TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #468: Q3 2023 Monetary Base Update with Matthew Mežinskis

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

Marty sits down with Matthew Mežinskis to discuss the Q3 2023 Monetary Base Update Matthew on Twitter: https://twitter.com/1basemoney 0:00 - Intro 6:17 - Marty’s late 8:35 - Bitcoin power curve 25:28 - Top 5 currencies 30:35 - Bitcoin vs currencies 34:11 - Dollar’s relative strength growing 38:48 - Network update 44:49 - Sovereign mining and pool censorship 52:18 - Why money must be kept decentralized 1:01:45 - ETF Trojan horse 1:03:45 - Argentina 1:27:22 - European security 1:30:16 - Defense startups 1:37:34 - Texit 1:43:07 - Deterrence and cold war history 2:02:31 - Wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: River https://river.com/tftc Unchained https://unchained.com/concierge/ CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Bitcoin Talent Co https://www.bitcointalent.co/ TFTC Merch is Available Shop Now: https://merch.tftc.io Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://tftc.io/podcasts/

what's up freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce this rip of tftc this rip was brought to you by our good friends at river river's the best place to buy bitcoin you can easily buy and sell using the app if you dollar cost average you're not going to pay any fees on those buys if you set up a daily weekly bi-weekly monthly whatever it is you set that up Set it and forget it. You're not going to pay any fees on that. They have limit orders as well. So maybe you want to price snipe and set your buy below where the current price is

or above where the current price is. You can easily do that within the app now. As well, they have auto withdrawals. They really value self-custody at River. So you can give them an address to a wallet that you control. And once you hit a certain threshold, they'll send the Bitcoin directly to that wallet. But they're doing it the right way. They build everything in-house.

They don't have any third-party dependencies. They don't depend on Fortress Trust or Prime Trust or any other third parties. They build their wallets, their multi-sig cold storage in-house. Everything's backed one-to-one, fully reserved. Go to river.com slash tftc. Sign up today. Great time to start SAC and SATs.

River's a great place to do it. Not financial advice. the store was also brought to you by good friends down the hall unchained it's lively down there right now and then they are strong down the hall they're leading the way in terms of leveraging bitcoin's native multi-sig properties to bring you products that give you peace of mind whether that's their vault product their core product which is a two or three multi-sig where you can old two keys you know one key you know no keys they've got multi-institution multi-signal partnerships with coin cover kingdom trust they just announced backed last week really leading

the way on multi-institutional multi-sig again they have that vault product you can buy bitcoin easily and sell bitcoin via unchained buy send it directly to your vault they have an ria product which gives you peace of mind knowing that your retirement funds are in bitcoin in a wallet with keys that you control you can roll your ira over they have an inheritance protocol to talk about peace of mind passing your bitcoin on is a big problem that many people think of unchained has created an inheritance product a protocol to make that as easy as possible so hit them up go to unchained.com slash consultation to learn more about what they're building why they're building it and why you should be securing your bitcoin interacting with their products they do it the

right way freaks unchained.com slash consultation set up a call today this trip was also brought to you by friends at crowd health crowd health is here to help you bring sovereignty to your health care if you're in bitcoin you're finding monetary sovereignty in the bitcoin protocol you should go seek sovereignty in other parts of your life health care is one of the pivotal parts of your life crowd health is really attacking the health insurance model which is typically expensive opaque impersonal crowd health isn't health insurance it's crowdfunded health care you join the crowd health community you pay a monthly fee if you ever go to the doctors you pay the first 500 of that bill then the rest is crowdfunded by the crowd health community they

have a bitcoin community and the beauty of crowd health is that you have health advocates so you can get a personal experience talk to somebody to advise you on what to do if you have a health care incident or health event that you need to take care of they advocate for you with the doctors since you're paying out doctors in cash they can negotiate prices lower and they get very steep discounts on everything it's a beautiful thing if you're looking to take sovereignty over your health care me and my family have done this we've been using crowd health for almost two years the experience has been incredible it's much better than the health insurance industry we were on cobra very expensive crowd health is much cheaper much better experience

it's a beautiful thing go to joincrowdhealth.com slash tftc sign up today and you're going to get 99 for your first six months of subscriptions to the crowd health community joincrowdhealth.com slash tftc this report was also brought to you by our good friends at bitcoin talent co a recruiting firm built by bitcoiners for bitcoiners if you're a company in the space looking to hire talent to poach talent from the tech industry from the banking industry go get onboarded with bitcoin talent co they understand bitcoin they know multi-sig they know mining they know lightning they're not just some run-of-the-mill recruiting firm they're just going to try and gouge you for fees they're actually going to help you find the talent

that you need. And since they know Bitcoin, they know what you're looking for. They have a flex product as well. Maybe you don't need a full-time employee. You just need a contractor for three months, six months to help you on a development sprint, a design sprint, growth marketing sprint. You can tap into their flex network as well. If you're looking to get into the space and get into the best companies in the space and you're in the tech industry or the banking industry or somewhere else. Go set up a profile with Bitcoin Talent Co. Get in the mix. Get your resume out there and come help us build a future built on a Bitcoin standard. Go to bitcointalent.co. Tell them that TFTC sent you. Enjoy this rip.

central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be we meet again it's december 12th 2023 i've got my coffee in hand what's going on is i need to apologize to you i was late i don't know why i do this two kids the early morning and it's you know it's it's uh pub 30 here in eastern europe so i can't complain really at all but not drinking a beer but still uh uh i could be so don't don't worry at all it's no no skin off my back my friend good to see you yeah we do this good to see you too

it's always a pleasure but we do this every time you're like we need to do it early early morning your time i'm like all right 9 a.m and without fail i'm like stressed at 8 30 drop off for my son like oh shit i gotta get in i gotta get in we had peak traffic and i inevitably have to text you five minutes before we're supposed to record i'm running 10 minutes late and here we are 20 minutes after we're supposed to start just allows me a few more minutes to perfect the charts for the people and uh and all is good so i hope the kids are good and uh all is well for you this christmas season vibes are high i mean bitcoin price is bumping yeah it's been it's been a couple years of uh some pretty like hang in there guys bitcoin's base money it's climbing

the charts it's falling down a little bit and i know q3 ended what end of september so none of what has happened over the last two months will be reflected in the data we're about to discuss No, no, I always keep the exchange rates moving on, even though the data is like the fiat money supply data ends in September, as I always have to reiterate, because these banks are so slow to publish the data. I do extend them out and just adjust the currency rates and all the Bitcoin data is current.

So we got, it'll be all right. Yeah, let's get bullish. Let's look at these charts. What are the power trends looking like these days? All right, the good old power trend line. we got right here uh actually that's wrong it's a daily do i need to switch uh it's only on uh that tab maybe it's not on the whole window hold on i thought you guys troubleshot this before i got in here what's going on you were just talking a big whole window whole window hold on logan it's

coming back there we go it was only a tab i had with you there we go good enough a little bit of my browser peeking through there so it's not perfect but it's good enough okay uh so this is the best trend line to look at no need for anything else i'll show you how the trend trend lines have evolved over the years but uh not linear not exponential not logarithmic but the power curve that's how this works uh kind of a cross between logarithmic and uh exponential but this grows fast at the beginning but then kind of smooths off more at the end so remember we're really bumping down on the two sigma down move a year ago uh which is an extremely rare event it's what these bands represent and here we got as of december 10th which is basically the same

price as today 43 000 44 000 bitcoin we're still close to 20 grand under the trend line and remember So this trend line is a 95% R-squared. All that means is that the volatility or the variation of the price around the trend line is 95% better than if you just drew the average, a straight line. That's all that it means. So it means it's a very, very good regression. Goodness of fit is very good. and we're still uh 18 17 you know a little less than 20 grand under the trend fell under it last summer uh june two summers ago june 2022 all the madness all the chicanery that was happening

uh in the space solidified by the ftx hilarious zero bitcoin upon bankruptcy uh fail and then um now we're back up so i did a video this recently and people always want to know you know they don't want to know the past they want to know the future so let's just run right to it remember the blue bands are two-thirds of the time you can expect the price to be with in there and that's just mathematically i'm not making up numbers that's just mathematically how it works red bands are 95 percent of the time based on the based upon the trend so if you go the halving uh say april may trend is at 70 grand uh one sigma down would be 36 grand one sigma up only 159 160 grand two sigma up would be 472 grand do something down 28 grand so it's a big

delta there you know 400 000 uh dollars worth of range that bitcoin still trades in but um Um, you know, that's how it looks. Then you go out, if you assume the four year cycle, let's go out to December 2025 would be the four year cycle. The trend lines at 130,000 and you see there, let's just go on the upwards. You can get, uh, one Sigma up would be 287,000 to Sigma up $849,000 for Bitcoin. Take it out to 2030, $600,000 trend line. actually this has come down a little bit probably since we last talked a quarter ago uh it used to

be about six hundred thousand dollars by 2030 now it's 580 000 so that shows you all this does it's nothing fancy it's not stock to flow or anything it's just it's nothing fixed nothing made up it's just like while the price is below the trend the trend will go down and then once the price gets back up the trend will move up so it has been pulling it down for a year and a half um and you can see that you know in 2021 the double top there we actually did not have unlike prior cycles we did not get up to the two sigma move uh you know we could talk about all the reasons maybe that is why but we did do that in 2017 we did in 2013 and even in 2011 um with those spikes so that's how it looks so zoom in again to like this year yep so what you're saying is i mean everybody over the

last couple months it's like whoa pumped a 44k currently sitting where around 41 i don't even know i think no we're at 44 even yeah 40 43 144 41 i'm sorry 41 for correct luckily we have our our trusty block clock mini right here with the price there you go there you go 41 466 well people are saying this is like a big pump gonna pull back going back to 30 35 but if we look at the power trends we're still below the average yep below the trend and even a one sigma down move which again just means like you're outside of two-thirds of the time of the the observations uh you'd have to get down to 30 000 for that so plenty of space in between there uh for you know and you know everyone likes to say in the in the mainstream space bitcoin is

