraine to turn into iraq i don't want it to turn to syria i don't want it to turn into libya and if we continue my view is that if we continue going down this path the west continues going down this path of just arming and escalating that it's not going to end well for anybody uh i do think there should be a greater drive for diplomacy particularly from western countries saying hey all right let's figure this out um we'll buy your fucking gas let's take the the russian region that you're claiming to be protecting take that that's it um we'll take your gas but in the meantime well that's the thing like you have to follow it up with action in europe they have to spin up nuclear

power plants they have to drill for natural gas um uh in uk they have to drill for natural gas in cyprus they have to build reliable infrastructure and create like an economic um apparatus that increases chances for peace because it reduces the leverage that putin has that's my take again it's obviously very messy and again it sucks just fucked up all around And again, I don't want Ukraine to turn into the next Iraq, Libya, Syria, and everything that I'm seeing from my perspective over here in Texas seems to be pointing in that direction where everybody is dick measuring and refuses to bite the bullet and try to sit at the table for some diplomacy. see yeah well probably mostly gonna have to agree to disagree on that one because it's uh it's different views over here and i mean ukrainians themselves 90 plus 90 percent you know still want to get everything back it's been going on for eight years the war and all the rest

but that's that's uh i it's like live to fight another day is my perspective like sure what is 100 correct is europe just pussyfooted to putin all the time and just enjoyed the cheap gas that he was providing right and that was uh that was a problem and the uh if you look at politically i said it on peter's show as well like if you don't follow tomas ilves who's the former president of estonia american estonian he is just ruthless showing that like he was president when ukraine was invaded in 2014 as president of estonia and he was president early on in that as well like during a lot of the obama administration whatever um he would as he says all the time like it's very rare where you get like a high level leader in a in a country in eastern europe they just put it

out on the table and tell you exactly as it is and oh this this also brings back another point about uh breaking up the u.s economy which is too big and we can talk about that in a second if you don't if you can keep going but um the what he is saying is like basically for years they were we we all said this we have been west splained into saying what is good for us in eastern europe we need all this you know peace prosperity all the rest yada yada yada when really what was happening was it was backwards deals with corrupt crooked schroeder type politicians dealing with the kremlin and kremlin that you're dealing with a state that has no respect for human rights private property liberty all the rest you have to just look at the people that are in

opposition like navalny he's in a prison in siberia you have to look at there's more political prisoners than there has ever been in the soviet union right now in russia and you have to look at uh you have to look at people like vladimir carl morzo who is a more intellectual opposition he's now in jail as well unfortunately went back which i would you know he's just got balls to do it he went back uh when the war started he got arrested he's been poisoned twice and these are the types of people that is these are this is the opposition of us these are the people that you want to you know that they're themselves trying to talk to russia like it's all up to the russians they're russians they're the ones that fucking fell for this bolshevist bullshit

that we have been dealing with this for 100 years. Because of them, they fell for it. They thought it was a better way to rebuild a society after an empire, a monarchy, as you say. And we have all these, not as you say, sorry, as libertarians say, some libertarians think monarchies are the way to go because of Hans Hermann Hoppe.

I'm quite skeptical about that. Although I know the ideas of if it really came down to like city-states and private monarchies, it might be interesting. but still this goes back to david friedman and the hard problem you don't quite know what would happen in those situations like during first of all we got nukes to contend with that's peter todd point which i do agree with like we've already fucked ourselves no one wanted nukes governments created nukes now we have nukes we have to deal with nukes that's the problem and um i i don't

have a good answer for that either ukraine gave up their nukes in 1994 with the budapest memorandum that was another agreement peace deal whatever like valencia the former solidarity uh you know first president of Poland post communism, uh, always said Russians had a pen in one hand and a hand grenade in the other. I mean, it was just, they're known for this. They'd never honor any agreement. This is what they do. They just fuck you up. And this, this, they've done this for a hundred years. So like, you just never going to convince any of this. And to hear it from someone like Tomas Ilves, who can speak very clear, like he's, he's native English speaker. All right. He's like me. I mean, he's, he speaks Estonian as well, but raised Estonian in the U S went to Columbia.

