TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #804: Bitcoin Is Cheap And Nobody Believes It with Matthew Mežinskis

Episode Date: October 27, 2026

Bitcoin is sitting near the 8th percentile of its 17-year power trend while sentiment feels like the summer of 2015. Matty Mežinskis of Porkopolis Economics walks Marty through Bitcoin priced in gold, the top five base monies, Fed balance sheet expansion echoing the 2019 repo crisis, and why stablecoins are a rounding error next to global broad money. They also cover falling costs for Bitcoin-backed lending, drone warfare, Russia's war on Ukraine, and when Bitcoin could rival central bank money. Matthew on X: https://x.com/1basemoney Porkopolis: https://www.porkopolis.io/topmoney/ The Bitcoin Playbook for Commercial Real Estate Owners & Investors: https://www.tftc.io/CRE STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/yHGkvYxdqT Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Block: - Cash App: For a limited time, new customers can get $21 added to their balance. Just use code TFTC10 when you sign up, and send at least $5 to a friend in the first two weeks. Terms apply. Bitcoin services by Block, Inc. See the Bitcoin disclosures at cash.app/legal/podcast. - Square: Visit http://square.com/go/tftc for up to $200 off eligible Square hardware. - Bitkey: Use code TFTC10 for 10% off the new Bitkey. Aven https://www.aven.com/bitcoin CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Simple Mining https://www.simplemining.io/tftc Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc 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/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/ Disclosure: Bitcoin services are provided by Block, Inc. Bitcoin services are not licensable activity in all U.S. states and territories, and not all services are available in all states. Bitkey is not available in New York. Block, Inc. operates in New York as Block of Delaware and is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Bitcoin is a non-deposit, non-bank product that is not FDIC insured and involves risk, including monetary loss. For additional information, see the Bitcoin disclosures: https://help.cash.app/btcdisclosures Get up to $200 off Square hardware when you sign up at http://square.com/go/tftc! #squarepartner. Offer expires December 31, 2026 at 11:59 pm PST. Offer for $40 off the cost of one Square Stand, $75 off the cost of one Square Terminal, $100 off the cost of one Square Handheld, or $200 off the cost of one Square Register, excluding applicable taxes. Limited to one discount per product type per seller account. Each code is limited to one redemption per account holder. Valid for new Square customers located in the US only. Offer not valid with guest checkout. Square reserves the right to modify, revoke or cancel the offer at any time. Offer cannot be combined with any other coupon. Void where prohibited, not redeemable for cash, and non-transferable. #squarepartner #blockpartner

You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bold case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Maddie, good afternoon.

Marty, good to be here, my friend, is your longest running guest. Most anti-comi anti-Nazi guest. I'm always glad to be back on. It's always great to have you on, sir. Wild times we're living in. Wild times. You're just saying, I need to get off Twitter. I have been saying that, yeah, for a few years now myself.

I find, you know, if I go to conferences and really need to link with people via Twitter DMs, then, you know, put it back on. But a few years now, I had it off the phone. I don't know. How are you feeling? You in the doom, the doom spiral? No, I mean, it's, uh, we got midterms here next week. And so I think the, the algos are being turned up to stoke fear to get people

to vote one way or another. So it's just observing that. Then the AI stuff is pretty crazy what's going on. It is. But you guys are in the golden age, right? The golden age of America. Oh, yeah, baby. All systems go.

All systems go. There's nothing to complain about, my friend. We're good. Yeah, we got everyone in their mother building data centers, locking down power deals. They're handing out starlings like candy over here. You're led by the doctor. You have a fearless leader in the doctor. you remember the doctor you remember the doctor don't you

don't you remember this tweet came out it was a very very controversial tweet with the evangelical right by your fearless leader and he said this is not a picture of jesus this is a picture of a doctor oh yes yes you're led by the doctor so i forgot about that there is the other crazy thing about and about twitter it's like

24-hour news cycle. That thing is a head to... Six months. Six months is already way deep in the recesses. I had to get deep in the mental random access memory of my brain to pull that one out. Well, this is the beauty of, like, not getting on Twitter much as, you know, you just barely see this nonsense. So, yeah.