volatile yeah but look at how it's followed around this trend over the last 15 years and uh yeah it it does have a big range but it's still the trend line is 95 r squared so there is some interesting reliability there and again no one has a future hyper bitcoinization could happen this thing could be destroyed this trend line bitcoin could go to zero which obviously none of us believe that on this show the trend line would be destroyed but it hasn't been destroyed over uh you know 13 years of pricing data i started this in 2011 pick one pizza day 2010 sorry um so that is that is what it is how are you marketing this uh i was talking with uh peter mccormick and danny on one of their

shows and they're like yeah you got to get this on on your website and i do i'm mostly just doing youtube videos on this but people would have fun to play around with these curves well and i'm saying i say market i mean positioning you should position this of like here is the chart that'll allow you to zone out all the noise just look at where the price is in relation to the power trend line and standard deviations above or below it yeah just have some confidence yeah exactly and uh i think that's that's uh you know you can't put every chart up that i'm doing like with research and stuff but this one is good enough i think that it's people just like it so much they'd love to see those standard deviations so

yes i can say it's in the works may take a little bit but it'll be up uh let's say next year for sure um hopefully early next year let's just do another one really quickly same trend line but i'll show you the evolution remember the evolution so the old 2010 trend line this was like we've fallen off this trend line unfortunately if we're on the 2010 trend line we'd be at 128 billion dollar bitcoin by 2030 and even today 1.8 billion dollar bitcoin today you're not misreading that per bitcoin that's the trend of how fast it went up in 2010 this would have been nice yeah this is a slash dot article you can see just that it bounces uh quickly quickly there in 2010 but uh won't run through every year here but again this is another

interesting thing about this trend line is from 2016 and 2016 was the lowest uh i'll show you how that has progressed but i'll take off the 2010 just to maybe move a little bit of the noise away can you put a 2010 back up okay maybe this could be learning like what were some of the factors that could have driven this trend line to be so extreme was it just the infancy of the exchange infrastructure where price discovery just wasn't simply wasn't easy because the exchange infrastructure was so nation i think the yes i think that i think the fact that anytime if you're in a strong compounding exponential logarithmic type growth situation and you start with a base that's basically zero uh it will definitely grow fast and that's what it that's what happened

um but you know no one can predict exactly how it's going to go but it just so happened that with bitcoin over the years in 2010 2011 2012 uh 2010 was just the fastest so you know where you have here for example uh our friend laszlo you know this is like 0.1 cents uh 10 000 bitcoins so 10 000 uh yeah 10 000 bitcoins for two pizzas right it's like 40 40 was the transaction uh something like that it was actually done with british pounds uh which was interesting but you can see it was just like humming along at this price was like a penny then the slash that article comes out a lot of developers get into it and it goes to 10 cents six seven eight nine ten cents you know over the summer and then by december it's uh it's up to like 30 cents and then by

june of the next year it's up to 30 so that's you know when you start from nothing and then you climb that fast like even you know day traders just love that with stocks like that's just that's where you can certainly uh make a lot of cash but we just didn't continue on with that growth whether it be just the adoption of wallets miners infrastructure like you said everything was just slower than what it was in 2010 when you from zero to like 30 bucks and then from 2011 you know people remember how this price curve works right 2011 goes down uh you know it's a couple dollars here by the end of 2011 from june and then it takes two years to get back over to a thousand dollars for the first time so that's just that's just how it looked and

i don't have because i didn't want to clog the chart all the other trend lines but just imagine that from 2010 down uh to today it's it's moving down like the curve is just moving down as we see that this is just kind of how the pricing action has shaken up so all those factors and you know hundreds more we just did not have the uh the adoption rate that happened in 2010. uh could probably be more scientific to explain other things like that but that's just it's just how it looked so statistically this is where we've settled today after 13 more years of pricing data so that so just quickly with this that i think is interesting is you might say okay well this black line which you're showing is the all-time line right 95 are squared that's cool

all right but 2010 was so crazy how are we going to know what it's going to be 10 years from now well this is where i think it gets interesting yes bitcoin is super nascent as you said still and though we have tons of adoption we even get the old regulators getting in the game now more than ever i mean just more eyeballs on bitcoin than has ever been every year still how can you say that like 10 years from now that curve won't be like much lower yeah it's true it's possible but we have some interesting data to show that that might not happen if you look back so i'll just take off the 2010 curve here's the all-time all right this is like you can see the curve runs nicely through the the the logarithmic uh scale and the power curve so let's actually let's zoom

in just to see it this past couple years let's go from 2016 all right so just watch closely i'll pull them up all right so 2016 it's a red line you can barely see it 2017 is a blue line 18 19 20 21 22 so the fact that all of these trend lines each year no matter where you measure it compress around the all-time line i think is pretty interesting certainly other assets do do this i'll show you one more after this but for bitcoin the supposedly volatile asset right since 2016 it's had basically the same line and let's zoom in so you can see like exactly remember they're all around like some are higher some are lower 2018 i had 2016 in red because it was the previous low we have actually if you can see this the black line is now the lowest

so because of all the uh the chaos of basically last year and the the deep bear from last year you know bitcoin being 15 grand a year ago that has pulled it down to as low as it's as it's ever been but that's not always the case is the point like another bull could easily pull it back where 2016 and 20 uh let's look at the low ones 2020 is a low one uh 2016 2020 2020 2017 is also another a low one so those could again take a place as a lower trend line you know what i'm saying as the price continues to get into a bull and then the trend line pulls it back up so it's again it's just basic statistics nothing fancy there uh but i just measure it every year just to show you that we actually do have some interesting data to show that all right yeah

after a mega bull in 2021 and a mega bear in 2022 into 2023 it is the lowest it's ever been but it's not that much lower all right and to show you that now let's look at this one here's apple i'll be quick about this so we have a lot more data with apple big tech company major adoption huge company right exponential uh stocks pretty much all stocks if they're like long term it doesn't really matter what kind of stock they are growth or speculative or whatever they're going to fall into an exponential curve unlike bitcoin which has this power it's faster adoption stocks are just exponential exponential all you have to know is that it's a straight line on log scale so you see this is an exponential curve it's a little bit different

but it's that's you can see that it hugs the apple price now apple went through a lot of stuff we'll go through the whole history of apple here but you know in the 90s you know they were struggling and then jobs came back and the ipod and all that stuff they they increased but now let's just look at the decade by decade for apple so here are the 80s it's above it here are the 90s oh here's 2009 pulling it back up here's the 2010s pulling it back up further to where it is today the black line so the 80s are actually the closest to today as far as the angle of it but you can see that huge trough in the 90s pulled it down again i'm not saying it's not going to happen to bitcoin no one knows but you know you can be pretty wild on how these trend

lines go that's that's the point of this you can be pretty sporadic with huge deltas in the ranges and where bitcoins is is just not like that they're all stacking from 2016 each trend line each year is pretty much stacking on top of the the next so that's my that's my latest yeah it looks very it looks much more mechanical and predictable bitcoin and apple yeah yeah and uh you know again two decades out maybe it will be lower still maybe we'll have hyper bitcoinization and this thing is blown out and you know because hyper bitcoinization would blow this out too you would have probably you know but if it's like a steady growth um which we've been having here then this is how it will look so 600 600k by the end of the decade what what's the probability you

put on hyper bitcoinization in the next seven years six years now i'd say i'd say lower i don't know if it's a low low but lower you might have a different view i don't know i don't i just try to stay humble and stack stats agreed agreed it's you never know man we can we can get we can get into that a little bit later yeah which is all the shit that keeps coming down on us it's unbelievable uh we don't have to go too much on the charts anymore but the is the top five the old base money here this is what i said this this does stop in september uh quick aside a couple central banks they always take time to publish or some still haven't published since their economies have been on fire one notable is iran uh i haven't

even gotten on their central bank website since june of 2022 when they had a lot of riots and protests and literally fires uh so i think that's interesting if any listener out there via your vpn or not can actually connect with the bank of iran's website i'd be interested let me know um that's other people they haven't been able to get on so that's kind of interesting like it's the central bank is literally just close to the world you can't connect even with iranian vpns tried to connect um i haven't let's say unless anyone from the nsa is listening but um uh so that so that is uh that is an interesting central bank that's kind of off the grid now like fully and then another one is interestingly argentina that's a story i want to

talk to you about i want to talk about argentina too i've got some questions yeah we can we can go there in a sec but since july basically they haven't updated their numbers and it's been very spotty sometimes i can't even connect uh you do connect sometimes but like they're not updating at least over the last couple weeks from july so that's interesting i mean and this is this is like a a qualitative sign that the money's breaking in these countries if you can't even i would absolutely say a qualitative sign and a real like a real sign like i track this stuff it's just top 50 currencies in the world i'm going through i'm actually seeing you know what central banks will connect to you or not or you know show up their web page update their numbers you know if you

can't even update your numbers and obviously we know why with argentina there's big changes there which are very interesting and i hope very good but uh that's just just a little aside i didn't mention that in my little update but uh iran and argentina are the latest that are updating so So, just a quick one here. We see that it's down from the COVID top. It was about $30 trillion in the base money. Probably when you and I started doing this, Marty, even. I mean, I started doing this in 2018.