all the rest took on paul krugman on twitter great dude great fucking dude absolute follow if you haven't followed him he's funny and he's just to the bone he's gonna say look this is bullshit uh none of our interests have been heeded to in in this european union which is supposed to be equal among states um and now you're paying the price you are paying the price germany and france and all the rest for dealing with this like macron is the one to tell him you know macron is saying like i want to talk to putin talk to putin talk to putin and he thought he was going to do a deal on february you know 22nd or sorry 20 uh 20th 18th of february thought he was going to have a russia summit to putin summit and all the rest putin gonna give a fuck i mean he

just invaded he just invaded like this is just what they're going to do so there's a time for talking but the russians have done that for 30 years we're never going back there we're not going back to the soviet union man you have to understand from our position yeah we are never going back and like you let them in they just don't follow the rules like you let them in they'll fucking try to kill their dissidents that defect to your country with plutonium plutonium or novichok like illegal substances like if geneva can't mention fucking means anything anymore like there are illegal substances that russia still produces i'm not saying the u.s doesn't produce season secret so that's this is where i always get hung up on it's like i fucking hate

by government too and like you talk about like bolshevik like political like taking out your political enemies it's literally happening in the united states right now the fbi is completely weaponized they're arresting people who were in trump's administration it's like we don't have our own house in order it's like yeah yeah let me let me go to this this is where you you do need to get your house in order i agree with that and i would as libertarian as a classical liberal totally support the idea of like as as anyone should right of you know federalist papers jefferson madison secession all the rest uh that probably is the only way if you're talking about if you're talking about a political satoshi said cryptography jesus name it's hard right now

satoshi said cryptography can't solve all of your political problems i agree right it's true it's true so if you want to talk about another solution to solve it it seems to be to me the the the one a book I wanted to bring up earlier is Donald Livingston, Rethinking the American Union for the 21st Century. Have you heard of this? No. Donald Livingston. Very good book. Recommend it. Donald Livingston, Rethinking the American Union for the 21st Century. And it's just like, his main point is like, look at Switzerland. They follow the American model. They stuck to the American model, federalism, different cantons. It's a total academic question who the president of Switzerland is. No one cares. No one even knows. I don't know. The president

switzerland is we know switzerland's a great place they have four different uh cantons or four different main regions many different cantons i guess inside of that whatever they have all these states uh they're decentralized and it works all right yeah they probably have some nazi gold in their coffers and they did dirty deals and they're still doing dirty deals with uh the russians which is a problem but uh as far as the state that up that the most interesting thing i hear about when i talk to swiss is that they appreciate their government because you never get too many extremes on either side if you got like some of the nut jobs on the left then the the normal people in the middle are going to correct that nut jobs on the right

the normal people in the middle will correct it and they just correct it every time the overton window never really shifts as far as i know in switzerland and they're armed everybody is armed in switzerland you know there's different cultures yeah i mean there's some things are mandatory as far as like training or you know certain levels of conscription i'm not quite sure of in switzerland yeah it's all it's all different but size does matter right and not in the special movies way size size does matter as far as governing a nation and i completely agree with you like absolutely within the libertarian ideal to rethink things it's very difficult right now for the u.s from that perspective um but i don't know maybe it's maybe i'm just trying to give your listeners

a little bit more entertaining alternative thoughts there because like look we can rail we can rail in the u.s federal government all day and i just told you the fucking numbers like of their senior age and their and their tax and spend it's it's insane it's the largest in the world multiples multiples multiples higher than the largest companies in the world they make in one year you know six trillion or five trillion dollars in in tax receipts it's insane so um that's that's that's a challenge but rethink you know if you like if you looked at the seats in all of the original 13 colonies and you standardize it for the seats today,

you need to have like, I don't know, X many thousand of seats, right? So we don't have that. And if you go the other way, if you look at the, if you look at the, no, whatever, I can't think of it on the fly. But if you go the other way, basically,

and you think of today's, yeah, today's representation based on a percentage, right, of our representatives per capita in the House, 435 or whatever it is, right? You would have like no representatives in like half the states. If you standardize that proportion back then, right?