Okay, so it was like $20 trillion. I don't know when we started doing our little updates, but it was probably somewhere here. It was pre-COVID. So, it was $20 trillion, right? We're down to $26 trillion total, dollar equivalent. uh but that's still september 2020 levels during the midst of covid and how much more they're going to be able to cut that off with these rising interest rates i highly doubt i highly doubt

and do you have any comments on reverse repo draining people are saying that's sort of quiet qe yeah i haven't uh checked on the facility in a bit but uh they have been easing up on that i guess it was i'll check it was 2.1 trillion at one point i think it's like 800 billion or something now Yeah. So, you know, that could be hard. So reverse repos and repos is basically just non-banks having access to the Fed's liquidity. If they want to trade with the Fed other than the market, it's theoretically taking liquidity away from the system, even though they themselves are getting the liquidity from the Fed, but they're not dealing with anybody else in the market. um so the fact that it's not they're not doing that as much anymore theoretically is better for the market and it's it's how they're trying to unwind all of this just massive inflation that they've put into the system before so theoretically is better that the market is now dealing with each

other and not just with the fed because it's a big it's a big issue i think to have the fed just keep on taking more and more liabilities from other uh from other market participants right like they already have monopolized the banking system they need to monopolize the shadow bank system as well because that's what that's what the reverse repo and the repo facilities happen with the feds so uh yeah i mean i'm not surprised that they're trying to make it come down but it's just one more thing why they distort the market and they're trying to they're trying to normalize it and it is becoming more normalized how much more that can go on nobody knows especially with these interest rates i would say because

these interest rates are tough on a lot of people yeah and everybody always talks about you need that credit need that credit baby so you know we know we know the story from there yeah but back to uh the q3 update i was looking at the price here bitcoin was around 28 000 september 30th i believe yeah but when i published it i'll show you this one so this is the i published it at about 43 000 So it had passed silver again, Switzerland, and India. India was kind of borderline last quarter. So back up again above those mid-majors, let's say. And the last one ahead of it now, again, is the sterling.

So it just shows you how open this territory really is. It's like all of these fiat monopolized regulated currencies that everybody says they need to strengthen their economy and all these things, monetary elasticity. Bitcoin's bigger than all of them. This is probably the main picture, if you take anything away from this. It's like just look at the snapshot of each central banks. What you see in these green bars and plus gold and silver,

This is a central bank monetary liquidity that they pump into the system, the base of the system. And that's why Bitcoin UTXOs are the base of the Bitcoin system. So that's the accurate comparison. That's why I've done this now for five years. And this is the chart. So when you're between, you know, 30 grand and 60 grand, it's like we're in the mid-major area, right? And silver is in that as well. uh that's this uh 35 000 bitcoin price or 700 billion dollars worth of silver that's the

estimated non-industrial silver in the world and silver works kind of weird as we know it's like more industrial than gold so you probably double that to get the total silver that's ever been mined but half of that is just constantly churning through the system so the industrial system i mean you know conductors and conduits and ipads and iphones and electronics and all the rest so that's not included in here that's why it's a monetary type silver and then gold of course is always number one uh 11 trillion at the moment also non-industrial gold although gold's industrial usage is way less than silver is maybe 10 to 15 percent it is 10 to 15 percent it's 588 thousand dollar bitcoin to reach gold yeah but the big four dollar euro yuan and yen dollars back on top

which hasn't been it's been a long time actually since the dollars base has been higher it's behind the euro now or it was always behind the euro but now it's ahead of it uh 250 to almost 300 thousand dollar bitcoin is all it would take think about the power percentiles again and those bands That's all it would take to get past the balance sheet of just one of those central banks. Yeah. And back to the dollar surpassing the euro. The European central bank hasn't had as aggressive

a monetary policy as interest rate policy specifically. They have had some, yeah. It hasn't been as drastic though, right? No. uh i guess relatively it has because the dollar is ahead of it oh but also i should say this this is this is the other thing um i know why it's it's the the main thing is that is that the dollar itself is strengthening so here we can see this uh this is the growth rate trailing 12 months so again the all time is roughly 13 percent remember it's about a percent

a month a percent a month compounded is close to 13 not 12 so your money inflates literally the stock of it the world average the world weighted average one percent a month uh doesn't matter where you are right the weighted average of the world and then you can see how that the the dotted line is is the is the sort of the volatility of that 13 so sometimes it's way up as it was in COVID days, 35%. Global financial crisis, 36%. You see the annualized run rate there, trailing 12-month run rates. Now, we've been about flat for the past couple quarters. But here's the interesting thing. If this percentage right here is telling you that it's flat, a little bit negative, but mostly past couple months flat, 0%, negative 0.1%. How could

to be that the the green value is going down if the percentage is negative the reason which is interesting is that the dollar is strengthening this is that wittgenstein's ruler type of thing like i can't due to the inherent nature of we don't have a beautiful system like bitcoin with fiat currency we have all these different fiat currencies the only way i can sort of visualize it for you is to put it into sort of the leading currency which is the dollar but that is a money is not a measuring stick remember ludwig von mese's money is not a measuring stick actually and you can only compare it one-to-one with whatever good you're looking at whatever good you're trying to engage in when you're trying to look at it all together it certainly helps to see

the money supply but you know it's going to look different if you look at this chart in yen or whatever but if you look at it in dollar terms all of the currencies you see that the the other currencies euro included are falling in value so that's why the the chart is falling down even though they're since they've hiked interest rates so much and a lot of that you do see here right from 2020 but the huge hiking is of interest rates again we talked about this many times that's pulling money out of the system pulling those bank reserves out of the system it has gone down but for the past year uh it's basically been flat yet it still goes down because the dollar continues to hold against these other currencies which is another interesting sign

i mean and dollar just gets stronger and these other currencies keep getting more particularly against the euros dollar getting stronger because people are looking at the energy policy in europe and the potential for economic growth and saying there's nothing here so why hold euros there's also a lot of horrible uh fiscal situations in europe there's also a horrible security situation in europe which you know i like to go on about so there's a lot of problems structurally with europe and i yeah i i feel actually as an american european i can tell you i have confidence in the states i know you have you have your issues marty we'll get there but i do continue to have confidence in americans i do too i don't have confidence in europe i have

confidence in americans we'll figure it out yeah um and for anybody at home they can't see this chart this data goes all the way back to 1969 and so this compound annual growth rate is essentially 13 on average over the last five plus decades which is a very long time scale very long time scale it's the modern era basically the end of the gold standard like any sort of semblance of the gold standard and it's weighted it's a weighted average so there are some currencies right i have 50 currencies right but i don't have data for some of them all the way back but that doesn't matter because i just don't factor them into the basket at this time so there's nothing like skewed here it's just here you know at the very beginning in the 70s you maybe only have something like 20

currencies right but as you just add more and more they change the basket uh but um it's just the weightings appropriately and the data makes sense yeah yeah so that's that uh you want to talk about fees hot topic probably should talk about it bullish just want to show you just want no comment but uh here here's the here's the daily fees uh i know we do stats per byte or stats per v byte but um this is just that's just simple dollar per transaction per day average so 2017 huge 60 bucks well well over 60 i can't even catch it 2017 70 bucks like for one day 2021 got up to 60 bucks our ordinal scare in the spring in may 30 bucks here hasn't been as high but it's definitely been let's say more prolonged and higher peaks

um this is where we are coming down from another peak just a couple days ago this is only as of december 10th so a couple days before today but yeah you definitely can see it's you know some of these peaks are higher uh than than april may sort of kerfuffle about this but then just the last thing about this chart again i was trying to just look big picture look long term if you look at the i know there have been blocks where fees have been like basically 100 i mean not 100 but the vast majority of the block reward as the coinbase versus the fees the vast majority is fees but still if you want to look at this more gradually look at it over a trailing 12 month range all right so just what miners make just roll 365 days of minor uh splits their fees and

their coinbase transaction the worst that's ever been the worst in 2018 was 86 coinbase 14 fees it's a little bit better in 2021 90 here you know we're at 95 so definitely again this is a slow moving average i mean it's a slow you know it's a 365 day figure it probably will go down test the 90 levels maybe even 85 depending on how long this goes obviously but it's you know this gets into the philosophy we can take this as deep as you want i don't have strong strong opinions but it's it's it's not it's not the end of the world i'll say that and we've definitely seen this before twice i'll say that block space is scarce if bitcoin is going to be as successful as we think it can be i think this fee pressure should be expected you should prepare accordingly

another interesting thing here i just pulled up insights.brains.com i just think this is fascinating where um the price of bitcoin december of 2021 was let's just say anywhere between 50 and 65k depending on the day and yet uh as it stands today we're making around the same daily mining revenue in u.s dollar terms so miners are pulling in the same amount of revenue as they were in the middle of december 2021 prices half or well below it's actually not half not half but yeah well below and so that that fee uh the fee bump and the end of december 2021 fees came down a bit so this fee bump even though we're below where we uh we're in price in december of 2021 um the daily revenue is about the same that's another thing yes the daily revenue is the same but

obviously a ton of hash rate has come on the network between december 2021 and today and so the average revenue per miner probably isn't the same as the aggregate of all miners and a lot of miners have joined the network over the last two years so it's fascinating then if you get a go to the hash price let's see what the hash price is going to five year let's take hash value off yeah we're like around nine cents and if you go back to december 21 we were at uh we were at like 24 cents right this that's an interesting one this highlights like the relative revenue per miner yep uh state of the industry state of the equipment pulls all that stuff it's interesting to see uh such a lower hash price right there

yeah i mean there's so many ways to slice and dice it and obviously people get caught up in a lot of different messages bitcoin for everybody and bitcoin solving all the world's problems and i'm not i'm not trying to gloss over there are issues that need to be solved there but um what you see with this chart here that i've shown is it's kind of a it's an accountant's way of looking at it or a financial analyst's way of looking at it right it's just a trailing 12 month uh realizations of revenue and just think about all the times i mean to think about the whole you know the segwit debate right how contentious that was and at the very worst on trailing 12 month basis it was uh 14 14 of the block reward on a trailing 12 month basis was fees and i got

to 10 and now it's five probably will go more than that now but um i yeah like you said it's to be expected it should be expected and uh i know you've been talking about that a lot more than the deep dives i do anyway but it's just one way of looking at it yeah yeah the mining we're heading into a whole new era of mining era not error uh The Bhutan come out earlier this year. They're mining. They're doubling down.

Oman did a $1.1 billion investment in a private miner in Oman. You see Russia, if you talk to the ASIC manufacturers, they're pretty open about the fact that the Russians are buying their machines at a premium. They're happy to send them that way. Venezuela's been mining for some time. Obviously, we have the private industry here in the United States becoming pretty sophisticated. I think it's going to be a fool's errand to try to use historical mining data

and mining trends to project what's going to happen in the future. The nation states have officially entered the game. Yeah. It may not be the largest, but it is the snowflake on the snowball. it'll that'll continue to to accelerate what do you think uh we talked about this on my pod while back like what do you think about the fact that it's over 50 percent now of ky seed uh mining pool hash what do you think about that not great um i've been pretty open about this i think what you want to do if you're trying to dissect diagnose the state of the network you

want to find the weakest link i think mining pools are the weakest link from a security perspective or a censorship resistant perspective to be more specific that may be hardened it's good to see pools like demand and ocean pool coming to the market regardless of whether or not you agree with particular decisions that any of them made. I think separate from the fact that more competition is coming, people understand that this problem exists at the mining pool layer and are trying to provide solutions and options to the market, which is good. So I do think there is a bit of self-correcting going on in the market right now.