The amount of representatives, you would have like one or two representatives in each state as opposed to the 50 or 60 or however many it was back in the day. So like it's all out of whack. You have to be small to manage politically effectively and defense is a hard problem and it is a hard problem i think it's very interesting that like to follow someone like david friedman look at his debates talk about how that's another thing he

always said that his father which again is a great champion for liberty i know we don't like his monetary policy and all that all that with milton friedman but uh i love the way that he said it he said that uh david friedman you know milton friedman's son the anarchist he he believes that anarcho-capitalism will probably work but it might not and he said his father i believe that anarcho-capitalism probably wouldn't work but maybe it could right so it's like a little bit of a shift there from generation like just a just a shift as far as if it probably work or probably not no one knows for sure we're way way far from that like philosophical idea but i wouldn't get too hung up on the extremes because we're just so far from that in 2022 man we got

you know on my neck of the woods we got people being deported you know literally world war ii style deportations to russia children being deported thousands of them tens of thousands millions refugees and it's just uh that's what we're dealing with so i you know yes you do need to get your house in order back in the states i agree with that 100 but the hard the hard problem really is sort of sharpening the blade and making people understand like okay this is actually important for the government to do this is not so important this is a complete waste of time this is an infringement on your liberty right like that's that's obviously the hard problem for the united states because it's just too big yeah well and then the hard problem for

europe and most of the world is to recognize that how could you i think the best path toward these small anarcho-capitalist states is arming everybody and that's just a conversation that's unapproachable in many parts of the world and nukes as well are a huge issue like Ukraine is the again bellwether

skeleton key example of why diplomatic talks diplomatic talks specifically with Russia will never work because they gave up their nukes and you see what happens yeah and again it goes back to shifting leverage uh are these big governments willing to to go to war with citizens of their country or other countries if they're able to be war armed um i mean again controversial even here in the united

states but and they are in every home i think would do a lot to uh to stop a lot of these problems i don't know man i'm not gonna go there it's uh i don't i don't know enough i don't know enough yeah i mean it goes back to like the uh switzerland is armed switzerland is i don't think they have an ar in every home but uh they need to keep like they can only use like hunting rifles and they keep them in like lock no they have they have also they have safes yeah they have lockbox it's correct but yeah um at least at least people you know that the house is protected and you know that like there's a government mandate behind some of the stuff and look at it's like that way in estonia and finland as well there's like mandatory i'm not i'm not for this i'm not

saying this is a solution but it's just again a small country has to do things a little bit differently it's like you have to understand security is not free right it's like that's why i totally sympathize with people that say you know okay maybe canadians you're not really understanding your security because uh you know you're just living peacefully because the united states is disarming the hell out of everything around you we know you're not going to invade canada so like you know you might want to pay a little bit more to the nato budget or the same thing with uh with the western countries and nato and same and trump was correct on that right a lot of western countries weren't paying their quote fair share which is two percent of the gdp target

all of us eastern countries were doing it because we understood and estonia finland they have these like year-long i don't know reservist conscription periods where you got to learn shit you got to go out you got to serve i'm not saying that's a good thing i don't like the idea of having to serve government but exists in south korea as well um yeah yeah it does yeah it does so and also smaller states are about like this is why it's in it's extremely informative like if you really want to know just follow if you want to know what's going on with ukraine follow it's my sales he's the foreign president of estonia it's a small state but he was at the table with every big state and he had to listen all the bullshit from every big state all right in nato in the european union

whatever but the benefit of having a small state which all of us are pretty small states in eastern europe um the benefit is you can really you know have ear to the ground hear what's going on and and you do have more of a representation you can see what's going on so obviously we don't have that i mean with you i mean obvious with biden if you want to try to get like something something ear to the ground with biden uh it's not going to come in that form so uh yeah careful putting your ear to the ground with biden he might come down and try to try to lick it correct exactly i was gonna go actually precisely in that direction but i'm glad you did the uh well we do come here to talk about the monetary base update and we've got like 25 minutes left before i have to roll

here we had uh no man whatever you want to well i think it was an interesting update um just for the pure fact that this is the first time we've uh we've had the the base fall i think since we've um since we've been doing these shows yeah it might have fallen it might have slipped one or two spots in early very very early years but um yeah it's true it was uh it slipped a few slots and uh obviously it's a combination of things bitcoin price has fallen but everything's fallen people have to understand well that's what that i'm not saying bitcoin i'm not saying bitcoin and particularly, I mean, just the global monetary base has gotten smaller quarter on quarter.

Oh, yeah, yeah, true. And that's precisely because, yeah, Wittgenstein's ruler, I'm measuring this in the dollar, and, you know, dollar's just screaming compared to everything else. Yeah, you can pull that chart up, Logan. You were living like a Kardashian in Europe, my friend. Well, yeah, I mean, what are your thoughts

on the dollar milkshake theory? Is that playing out right now? I mean, I guess, yeah, but I mean, I don't know. I mean, like, Saylor maybe has a better, I don't know. Melting ice cube? Yeah. It's obvious that the dollar is, I don't see the dollar milkshake being anything different than the best looking horse in the glue factory, which was the trope for a long time.

All these weak currencies are going to fail into the dollar. Right. It's obvious that that's the case. It's obvious that it's been the reserve currency at least since the end of World War I. when the pound when the brits up their system the pound sterling was the worldwide currency right after the after the set uh that originally the the freaking the pieces of eight the spanish one the dutch and the portuguese uh currencies right but the british one was the last one just before the dollar world war one it up they tried to revalue their gold to an insane rate

it screwed up their currency even more and then they were just done from that point so it was the dollar for the last hundred years it's absolutely been the dollar everybody knows that so i don't I don't really think that that's anything interesting as far as macro policy goes. That's why, obviously, I do this in dollars. And by the way, there's a couple of the sites, they take CSV files or whatever, and they do Bitcoin as far as M2 or M3 of other currencies, which is not comparable, right? Because that's fiduciary media, that's bank money. that's not like the basic basic final system settlement money like central bank money

uh and they'll just do it actually in bitcoin terms which is even more bizarre because you get numbers like 222 million bitcoin uh it's the value of this money supply you can't do it in bitcoin terms like right now it just doesn't make any sense there is only 21 million bitcoins why would we uh do it that way only when there's that standard that starts to evolve which by the way It's never a fully backed standard. It's another thing that full reservist, non-free banking people don't understand. There's only $5.6 trillion in existence,

but we can still talk about crazy numbers. And at least even though they're insane, we can still talk about it. 30 trillion in monetary base. Maybe there's 100 plus trillion. It's definitely 100 plus trillion in broad money. Who knows how many euro dollars there are in trillions. We talk about in trillions and trillions of units

because we have a standard, But never as a standard meant, by the way, just side note, it's never ever meant fully backed, never has been in history. It's just media that's issued, just like stable coins. Doesn't matter how many units you have out there. Yeah, if your debtor-creditor relationship with your institution is delinquent and is bad in organizing their own receivables, their loans, their own assets, their own investments, then you have a problem in banking. that's that's absolutely that's going to be the case that was the case prior to bitcoin that's going to be the case post bitcoin uh and those arguments don't even interest me at all about how bitcoins are going to make people like invest better and do all this it definitely will definitely will but you're still going to have investments uh outside of base money bitcoin which is uh obviously only been 21 million units so uh anyway it's a long roundabout uh way of saying that it's just a standard it doesn't have to be fully backed um but right now obviously we

have a dollar standard so the only way to understand some of this broader money is to think about in terms of dollar uh yeah that's it that makes sense yep what uh what charts do you think we should focus on this this quarter uh let me pull it up on my own here um i don't know you want to scroll down uh yeah pull it up i'm down for whatever i'm pulling it up myself sorry give me a sec uh so it's just same stuff you know we got uh sort of a background on what base money is why it's important um it's final settlement of the system all the rest uh one of The things, which is maybe always interesting to look at,

which I didn't have too many schedules ago, too many updates ago, is number 19. Number 19, Logan. So here we have, it's probably still pretty hard to view for your... That's better than last time. Yeah. I'm working.