There's other people teasing that they're going to be launching new pools soon to help solve this problem. But yeah, as it stands today, effective foundry, F2 pool and pool make up a majority of the hash rate. It's not ideal, especially when you have F2 pool coming out and openly saying they're going to censor. Of course, they backed away from that, but it's just a tremor that could lead to a larger trend if things aren't changed at that particular layer of the Bitcoin stack. Yeah. And there's all this theory about, you know, what does the pool itself really represent? What's the hash, the makeup of the hash inside that pool? When will that hash leave? What will make them leave? I don't know all the answers to that. But I do think that mining in secret or having the ability to mine in secret is probably going to be huge as we get into this nation state level, as you said. That's going to be a challenge. yes i mean you mentioned segwit pressure leading or fee pressure leading to segwit i think we're

gonna have a similar thing particularly here in the united states i'm not sure if you've been following along but the letter of the treasury sent um the senate banking and house financial services committees a couple of weeks ago suggesting suggesting uh regulations they want to see on the bitcoin ecosystem designating mining pools as financial institutions that have to follow the letter of the law the bank secrecy act was one of those suggestions and quickly after that you had the senate banking committee meet with the executives from the largest banks in the united states and that's where you had elizabeth warren and jamie diamond essentially saying we need to ban ban bitcoin get tougher on it they're evading these things

And then obviously yesterday, Senator Warren came out and proposed a bill that included all the suggestions from the Treasury and just built on the last two weeks of posturing from the Treasury and the Senate Banking Committee. So I think that could be pressure. And as it pertains to mining pools specifically, the way a lot of these pools do things now, if we're steel manning this and playing devil's advocate, you could easily see how regulators would point at the way they distribute rewards to individual miners and say, hey, yeah, they're essentially holding a Bitcoin treasury and paying you out. They're technically not paying you out from the block. And so I think Oceanpool's efforts to distribute block rewards directly from the Coinbase transaction is a design that could prevent regulators from being able to point, like, hey, you're building up a Bitcoin treasury and dispersing it. But they'll still have a threshold themselves, algorithmically, won't they? What do you mean? probably i don't think they're gonna i think it's still gonna be threshold based and it's not gonna

be every block it goes at least i didn't think so although there's still gonna be a threshold no you've accumulated somewhere and then you'll pay it out yes well no you don't you can do it directly from the coinbase it's just how you do the shares accounting and just gotta work with the fees and increase variance risk essentially are you sure it's gonna be every block no so like i'm not up to date on it but if i have one asic and i'm mining to a pool that's doing coinbase reward distribution like every time they mine a block i'm not going to get a reward they're just going to calculate the shares i'm accumulating over time then once i hit a certain threshold where i'm able to have bitcoin distributed to me directly from the coinbase reward that isn't dust

and it's actually spendable um that will happen yeah that's what i'm saying but you're saying ocean is going to do away with the thresholds to have no thresholds basically no they're gonna have thresholds okay well then those thresholds would still theoretically have this is where the argument comes in right as long as you have a threshold it's still going to be the pool operator that's managing that until the threshold gets paid out it's the same argument yeah but they're not holding the bitcoin on the balance sheet waiting for that threshold to be hit once you've reached the threshold the next block that's going to be like algorithmically this is the way i understand it yeah but i think it's whether it's on their

balance sheet or whether it's in it's an i think it's an accounting practice and not necessarily like a balance sheet um management practice you get what i mean does that make sense it's it's fine yeah i i shouldn't go on about it because i'm not too up to date myself but i think the what i'm saying is they're they as in the government is going to fight hard as far as like what really defines the threshold yeah and it could be that they will might they might say that if you're managing any sort of threshold no matter how you're doing it then you you're opening yourself up to all the regulations the security risk all that stuff yeah and this well this gets into a broader conversation i forget where i brought this up this was in nashville

matt and i did a live rabbit hole recap a couple of months ago um and what we're talking about now is like unique ways to design around this problem at the technical level and maybe the question we should be asking is everybody's trying to figure out these technical cock and any solutions to these regulatory issues is do we need to shift um the defensive posture to an attack attacking posture philosophically on the idea of the bank secrecy act kyc aml and all this what will be more effective spending a lot of time designing technical solutions to this or meeting the regulators in the battlefield of ideas and highlighting the bank secrecy act kyc aml wholly ineffective serves essentially is nothing more than a way to create regulatory modes for

incumbents i create this two-tiered system where they can pay a fine which is the cost of doing business and get away with murder um and the little guy um gets thrown in a cage for the smallest of infractions um is this is there a technical solution or is this more philosophical i think it's both i think anything we can do to fight this madness coming into bitcoin this is we've been talking about for 15 years right and not on the not always on the technical level certainly we talk about segwit talk about what we're talking about now with fees and inscriptions and ordinals and mining thresholds these are all technical things but um you know i did i did a i don't have it uh handy but i did a presentation at btc prague about mining not excuse me not

mining, but the dangers of centralizing gold, your country's gold. And I've probably mentioned in a show before, but the story of the Polish gold in World War II, it's the most remarkable thing, how the Nazis invaded them September 1st, 1939, the Soviets invaded September 17th, and literally on unmarked buses, the Poles are going from each central bank branch, taking it down through Romania, they get on train, they get it on a boat, through the uh through the black sea and into the bosphorus they get it on a train into uh lebanon they get a french ship taking it over to uh to marseille to the south of france and then the nazis invade france in june of 1940 and this the polish gold is on the run as well as now like

belgian gold french gold dutch gold uh it goes to the coast in uh brittany just south of uh of the of the british isles uh the of the uk uh dunkirk is happening like immediately there's retreats somehow they get it on this uh french ships they take it down to africa to senegal french senegal to dakar and this polish gold a lot of gold hides out in the desert there for like three years of war and it's an it's an amazing story if uh the best there's a few places you can find that story there's a book called george by george taber called chasing gold is where i read the best encounter of that but anyway i talked about that and just in general what was happening in the u.s at that time uh was as gold was fleeing europe due to tyrants and dictators as they do in government

more gold circulate or flowed into the u.s than ever in its history so by like 1940 there was already 70 of the world's monetary gold was in the new york fed and then it's like well if the worst of the worst is what dictators and tyrants can do to you kill you take your gold and that's even talk that's central bank gold by the way uh there's a the actually the the crux of the presentation is and i'm not making a moral relativistic claim of these piles of gold but the worst that the nazis did literally taking gold from uh the teeth of jews and then killing them sent into oblivion that's the worst of the worst that percentage of gold was it's like smaller than a quarter uh the the easiest way that the nazis took gold the most careful my words this most

swift way that they took gold was they just walked into a central bank and they took the gold and that's what they used to finance their war so 80 percent of the gold that the nazis stole was you know walking into the czechoslovak bank walking into the uh bank of austria and just just taking the gold so it's the the point there is it's the age-old thing like we talk about all the technical stuff but you're still going to get to the same problem with bitcoin is if you kyc it you have at the end of the day a few bankers uh with signing rights of bitcoin transactions it never becomes that centralized again you're at the same risk that happened with the gold in world war ii and then the other thing is i didn't plan on getting this long tirade sorry but the other

thing is the if you say okay that's the worst of the worst they can either steal it from you kill you individually or just walk into your nation's central bank and steal the wealth of your people that's the worst of the worst supposedly the best was what the u.s did the u.s had 70 of the world's gold had a golden opportunity literally to uh remake the monetary framework the brettonwood system started in 1945 46 how long did that last not even 30 years not even 30 years they couldn't make it last so it's like the lessons are just there again and again and again for those that are willing to pay attention this is why you've got to keep it decentralized you've got to keep it out of the hands of central bankers and governments and you

got to be able to mine in secret and all those things so anyway that's my little soapbox on that one well number one chasing gold should be a movie if it isn't already that's an unbelievable story epic story epic story number two i think i don't know if we've touched on this in the past but i think that's part of the beauty of satoshi's supply schedule 19.5 million bitcoin more than 19.5 million have been distributed to the market already due to the nascency of the exchange infrastructure in the early days a vast majority of those coins are held in self-custody there's probably two to four million floating on regulated exchanges three to five that are lost so that's five to nine that are accounted for there so you have like 14