I'm trying to get a dark mode that still has my theme colors. So I haven't quite figured that out, but that's why i go with the green but we're working on it zero dollar marketing budget here so anyway it's a tornado chart here so you got the uh on the left you have gdp per capita on the right you have base money per capita and this is interesting just to see like obviously norway switzerland qatar singapore u.s these are the richest states per capita um you know almost a hundred thousand dollar equivalent per capita of uh of gdp yeah zoom in on norway and look at norway that's just so interesting and this is the one it's actually talking to someone from

norway about this because back to the cdb cbdc discussion uh norway and sweden are actually two states that will probably give it a go with cbdc's because they have such little cash in society but i'm still not convinced with those and i can explain why but norway has such a small monetary base primarily because it has such a massive as people know the sovereign wealth fund and uh i think it's just the fact that they they know that they have such a huge so the sovereign wealth fund is on their asset and as i show there's a shit ton of assets yeah 1.2 trillion dollars that sits on the central bank's assets actually strangely i don't know it could be on the treasury's balance sheet but they put it on the central bank's balance sheet and um so

that works out to $220,000 per capita in Norway. So it's by far like the richest thing, you know, as you can talk about as far as wealth, money, storage of value of a central bank. But interestingly, you know,

if you look at the base money itself, it's $1,500 equivalent, which is like pretty much with some of the lowest countries there. And so Norway has obviously been famously a cashless society for about 15 years now. uh sweden as well i probably will do a chart soon regarding just their physical cash supplies they are rising they are rising they were declining for years uh uh probably in the last five years it turned i started to rise again so that's interesting to me just like india just

back to this talk about physical cash like being more important than central banks realize or treasury realizes or politicians realize i i still have a hard time believing that they will fully do away with physical cash, even though they really are trying in these developed nations of Norway and Sweden. But they will probably try to give it a go. If they have, again, they're not going to have good energy reserves there. So they're probably not going to have a need for it, like Drew said, to do a energy subsidy, CBDC drop, airdrop. But that is just an interesting one. One of the richest countries in the world per capita. And they have basically no basic money in the system at all but they're printing krona they're starting to print more krona yeah yeah

they are printing uh they are printing a little bit more but still as a as a relative as you can see in dollar terms it's so small compared to look at the next one which is switzerland and of course you get into a little bit ambiguity with money here as you still do with gdp but with money obviously specifically the swiss franc the swiss is like even though it's negative uh because it has such demand the interest rate is negative on it um it is cross-border right it's not only swiss people that hold the swiss franc so and obviously it gets too strong they even have to they worry about it being too strong relative to the euro which is just funny um of course you know it's the old import export argument uh but the it's it's it's by far and away the largest

per capita. If you just assume that all the Swiss monetary base was in Switzerland, it's $90,000 per capita. So it's like a massive one. And then you got just Norway, the country that's basically the same as far as wealth goes. It's like only $1,500 per capita. So there's some interesting discrepancies there. It still is, if you look at all the other ones with the big base monies, the US, Japan. Japan's the next largest one with almost $40,000 per capita. It still is a huge amount of uh seniorage for the state um it's still it's just another way of looking at it um but you can also see again how top heavy it is with uh with the largest currencies on a per capita basis compared to the smallest currencies which have you know maybe four to ten thousand

dollars worth of gdp per capita and like maybe a couple hundred dollars worth of base money so um i'm not saying it needs to be higher or lower i'm just saying you can see you can still see that Pareto distribution is pretty wild here. Of course, I could look at this just as gross nominal terms, or I can put it in per capita. And here I did it in per capita. So it's quite different than the way that GDP lays out with some of the largest countries. So that's something that you can look at. And I will probably do another analysis of Sweden and Norway soon, because even though they're famously going cashless, and maybe CBDC would actually work in those countries and they're rich enough to try to pull it off uh they're still printing

physical cash right now they're printing more uh than they have in the last 10 years okay so how how would you distill what this chart highlights it's like just highlights how levered up gdp is or how much gdp is dependent on the layers above m0 yeah it's it tells a lot of different things like so regarding your question about levered up or whatever uh again there's very little base money relative to gdp so do i think that bitcoin is going to make those numbers like completely equal out to be the same no because it's just that's not how banking works that's not how scaling payments works all the rest you're still going to have to do share media to do all that stuff um so so i don't think that will change under a bitcoin

standard, but I do think it's insightful under a dollar standard or fiat standard to see the differences. And they are vast, except for maybe Switzerland, where it's like almost a one-to-one ratio. Other than that, you have many, many, many, many multiples more of say GDP versus the base money that sits in central bank accounts. So again, it's the pendulum swinging thing. Like it's, you look at these things, they're insightful, but it's just trying to show that the governments are never going to be able to hit what all the economists say that they can do, right? Like put all the economy in a spreadsheet, make it work out. It's all going to be perfect. No, it's just like, if you, if you actually line up GDP, you line up based money,

there's like these wacky differences. Um, yeah, it's just two metrics there. It's not, you know, you can't put uh it's just two metrics here to compare but it's just showing that if if the narrative is that like they're supposed to have all these managed monetary policy to smooth out you know the uh the economy and make everything you know work nicely it seems to me that you know i'm having a hard time understanding why i say switzerland has a huge one nor has such a little one as far as monetary base goes and you know japan is like uh, also kind of a one-to-one ratio like Switzerland is. So like, is that supposed to be the standard? Uh, the United States has also like a much lower ratio is about $16,000

with the base money in the United States for what is it? $76,000 per capita. All right. So it's a ratio of what like close to you know over five yeah yeah so um again it's it's just to me it's just insightful to put it all out to see the differences why would you mess around with any of these currencies just buy bitcoin they're not gonna hit the mark the pendulum's gonna swing and uh don't let the don't let the bear market lull you into a false sense of of security in these currencies it's what bitcoin bear markets do so yeah it's another yeah there's another if you look at uh logan 22 another tornado chart which i think is interesting just again to layer it up this has no the left side to the right side of this tornado has no uh there's no relationship

ship as far as like something you can judge it's just for fun it's looking at the native units of each monetary base versus their u.s dollar you know exchange rate equivalent shit unit it's just for fun like it's not like i'm not trying to make a point about like a ratio or anything else or like infer anything so you see like iran has uh 6.4 quadrillion iranian iranian rials in their monetary base which is about equivalent to about 20 20 billion dollars worth of monetary base on the on the top end as far as like the most units and new zealand actually has about 50 trillion dollars 50 trillion kiwi to about 30 trillion u.s dollars as far as a unit goes so it's like much less units out there for new zealand than there are for iran but it's just kind of a fun

thing like look at look for your currency wherever you are in the world you can see how massive your monetary basis vietnam is actually number two and that's not even they're so they're communists in vietnam is right as well right so they have uh 1.5 quadrillion dong best currency name out there vietnamese dong 1.5 trillion that is uh only m0 they're so non-transparent in their balance sheet like of course bitcoin's better we know because we know exactly how many bitcoins are out there all the time we can only take at face value what's central banks report on their books vietnam as well as the bank of england actually is the least transparent bank uh bank of england doesn't tell you their whole balance sheet but vietnam only tells you probably something

that's equivalent to like m0 which is cash outside of bank vaults and just in circulation it doesn't tell you the amount of reserves that banks have in the system and all the rest but that's just you know it's still a massive number so it's just interesting to look at uh again compared to like very small u.s dollar equivalent value and so again you can see the four big ones dollar euro yen yuan look at them find your own currency it might be interesting for you to see it and uh and yeah that's the rest just tracking them all so we don't have to we don't have to go too deep in that i'm the the gold one that is fascinating 24 let's uh let's wrap up on bitcoin's place where what happened uh q1 to q2 this year so it dropped um