10 to 14 million on the market free floating accessible held in self-custody rough math rough marty math on the go there but that uh that's encouraging but again it will be interesting particularly with the etf coming to market which seems pretty imminent i mean there's a lot of people who don't like the stress of managing their keys actually recorded with one of them yesterday and he's like yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna take some of my bitcoin held in multisig sell it take the tax hit and then buy the etf just because i don't want to worry about that um which is disheartening yeah yeah it's a it's a it's a tough it's a tough lesson i i mean i'm not judging i'm just saying that's it's it's uh it gets deep when you when you you know when you think how deep that

rabbit hole is and where it can go and the bad things that can happen and the slippery slope and all that so uh i mean i mean i empathize with him for trying to you know worry about his personal safety or whatever um but then you know you keep multi-six pretty safe how you manage it and uh and whatever we don't have to go into an individual case but i i completely hear what you're saying and that's a microcosm of what most people are probably thinking certainly people that are new to bitcoin i mean anyone who wanted to go down the bitcoin rabbit hole by now has been down it the only other people that i think are going to go down it are the younger generation right i mean would you agree there's no yes there's no boomer okay well that's that that even helps even more

i'd say but there is even no other peter shift type boomers that have just been hanging out right i mean i guess my that's called a boom or whatever but like michael saylor's type generation he only really got interested in 2020 it was relatively late i'd say for someone his age to really go hard i don't think you're gonna have many more like him i could be wrong but i think they're only coming from the younger generation you know like going going deep into trying to solve bitcoins these these types of problems because custody non-custody scaling it's only it's only going to happen from the younger generation so um it has really disheartening especially when you juxtapose it with the backdrop of what's going on here

in the United States. Maybe you can transition this into your optimism for the states. But as we roll into the 2024 election, the ETF seems imminent. It seems like the ETF is the Trojan horse for the Elizabeth Warrens and dick durbin's of the world to point at this regulated bitcoin exposure vehicle and say here here's your bitcoin exposure this is what you need to do everything else is not allowed that's what it's a msb money services business that's illegal yeah and that's what i mean they're trying that i'm not sure if you saw the bill

that hit the floor yesterday but they want to make it so open source software has to embed kyc aml in their wallet infrastructure mining pools uh full node validators full nodes are included like if you run a full node your money service transmitter you need to it's absurd do kyc aml and all the transactions going through um certainly shows they're scared right yes definitely that's the other thing go back to the philosophical thing that's one thing we've learned over the last three years particularly is fear is a great tool that these states have and they leverage the fear when they're weak and they're scared it's a projection tactic they're going to project what they fear onto the rest of the world and try to make them more fearful so

that they act in a way that the government wants them to and that's i don't have an answer to this But something I've been saying on a lot of shows is how do we instill confidence in individuals to have that mental switch go off in their head to recognize that their primitive fear sensors are being triggered to incite a particular reaction and how to avoid that. Well, let me transition on your transition here back to Argentina. I have one more chart, Logan. This is pretty interesting. so argentina as we know lots of debt problems gargantuan debt relative to the country uh this is the this is the official you know central bank rate of the peso uh this goes back to 2002 so it's like two pesos per dollar thing starts to get a little bit crazy 2016 15 pesos and it

starts to go over a hundred during covid yeah during covid okay and then this major ramp up and all the problems. And then we have our friend Javier Millet coming in, which is amazing. First anarcho-capitalist ever to be sworn in to a nation state, which I think is fascinating. So we should talk about that. But I brought this up specifically for him.

So this is the official rate. Now I'll show you the black market rate, okay? All right. So just a little bit here in the 2012s. it it it's like double right gets doubled the uh official but here you're talking like 10 pesos black market versus five official but if you get here to the covet days uh still staying about double um which is interesting uh but now but now it's been to triple basically and this is this is the problem of argentina right this is this is why they're talking dollarization this is what malay

wants to talk about but here's a really interesting thing uh i don't have the data much further back but since june i take i've taken the argentinian price uh the argentinian peso price per bitcoin on binance divided by the u.s dollar price per bitcoin on binance that should also back you into a black market peso price right the little dimensional analysis if you take the pesos per bitcoin divided by the dollars per bitcoin you're just gonna get pesos per dollar all right so i'll show you from june the peso price per bitcoin sorry the peso price per dollar bitcoin derived this is pretty interesting so this this black uh line just to remind you this comes from blue dollar there's lots of sites right this has gone on forever it's just just parallel rate

rate non-official rate black market rate but bitcoin because it's such a free asset in the world you can actually see it tracks the black market rate without having to like go to a black market this is the bitcoin this is the actual price per bitcoin on binance uh in pesos divided by the actual price in dollars you will get basically a black market peso rate which i is really fascinating uh even a little bit better at some some levels but um pretty much tracks the black market right so again this is just another reason why bitcoin needs to survive that helps people understand the market it helps people understand the devaluation of their money and this is just this is a beautiful chart a beautiful example of how bitcoin can bring

clarity to your financial life and you know this is why bitcoin is big in south america and has been for this is this is incredible data yeah yeah so you see that like without doing anything bitcoin will give you what the actual price of the peso should be uh like you know it's i think it's just an amazing thing and i'm starting to analyze these a little bit more like with the naira um a couple other sort of larger currencies that pretty much standard run and run a black market because the official rate is so abusive to the citizens basically so anyway point is it has to stay and like you know elizabeth warren's never going to talk about this never going to talk about the fact that bitcoin's actually going to show you the true rate

of what the Argentinian peso should be worth, so on and so forth. So anyway, we'll see where it goes. We'll see what Malay can do. He's obviously thinking dollarization just for the volatility of fiat currency. They're going to do that. But I'm very heartened by him getting into office. I think it's fascinating. I think, well, all right, let's jump into this because I got some questions.

It's hot on Malay. I'm like, not sure how hot I am. I agree. the fact that he was elected is an incredible signal if anything people are pissed off enough they recognize there's massive problem the platform that he ran on connected with a lot of people which as a free market enthusiast myself is very encouraging to see that the people of argentina threw up their hands said enough it is enough we're going the opposite direction but as it pertains to destroying the central bank and dollarizing

does that essentially just make argentina vassal state of the united states i think if they uh stay within the banking system yes but if uh the that is like you know following all the letter of the law of the imf and everything else um that's it i mean yeah but but here's the here's the thing as well the dollar oh i should have pulled this chart up for you the fed has lost control of international dollars let's say uh probably since the 80s but for sure since the global financial crisis okay uh there's this everybody always quotes m2 because it's the only available money supply that's not the money supply i should use m2 is just the retail uh sort of other monetary instruments besides a demand deposit but you need to look

at m3 that is uh retail plus institutional like money market funds all this stuff but m3 also includes something called euro dollars euro dollars are basically dollars that are outside of the federal reserves control what does that mean it's dollars that are just created deposits outside of the united states and that's a huge market it's a gigantic market no one actually knows how big it is i'm trying to research like central banks like argentina because they do post pretty detailed non-argentinian peso foreign currency accounts and you can kind of aggregate that it takes a long time and it's you know you never know if it's all dollars maybe some euros but anyway trying to get to some sort of a euro dollar figure the fed has not published a euro

dollar figure since 2006 and i've done videos on this i don't know if the chart's ready i'm not going to pull it up now but basically if you saw where m3 was in 2006 it's like here and then if you go back and later on there was all this dodd-frank and more regulations and stuff and they're trying to get the fed which is actually good regulations you know remember there's with ron paul days there's the audit the fed all these things trying to get more and more data because the fed was not publishing shit in the 2000s really and um finally they started to publish more things like repurchase agreements uh other sort of uh non-bank instruments into this into this which are all part of m3 by the way repurchase agreements are part of m3 money market funds uh

all these things and i went back i did a video on this if you backdate it and you make your own money supply which includes all these institutional accounts you have this m3 which is something like here and then you you you look at the recreated m3 at the same time what the fed was saying it it's it's like way up here and that does not even include euro dollars because i i don't know the euro dollar no one knows how many euro dollars it truly are could be 10 trillion dollars worth it could be 50 trillion it could be 100 trillion dollars worth because it's it's a shadow banking think about the panama papers the paradise papers there were tens twenties thirties of trillions of of value that is there now i'm not saying it's all in dollars it's hard to quantify this type

of stuff but this is the broad money these are things that are priced in dollars stable coins are in dollars now i know stable coins are on shitcoin networks um but it is and it's also very small by the way stable coin market is 100 billion i'm talking about a euro dollar market which is maybe 100 trillion my point of all this marty is that there is a vast pool of wealth that federal reserve never tells you but it's just a fact it's well outside of their control and it just means if if someone's gonna trade in dollars outside of the federal reserve bank uh sort of imf purview outside the of that purview in a foreign land then that's a euro dollar and it's a huge market so my that's a long-winded way of saying i think that argentina has a big chance

They might be able to do it with some Bitcoin derivatives or something of dollars, but whatever you can do to stabilize your currency and definitely not get captured by the Federal Reserve is a win, in my opinion. And I do not think that they will stand for becoming a vassal state. I mean, everybody already knows they've been screwed over by the CIA down in Latin America for decades. So I don't think they would have wanted to repeat this stuff with the monetary system. So a long way away of saying the euro dollar is way bigger than anybody knows. The Federal Reserve has not had control of it since the 80s. They don't even know the amount. They've never told the amount.

And if you even look at backdated M3s like I have, not including euro dollars, it's multiples more than they've ever said it is. So they don't have control. they do not have control of that money supply at the end of the day. Yeah. I brought the IMF too. It's something to keep in mind. Yes.

No, I mean, that would be the most bullish thing if they dollarized via something like stable coins. In my mind, it would show that they're trying to not become a U.S. vassal state. Who knows what's going on behind the scenes. Another thing, I think they should go to the IMF and say, we're not paying back this debt. Sure.

Yeah, IMF screws a lot of countries that way. They tried to screw the Baltics after the global financial crisis. We didn't let them, and that was a great thing. Paul Krugman got in a lot of fight with Baltic. Tomas Ilves was a Columbia-trained, bless you, American-Estonian president, got in a lot of great Twitter fights with Paul Krugman. And, yeah, we didn't let them screw with us after 2008.

But anyway, overall, I would say the point is America will shoot themselves in the foot at some point if they keep demanding that basically the whole financial system just does their dirty work and they have to make all these forms and reports and everything to the Fed. Because I've seen that being an American abroad, being an American European. It's harder for me opening accounts, doing reporting, all that stuff. It's very hard. And I'm just one person. I mean, I've got some personal businesses and stuff, but that's very, very small. If you're talking about big companies having to deal with all that, it just gets so onerous. And if you're a country like Argentina where you're going to look out for your citizens first, it is very possible to still utilize a currency like the dollar and not follow those rules.

And if you just say, look, American companies can't, you know, we're just not going to follow these forms or American companies are just going to have to have their accounts closed or just use stable coins. Who knows? I think the possibilities are there. And I think it'd be a great thing if they do. If they do dollarize, it just shows that the central bank system is breaking down. I mean, Argentina and Brazil prove that the most. They've had five, six currencies, respectively, over the last 50, 60 years. Yeah, look, I'm supposed to tweet.