it drops now it's number eight uh in i think in q1 it was still number eight but it was as high last year when it was screaming right here it was number six so that is uh that is not including gold and silver this chart is also not including gold so what are you looking at so there again you see it's still it's a little bit lower now the mid-major it was knocking on the pounds pound sterling's doorstep there last year when it was screaming uh that's like the last mid-major currency out there was the, was the British pound sterling, uh, you know, a trillion, a trillion sterling units are out there. Uh, and then of course the four top ones are, you know, there would be $200,000 plus Bitcoin to reach those, uh, to reach those levels of the monetary

base. But again, those, those things can go up. Bitcoin can also go up. Those things can go down. Bitcoin can go up. It's hard to know. It's all within scenes ruler. Um, it's just a way to measure compare the economic legal moral ethical money supply to uh 21 million uh bitcoins that will be outstanding so yes let's see what the chart so x gold and silver we have the euro the dollar the yen the yuan the pound swiss franc and the indian rupee in front of us um so it fell behind the swissy and the rupee uh whereas last year about a year and a half ago for the first time it was ahead of the swiss ever and now it's behind again so it's a nice little chart to show you the to show you the uh show you the discrepancies there and how it changes and it was

yeah it was number six now it's number eight just looking at fiat currencies so based off of this snapshot like you said we can see ruler these things can change as these governments print more um contract their monetary supply but let's make a bet uh the british pound as of this snapshot bitcoin would have to be above 66 600 to pass that when do we pass the pound you know i like the world of free real estate my friend not much of a not much of a gambler actually except on bitcoin so not financial advice obviously but like if i had to call it uh inside of 10 years is that enough that's a that's a very safe bet um i don't know man i don't know because the thing is that they can still print so so much

more as we've seen uh you know there's just the u.s alone trillions and trillions every year in deficit and the dollar is still surviving it's still surviving all the other currencies are collapsing whatever dollar milkshake best horse in the glue factory so i think it's going to come down to that moment where things have to reset things have to change things have to uh get revalued um that's probably will be the moment well that'll be the moment where it matches the top four as far as passing the pound man what do you think 2024 juicery suspense i love it bookmark it i can't i can't make predictions this way for my own chart i just

i this is like i'm i'll sell the i'll sell the drugs here but i just i cannot make a i can't i can't uh consume my own product here i just can't it's it's too i'm more of a train spotter than uh than a stock to flow analyst definitely even a stock to flow analyst my god we should talk about that that next time yeah let's dismantle that i'm happy i never hopped on that train absolutely needs to be dismantled but um the i i much much more prefer sort of spotting the train rather than placing the bet we know the trend i tell you about the trend as well the trend is always your friend follow it till the end that's the the bitcoin trend is insane it's absolutely insane it's rising uh it's power ratio stock to flow has nothing to do with it um we need to talk about

that next time remind me because the trend is always increasing it goes up like 45 bucks a day right now on average bitcoin goes up the trend the trend bitcoin price itself only goes up all-time average i think something like four dollars a day uh and now down of course now it's down like in 2022 it's down like 90 a day on average so you got to look at those things like the averages the trend all that rest uh i need to look at the power trend to maybe to make the that'd be my safest bet scientific prediction which obviously is not scientific but that'd be my safest bet prediction let me look at the trend let's revisit it in q3 all right q3 wraps up in uh in 16 days here it'll take you it'll take me another month to get all the data from

and the central banks because they themselves are slow to publish. I just have to say that. And probably it'll be like only like start of November, which is insane, I know, to publish Q3.

And then we'll eventually hopefully hop on the phone not long before that. But yeah, we should talk about the trend. The trend is important. The power trend. That gives a good prediction.

All right. In November, we're going to talk about the trend and dismantle stock to flow. Love it. It's a pleasure as always. Until then, let's just keep winning.

and the world's crazy right now it's all fucked up but we're winning because we're here talking about solutions absolutely instead of focusing on the problems i appreciate your viewpoint my friend uh thanks for having me on chat soon all right and so yeah i already said it's always a pleasure peace and love freaks it's a pleasure not a chore