Go to the information above. Yeah, so Argentina has an average annual inflation rate of 192% since 1944. Really leaning into the IMF here. They joined the IMF in 1956 and have participated in 21 standby agreements, which are essentially loans, since 1958. it's roughly one every three years it seems to me like the imf may be a big part of argentina's problems like how many times they've gone to the trough 21 times potentially more i think they might have done another loan between may of last year and today um at what point do people throw

their hands up against the imf and say no this is egregious predatory debt that we can't pay back we're not going to absolutely uh logan if you just switch to mine really quick it's a whole sea of numbers i'm not gonna go through it but the very last row i don't know if you can see where my cursor is uh he's doing this is i've already zoomed in believe it or not i'll try to zoom in more i don't know no it's not doing anyway uh it's argentina you can find all this on the twitter post as well on the website but uh over the last month meaning july basically they increased at 170 this is money supply growth okay over the last year 48 and since 1970 this is actual weighted money it's very similar to what the trading economics figure is but other than

looking at whether inflation rates or exchange rates this is actual money supply growth it's weighted average at 100 100 increase in the money stock so it's a it's a gigantic figure and you know just that system is not going to work for them anymore i'd love for them to go into bitcoin but uh you know melee i think i heard him say as well like he's just it's too volatile at the moment for them but dollar rise won't be a good thing i really think it would be but this guy just so you know one more other thought on him i mean uh murray rothbard had a article where he talked about how he's very skeptical about the anarcho-capitalist politician right he equated him to superman it's like you're you stay within the system you work hard you work your way up the

ranks you're good you're a good person you're a good politician but you're just working hard because you know that once you become president once you get the top you're gonna rip off your your uh you know your suit you're gonna have the the big a the big hand cap on your chest that he said that that's that's never going to work that's what he said he and he actually made interesting exceptions well really one for ron paul because he started believing ron paul pretty hardcore as rightly so i think but his main point is that it's very difficult to do that within the system and i think in the context of the united states government i think that's 100 true however uh we can get back to the u.s before the optimist i was telling you about but in the case

of argentina i it's it's it's a it is a historic moment i was i was on some chats with my latin american friends and i mean this guy is a genuine and cap i mean he's a genuine outsider he's respectful uh i also love by the way that he hates dictators that abuse state power so like he had a lot of warm things to say about uh ukraine and you know zelensky was there and i know that's going to trigger a lot of listeners but uh he's in my opinion he has all of the right uh ideas and just the right the right things going on am i putting all of my eggs in you know that basket or saying that the argentinian economy is just gonna soar and it's all gonna be roses obviously not but it may just be the right type of economy where where some good things can happen

You know, just this peaceful, nice Latin American, great people down there, warm, amazing climate. It may be that they can finally turn it all around and if he just starts gutting, you know, he already cut out like half the ministries at least, I saw his first executive order. So it's, I'm cautiously optimistic, let's say. I mean, it would be an incredible case study.

It will be. It will be an incredible case study. oh that's the worst come up that's the worst it won't come out but it's coming up yeah but i mean argentina very resource rich despite the fact that they've had this these incredible bouts of hyperinflation over the last 70 years really um they seem somewhat successful i mean in terms of having a society that operates well considering the conditions relatively with 100 with 100 monetary inflation yeah over the last 50 years now it's it's i mean when you compare argentina and venezuela it seems like

argentina's yeah the richest and got so i mean it's it's it's all fragile man it's i can tell you i can tell you how fragile those feelings of security and goodwill and like your leaders know they're doing they feel like when you know i've said it before over the last year it feels the same it's we feel very very at uh at risk here very uneasy over here with everything that's happening from the old our dictatorial neighbors and uh i love that a guy like malay is in here and he's hardcore he hates putin with a passion he hates any dictator any latin american dictator with a passion anybody that's just a thug is going to use state power he hates them uh i think it's it's pretty cool to see yeah i mean obviously el salvador made waves years ago with bukele coming

to power but on a relative basis they're so much smaller than argentina it'll be interesting to see if there are sort of partnerships made yeah i don't know if malay would would call bukele dictator i know some people do but it seems like yeah you have rating there is legit um yeah yeah There's definitely some controversy there, but there's also some interesting hard data, particularly around crime. That's what I mean. I would love to see. I mean, I love going to Central America. I've never been to Argentina.

There's incredible landscape, incredible people, nice, genuine people that I've come into contact with. It would be great to see Central South America break away from quasi-colonization that has existed. over the last few centuries yep um you know like i said they've they've dealt with the cia long enough they dealt with american uh issues and i i take your point about the dollar being uh a risk for them but i like i said that that's weird it talks about that but i do think that there are ways out there and just the fact that that's a genuine ancap that's now the head of state in 2023 like on planet earth is is pretty it's pretty cool it's very cool i mean is this what rothbard was saying is a president who's an ancap an oxymoron yeah he never thought it could happen

basically and like i said he he his one exception was ron paul uh he he did eventually think that ron paul could get it and uh you know rothbard died in 95 but he ron paul ran for president in 1988 and Rothbard was hopeful for him, but it's actually happened in the state of Argentina. And I'm fairly confident he would take that back. He would be very excited as well to see him. So I think there's a lot of good vibes going on down there. Hope that, just hope that he stays safe.

i mean i don't know that's a good way to get cued it's just to be a president who's a an anarcho-capitalist i shouldn't i shouldn't i didn't want to even say that it sounds way too negative for the way i feel but i think that the guy has a lot of respect actually for what he's been uh through and the way that he's portrayed in the media um and yeah even if it even if there is like you said there's a lot of people that are just voting for him in spite of what they might see as some sort of out-of-the-box behavior, let's say, or out-of-the-box type thinking, they just want to change. And he actually has the fundamentals that might be able to give them that.

How crazy is it that you have to mention, like, I hope he says stay safe. Like, that is the absolute state of the world. is they know that we know that they know that we know they're oppressive like it's just like an open secret like yeah the power structure is so strong if some of the populace votes somebody in that goes against the grain of the international order they will get murdered you have to like preface that in day-to-day conversation which is just insane to think this is where we are in 2023 it's probably been this much about human history but yeah i i have no doubt that he will uh he will be safe and he will do well he's got a lot of

ardent supporters but um yeah i i hope that people give him a chance and i'm sure they will get another choice frankly no let's go argentina we should be rooting we should be rooting for these people yeah these people i uh the argentines i'd like to see uh fernando actually later uh later next year and i've never been down to brazil argentina i've been to chile a few times and met some really nice argentinians there and we've had them on our show and stuff so it would be great I don't know where LibidConf is next year

but it should be in Argentina, it would be awesome It is? Is it? December? Usually in December, right? Google slow loading

bitconf was the 9th or 12th this year in boy it was in buenos aires this year uh last month yeah i was in november yeah it's a fun one cool people very nice people um yeah man well uh i think there's i think there's there's a lot of positivity there i think there's a lot of positivity for bitcoin i think uh there's a lot of negativity with u.s regulation but uh who knows what will happen elizabeth warren's track record for proposing bills and getting the pass is literally zero i think yeah i think something like 650 none of them have passed so i think the egregiousness of it is uh it's pretty apparent for all to see and i think that that that's that's going to be uh checked pretty strongly but

Yeah, I'm not one to really put my faith at all in any politics other than defense, which, again, I know is going to trigger a lot of people as well. And that's purely for selfish reasons, or not even selfish reasons, just reasons of what I see as sort of reality in the 21st century. That's something you have to worry about. I would love to have a purely a billion sovereign flags and private defense agencies and insurance for everybody really would, but it's tough. It's tough right now. It's tough right now in Europe. And like I said, if you juxtapose Europe's problems with America's America does have a boatload of debt too. It's never getting paid back. But you know,

other than that, we actually have a free movement of capital, free movement of labor and uh great entrepreneurial spirit and europe is just i don't know we can't even get our security right we have a major security problem in europe so the whole nato i think it's going to be interesting if trump comes in uh maybe more interesting for you guys more scary for us because if trump pushes and trump look again i'm trying to be honest on all sides like if trump says he's gonna either threaten to pull out of nato or pull back or pullback funding like all of the countries that know the problems of an imperial dictator which is all the eastern european countries of which i'm in one right now you know the baltics the

czechs the slovaks uh bulgarians romanians poles most notably the poles and even the fins and the swedes now like all of us know that we need to increase our security uh and that's totally because we have a dictatorial uh power on our eastern borders uh that's what that's what we're going to have to do but it's a it's a sad it's a sad state when i see just just the way that people talk about it in the u.s like i um if if americans wants to pull out of nato they would have every right to do it but i'll tell you that that people in eastern and central europe will that will have a backup alliance anyway and so i i feel good about that at least have you been following the developments in the tech or the defense startup space here in the united states

companies like andrew no that'll be really interesting to see so andrew palmer lucky palmer lucky create oculus rift and they got kicked out of facebook he got all pissed off and started this defense startup called andrew they're basically building like the autonomous drone fleet talked about in sci-fi books uh of decades past and it's you know i mean they've done some demos in recent weeks i think they had this one drone called the road road runner and it's insane like the capabilities of these drones um is on par if not better than the military grade drones that are being produced by the raytheons of the world and there's something like a tenth the cost uh point being it'll be interesting to see if um these defense startups like andrel

can reduce the cost of these defensive technologies to a point where it becomes very easy for anybody to harm themselves with defense technology and whether or not that gets opened up who knows if the us government's going to say only we can get this for x amount of time but andrew is just one example i think there's many others it's been a really interesting trend here in the states and it seems like you haven't been following it but like of tech guys starting to defend startups sounds like psyop it doesn't actually it just sounds like i mean if it's all peter teal back so palantir all that stuff well yeah i mean teal's interesting i it always gets It's murky, right, when the government comes in

and controls everything, which is obviously not ideal. But if you can make it happen where the private sector is managing that stuff as much as they can and no subsidies from the government, all that stuff, that would be obviously most ideal. But yeah, again, this is pie in the sky because we're nowhere near there right now. and uh i think that uh the ukraine war has shown a lot of uh usage of drones which are changing the

landscape um there's a good campaign from timothy snyder wonderful historian of the region where he's going to try to raise i mean he has been raising and a lot of people have been raising for for the ukrainian defense there and i think that uh that's that's definitely an interesting space But, yeah, I'm not counting on this anarcho-capitalist sort of world anytime soon, unfortunately. I do think that the government is always going to stay involved, which is unfortunate, but that's where it is. Why can't we rid ourselves of these governments?

There's a big age thing here, too. All the people, particularly in control of the United States government, are going to die in the next 10 to 20 years. Yeah. They also play on both sides, right? So, again, trying to appeal to, I know, a lot of the anarcho-capitalists that are listening from America, you know, if Texas could secede and if Texas could be its own state and still keep all the free trade open and have a lot of the things that, a lot of the political football that we saw happened with Brexit in the UK, if you could avoid that entirely, i would say it'd be great but the problem is it's so politicized it's so centralized it'd be very difficult to do that so what do i mean like you know brexit is kind of good in theory it's like well we don't really agree with all the profligate spending that brussels is doing let's secede but they didn't really have a plan and anyway they found out that their populace actually

liked a lot of things like the european open trade open borders open travel all that's ripped the way so that you know the brits are pissed about it i mean they might even have another referendum in a few years the scots might have a referendum to leave britain and join back in the eu so i mean it's it's uh it's not easy it's not easy to like who makes it hard in this example brexit who's making it hard it's europe right i think yeah i mean the pissy x is like fuck you we're not going to do trade with you you don't have any autonomy that's what i'm saying and so who would make it hard if texas who had every right to leave uh who would make it hard on them it would be primarily the elites in the northwest saying okay well you're not going to get this this

and this by the way northeast problem yeah what did i say yeah northwest sorry people in seattle aren't going to tell texas what to do good point but even old bezos he moved to miami right uh i mean this is just another example of someone who like i'm never gonna you know dog amazon the company or anything for for what they do but you know bezos has an x thousand square foot uh mansion uh in dc with like a massive ballroom like this is a guy who you know even better than gates you know stayed out there in seattle built an amazing business hardcore great entrepreneur but then at some point at some point right it's like why would he why would he buy a massive property in dc with a ballroom is it is it because i mean he lives in used to live i mean

and he's in miami now okay also pretty beautiful a little bit humid for me but he was in the most beautiful area of the world pacific northwest why would he buy that why would he buy luxury property in the in the dc area with a ballroom attached i mean there's only one reason and it's it's a relatively cheap way to buy politicians you know it's all the things we're complaining about so that's a very hard sell man it's hard uh maybe this startup i haven't really followed it maybe this little startup culture of defense can get away from that but you just got to cut it off this is why i think that the bitcoin is like the last bastion if if you can't keep bitcoin separate from the state then it is over you go back to the same thing i was talking about the

nazi gold you just walk in and take it tell you how you can spend it yeah and that's why i think I think I'm an eternal optimist because Bitcoin being a last bastion, if it falls prey to this, we get the dystopian future. We've always found a way throughout history. Obviously, it's been very volatile. But quality of life, up and to the right overall, you can debate whether the quality of life, particularly here in America, is at a peak or coming down.

If you look at deaths of despair, overdoses. Some things debatable in the U.S., very true. Birth rate, life expectancy, all trending in the wrong direction right now. Just rattled off a few of them. Yeah. But I'm here drinking a nice warm coffee, sitting in a nice chair, connected to high-speed internet, talking to somebody on the other side of the world.

Things looking good in Texas, I would say. Yeah. Nice red state. Tags it, baby. I do think they actually, look, if you've been following this, didn't they put something, I think they proposed something at the legislator that would set the stage for a techsit at some point in the future.

Learn from the UK, that's all I would say. You have to have a full plan. You have to know what you're going to do when they come at you. If we're wargaming this out, I mean, Texas has way more leverage than the UK did over Europe. like the uk doesn't have any natural resources yeah we're like the oil capital of the united states yeah well that would be more up the uh little few states north no they probably have a little bit more and the balkan definitely has a lot yeah the keystones come from canada

yeah but just south of there as well yeah but north dakota south dakota they're gonna they're gonna team up with new york state are they gonna be like texas you're good no that's true i mean if you can get uh well then what are you talking about are you talking about just texas are you talking about a whole swath of middle america just seceding because that's a whole different thing too that would be awesome yeah we gotta have the plan though brexit is a very good example of uh and look there's a lot of european libertarians i've talked to that are pissed off about how it all went down as well because there are it's just they've they've tilted the game completely in their favor when i say they i mean like just the status like that free trade

means one thing it means free trade right but when you have your negotiating partner on the way out which by the way doesn't want you to leave and it's like threatening you with all these things and then you're leaving like you said maybe with not enough leverage but maybe with uh some certain perks but bottom line you don't have a plan you can't negotiate it and you're just in this sort of weird poker game um you're gonna piss off a huge swath of the population if you can't deliver on the free trade the free movement and the free labor and that's what happened with brexit so uh you'd have to you'd have to you know it's one of those things that you'd have to get a good contingency of states

to go along with you I think I think it would be very tough to just have like Texas go it alone and then you know then you have New York and DC to just pull all these bullshit

regulations on you last minute and what are you gonna do I mean you're gonna you're still Americans so it's a very the game theory of that is very difficult when it comes down to actually succeeding i think texas oklahoma north dakota wyoming those four very energy watch yeah very freedom oriented but obviously geographically dispersed

bitcoin oriented bitcoin oriented i think you'd want to be connected as well you want to be landlocked to everybody that's going to go with you yeah but that's what i was saying louisiana's not coming new mexico is not coming so you gotta go to oklahoma yeah if you get the panhandle there uh i mean i think that it's it's a it's a wonderful theory and uh that's a uh great libertarian writer this is called the uh rethinking the american union for the 21st century i thought i thought and he just talks about how distorted the point of all this right and what i'm saying is it's the game is is tilted in the favor of the dc types the northeast the uh the new york types and they're just going to try to push that

as far as they can um even though no the book i was talking about no it's on him kent brown and marshall derosa donald livingston donald livingston that's the one donald livingston rethinking the american union is that right rethinking the american union for the 21st century okay i think it's a yeah it's a collection of essays but livingston always talks about how you know if you just look at the the proportions of congress seats of population of all these things like back in the days of the colonies as opposed to now i mean there's just no comparison there's just it's so skewed it's so it's so centralized like that that's what you're

going to deal with so they're going to throw the whole kitchen sink at you when they talk about what you're going to have to do to go along with your own Texit plan. You're not just going to be able to just walk out the door. You're going to have to sacrifice a lot. The other route is just

it dies. Northeast D.C. New York's triangle dies with a whimper where people just stop respecting them maybe you have these gray market operations that operate and eventually they're toothless and then you got the the whole nuclear thing as well you know is uh how many nukes do you have in that area uh you know because that's that's again another horrible thing the governments have brought on us like no one likes nukes but governments gave us nukes so now what are we

going to do? Can we privatize all nukes? This is a huge thing, obviously, that we've dealt with nuclear blackmail for 30 years from Russia, but particularly in the last two years from the invasion. The one thing that I agree with Mersheimer on is that he rightly pointed out in the 1990s that Ukraine giving up their nukes from the Budapest Memorandum signing, which we were saying this should be invoked in 2014 by the way it's the budapest memorandum you know what that is yeah we've discussed it yeah yeah so it's uh like uk us i think france and russia all nuclear powers at the time signed said okay we guarantee collectively ukraine's security uh but you're have to give up your nukes back to moscow and see what happens uh less than 30 years later

so mersheimer did say that in the 90s and he's correct so nuclear power is a major deterrent and you can't get away from the you can't get away from the discussion unfortunately without talking about that they got a nuke texas you you do not want to secede even from another american state without having a nuclear arsenal yourself two nukes right here bro it's done sign the dotted line where's the paperwork uh oh it's all so tiresome it is man why can't we just focus on being productive and building cool things and raising good families and hanging out with the members you want me to i gotta close it here but

you want me to trigger your listeners once more you know it's good for clicks it's good for views it's good for engagement so yes let's trigger them so uh i think this is an interesting thing with we talk about nato you're gonna hear this a lot by the way uh with trump coming in uh and Trump is right. Everybody in these blue countries, excluding the United Kingdom and Norway, who have been always very strong on their defense, the northern flank of NATO, all these countries here, a little bit lax on their spending and their defense. But this is a map here of Europe during what we called the Cold War, which was not ending with the fall of the berlin wall and so the reason i bring this up there's a there's a

strong vein of libertarians dave smith is one of them uh scott horton these guys i saw a really interesting interview with uh actually the comedy seller podcast you ever heard of this i've been at the comedy seller many times and never knew they had a podcast yeah so the owner noam dorman no i've been i've been once actually as well lived in new york many years ago uh great place obviously but they have a podcast and i've been catching some of it with the uh israel gaza conflict owner's interesting noam dorman uh he he's he's had a lot of these guests on that talk about uh that that conflict but also he had dave smith they talked about ukraine that was interesting but this narrative that just keeps getting repeated and it's just wrong is uh when they

they had this this not one inch uh phrase that was uttered by uh secretary of state baker this bush as a secretary of state to gorbachev said nato is basically not going to expand by one inch the context of that meeting just to make it very very clear for everybody and this is why we in eastern europe care so much about our security the context of well let me just even set the stage even broader so here we have nato in the blue right and we have the soviet union and what we call the warsaw pact the warsaw pact is basically a soviet union shitty version of nato so it's like At the time, you know, in the 80s, 70s, you had Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria. These were the Warsaw Pact countries.

And you also had East Germany because Germany was split up after the war, divided into four zones, American, British, French, and Soviet. So this little not one inch discussion happened in February of 1990. I've talked about this all the time, but I just had to say this again because I keep hearing people like say this, like hardcore libertarian so i agree with on most issues frankly i really do agree with on most issues but dave was trying to tell gnome on this podcast that the cold war ended with the fall of the berlin wall that's not true at all the cold war was still on when the berlin wall fell the only discussions that were happening the berlin wall fell in november of 1989 the not one inch key phrase was in a meeting it was it was called the four plus two so it's uh or two plus four i

guess uh is the four main powers it's u.s uh britain and france and then soviet union which is our shitty ally from all of this so those four powers then he had east and west germany at the at the fall of the berlin wall the only thing that was on germans minds or anybody's minds is the reunification of germany nobody is talking or caring about anything else it's the reunification of germany so when the soviet union is involved in this they have like a million troops in East Germany. Germany wants them out. Germany wants to reclaim its sovereign territory, which isn't all of its sovereign territory from old times, but whatever of East and West Germany as of post-World War II borders. When Baker talks about not one inch, they're talking about

moving NATO equipment or anything else into East Germany while, this is the important thing, while the Soviet Union is their counterpart, while the Soviet Union is in existence, while the Warsaw Pact is in existence. So this not one inch thing, just so everybody knows, is this light red state of East Germany. That's what they're talking about. Dave was talking about how it's in the minutes and all this stuff.

I've talked about this so many times. It was Stefan Kinsella, a lawyer, by the way. He's like, these are big boys. You don't run a treaty by minutes. First of all, it was minutes. That's not there's no treaty there that happens in any minutes. And the minutes never talk about NATO expanding not one inch into the Warsaw Pact countries. How could it? The point is, how could it? Unlike what Dave said in this podcast, the Cold War is very much still on here. This was February of 1990. Soviet Union didn't fall until December of 1991. Thank God it fell peacefully because of people in the UK, in America, a lot of diaspora from Eastern Europe, like my family, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Balts. We helped the Soviet Union end peacefully. Also, the Soviet Union, of course, ended itself peacefully economically because it was a disaster. But this is why I feel so strongly about this issue is it's it's the waters are muddied so much with this thing.

Everybody here that is in this eastern bloc, Poland, the Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians, even the Hungarians got kind of a little bit borderline dictatorial stuff going on right now. Romania, Bulgaria, we all once the Soviet Union ended, there was no way in the Baltics. You see, there aren't even states here. They were incorporated illegally for 50 years in the Soviet Union. we all ran as far as we could from moscow's influence moscow's sphere of influence so this just so everybody knows this not one inch comment has nothing to do how could it be so the whole premise which he's saying is that this is a mysterious uh secret pact between the reagan and then eventually the bush administration uh with gorbachev and moscow first of all

i'm showing you i'm hoping the point is very very clear now it's impossible that universe never existed in february 1990 the soviet union is still is still up here they're just trying to figure out how to give so it's already bankrupt at this point they're they're way in debt uh but they hadn't fallen and nobody knew that they were going to fall in 18 months or actually close to two years still two years left and secondly uh once they did fall gorbachev has no say for any of these countries so gorbachev has no say over what poland does czech slovaks whatever so there's never any promise this and that and it's all it's all about deterrence this is the one thing i agree with actually with netanyahu netanyahu excuse me is that it is about deterrence so this is again

this is the nuclear stuff i'm probably triggering a lot of anarcho-capitalists after we talk about all the beautiful anarcho-capitalist theory but this is what we're really we're really worried about this because as melee fears and as a lot of people fear you have literally a dictator here trying to bring back all this stuff to our eastern borders and we do need allies like the baltics are very very small countries seven million total uh we're really worried about being invaded and uh i would like to have the americans on our side even if they won't uh you know we have the fins and the swedes joining again another hilarious thing like if if if if putin was so triggered that he had to invade a sovereign country and take their land and kill their people

and rape their women and children and deport four to five million people, calling them refugees. If they had to do that, why isn't Putin rolling tanks up into Finland and Sweden right now? Because they joined NATO because of the invasion. So everything is just laughable on his face. Gorbachev said in 2014,

he said in 2014, it was never possible to even discuss eastern expansion of NATO. and anyway we all wanted to be a part of nato so uh maybe some conflicting messages there for some of the listeners where you can see that i'm pretty hardcore about liberty and bitcoin and keeping power away from the government but uh in 2023 i honestly don't know what else to do when you got uh sovereign borders basically just being invaded so that's that's my little food for thought there i think no i think over the years that we've been having these discussions definitely brought in my perspective on all this and i think you being in the baltics

and understanding the history of the region very well like this is all muddy war is muddy it's dirty it's not clean it's not clear i think your perspective is very valuable for the audience whether or not it triggers some of the listeners i think a lot are picking it up and expanding their their perspective on this just as i have because it's muddy we would we would love your support i mean uh everybody here is we have whether you like the word liberal democracy or even constitutions whatever i mean we have property rights we have a good history uh before we were invaded by the soviet union of uh you know independent governments so to all these other countries in the region and uh you know it's unfortunately what you're seeing here

is basically if you ever wondered what it was like when you know the russian empire the german empire the austrian empire were sort of carving up these states in the 1800s and stuff this is what russia just thinks that they can do now they think that we all think that we're playing by one set of rules and they just they just don't at all so that's yeah that's that's uh it's crazy to think how quickly all this could happen too because like um you mentioned like the fall of the berlin wall in 1990 it was a year before i was born like to me 89 november 89 89 two years before i was born like to me historically that's like eons ago in my mind but it was right before i was born like it wasn't that long ago no no i was i was uh seven and um the like i remember going to

protests and stuff and you know i didn't know it at the time but obviously later especially when we come free like the feeling of freedom we talk about liberty and freedom and what's happening here uh it was so strong for all of us right in these regions uh that were close to germany but like not in russia russia unfortunately they just they could never get it they could never you know boris yeltsin drunken boris yeltsin was the only time they had a democracy in the 90s um and that you know the oligarchs and all this stuff and then you know to be honest about why that happened it's not because of some inherent corruption or the way the people are the reason that it happened is because russia was the like foundation of marxist leninist thought you know 100 years

before they decided to form this you know socialist empire and kill the czars and all that stuff uh czar and czarina and their family just start this like socialist you know theoretical powerhouse and it was just anything but uh they killed at least three million ukrainians probably more in in the 1930s uh the hollow demora is a famine uh baltics just suffered horribly deportations everything uh during world war ii and they just haven't got out of it but but even they just never had it they've never had any sort of a background so you you know we really do live through history when you see how just these things can happen like you say so quickly and uh you know putin does not have a 90 approval rating let me just tell you that be very skeptical when people tell

you okay well ukraine is corrupt country just be very skeptical who's telling you that uh ukraine has had free and independent elections every year they've had two revolutions uh i went to the revolution in uh in 2014 and 2013 it was pretty wild a lot of ukrainian friends uh they are very uh very thoughtful people and they're doing their best to break away from this this influence so i'll keep saying it because this this this is not uh this conflict's not ending anytime soon it's really i think really important for i don't know the north northern hemisphere argentinians might not have too much to worry about as far as this goes but yeah i was glad to see him support zelensky as well so and support the ukrainian people

i'm gonna anchor too i don't trust the cia they're meddling it's like i told you on one of these shows right america should help all they can and then just stay the fuck out and just stay the fuck out uh do it i think it's going to be hard and i think all those cross currents we just talked about the leviathan it's going to make it hard um all i can say is we'll cross that bridge maybe we'll get to it but the war we said never again with world war ii with all the shit that happened from the dictators of stalin and hitler and we we just said never again and it's here we are yeah one last thing uh this shows you how they do it uh kaya collis she's the uh uh head of estonia prime minister of estonia her father was ahead during the um during the independence

states like during the 80s and the 90s uh of estonia breaking away from the soviet union baltic for the first countries to break away along with azerbaijan and she has told a story that like as her father framed what the russians would always do so again the russians like when i say russians i shouldn't say that because again as an anarcho-capitalist i mean moscow i mean like the center i don't mean like the the regular people but as the social the socialist communist elite The way that they figured out their role in the West was basically to take and fuck shit up as much as you can and try to get what you never had and not really ask forgiveness, but then just go to the negotiating table and then you'll be able to give some of it back. And I think that's a very normal probably game theory for a lot of states. It kind of goes back to some of this John Mersheimer, uh, realist, uh, aggressive realist

theory, but you know, they had nothing like by the time East Germany is negotiating their reunification with Germany in 1989, they're completely falling apart that Americans, Brits are giving them so much money and loans and like economically, they were just crushed. They had nothing. Their system wasn't working. They were, you know, a socialist, horrible communist economy completely falling apart. So the only way and they figured this out, like in the in the 60s, 70s, like the only way that they could really impose their will on the West is just to to fuck with the West, whether it's like with espionage, with spying, which is something they've continued to this day. you know they they uh poisoned you know uh people british citizens on british soil

uh you know the point is poison the volney um the uh uh opposition leader and all this stuff that they they just don't give a fuck about our rules about our values about our morals and then it's not even really asked for forgiveness later it's just do what you can to push the line and then they're like okay well you want us to stop let's negotiate it's exactly what it's exactly what he's done in ukraine i mean it's sovereign land he's gone in killed a bunch of people and you know ukraine ukraine is trying to fight off now suing for peace because they know that i and i can guarantee you this this is just going to be a regrouping that they're going to do if they do sue for peace they're going to try to take more this is just the mo of this type of a

regime they just take what you can take and take and take and then if we say look it's too much you're just breaking our rules they're like okay we will negotiate with you it's okay and then they're going to get more than they had at the beginning because the beginning they had nothing they had you know empty corrupt fields and you know dictators and and uh vodka that's all that they had and now now they have uh you know they have crimea and they have a whole eastern part of Ukraine. And don't tell me anything about Crimea being historically Russia or anything like that. Then they should give back Kaliningrad. Kaliningrad is right here. You can see it on the map. That's where their Baltic Sea fleet is headquartered. That's historically German for

a thousand years. They have Kaliningrad. Don't tell me that history has anything to do with it. It's international law. It's borders. It's property rights. It's sovereignty. Anyway, I get on this. I always get on this every time. I was going to try to just send a few messages but i went on longer than i wanted so i love it it's my latest that's my latest i'll tell you i'll tell you more next quarter i'm sure there'll be more to talk about there will be my friend another one in the books i know you gotta go i don't know in the background but yeah i hope you have a joyous and wonderful christmas my friend yes and uh and your family business on air here uh but ping me in like 30 minutes or whenever you're done with your daughter

because i do want to tell you that thing i referenced before we hit record fair enough we'll do it's always a pleasure sir never chore no peace and love freaks