Yeah. But, you know, to each their own, ignorance is bliss, I guess. I mean, over the weekend, I don't know if you saw it, but he was prating around Nikki Minaj saying, look at her ass. I did not and this is true this is a true thing this happened here

all right well next time I'm on I'm on a little search for that yeah can't wait yeah the Bitcoin price

sitting at a boob price right now 80,000 80 dollars boobo yeah it's all all's been quiet on the western front of Bitcoin I feel like we're in a consolidation period for the last couple months yeah

But generally, I'd say still pretty positive from that August bump. I was much more bearish in the summer and happy to be proven wrong on that bump that we got in August. And so far holding and I would be highly, highly doubtful if we go back to, you know, 60,000, even 70,000 levels maybe for a quick, quick minute. but yeah you know i'm flirting with i chart this i chart this stuff out and we're we're we're looking at it most days what uh i mean we do this every three months yes we do um and we've been doing this for seven eight years now almost yeah it's gonna be um eight eight it's gonna be like about to be nine years actually next next year And I know I know we've both been hanging around the rim of the corn for for quite some time now.

13 going on 14 years, which is hard to believe. But I tweeted this out like a month ago. The dislocation between market structure is the price of Bitcoin. I know like looking at your charts power law trend, like it's it is or power trend line is. It was near like historic lows, but it felt like the bear market wasn't as severe as bear markets passed from a price perspective. But the dislocation between what I would call like market structure, like pretty shallow bear market and short bear market. And the sentiment is larger than I've ever seen it. The sentiment is very reminiscent to the summer of 2015 to me these days.

and the price is hovering around $80,000, which is a, I don't know, there's a disconnect between price and sentiment right now, I think. Yeah. Yeah. I think that you're right. If you back it up, though, and take a look at the numbers. We're definitely in cheap territory. In fact, the same thing as those 2015 lows or 2018 lows or 2018 lows or 20s. 22 lows. But I still remain pretty confident. I mean, we do this every time. It rebounds every time. And I say it often in my streams, especially when we get to these levels.

And when we're around $17,000 at the end of 2022, all the FTX debacle was in full swing. And Peter Zion, the geopolitical genius was on Joe Rogan saying, Bitcoin was $17,000 overvalued at $16,000. Those are moments to remember because often people spout off about Bitcoin without knowing anything about it. Even if they may be somewhat learned in other spheres, I'm not saying he's not learned in certain things. It's important to remember because cycles do repeat. And we are in the exact same scenario, percentage-wise, percentile-wise. now as we were in those periods so yeah you tweeted out on Friday the

8.4 4th percentile on 17 year power trend gold at the 93 and a half so we've got this gold still hovering up there yeah yeah so we can look at these I don't know if you want yeah that's a live that usually dear listener when we we do these it's a little bit better on the YouTube streams or when you launch on Spotify do you have the live videos going as well I think you do right if we do on Apple now Spotify's been a little finicky with the fountain is trying to communicate with the Spotify team okay we have video all over the place but you can watch a video on Apple or a fountain you're listening on Spotify right now okay

so again just brass tacks being in the trying to get the macro trend and not get too worked up. The nice rainbow looking log linear trend of Bitcoin with a power trend, 96% R squared. You go log log, get a nice straight line, beautiful trend. Here's the Peter Zion moment, right? It's here. End of 2022, 16, and change. And you see here, we actually went lower and set really like an all-time low here in June when that was $60,000 Bitcoin for the time for the relative time of Bitcoin relative to the power trend. And so now, yeah, we're even lower than that tweet that I did last week.

So we're about can never assume. We're around 80,000, whatever. It's a little bit below 8%. The eighth percentile. So again, that means 92% of the time of all observations that we've had in the Bitcoin world. You know, the price has been higher relative to trends. So I'm pretty bullish. Not saying that we couldn't go down to the fifth percentile. And in fact, I do think we could see some weakness here, especially if, you know, Elizabeth Warren gets on her by horse after a blue wave or whatever might happen here in the midterms, you know, trying to target corruption in crypto or whatever from the Trump admin. There's, there could be narratives to

bring the price even weaker, but generally speaking, I would say, you know, not financial advice, but this is, this remains a relatively cheap price point for Bitcoin. Yeah. What's been going on with gold in the Bitcoin to gold ratio? Right. So let's look at gold first. Let's pull it up here. Just a quick second. So with gold, I call this one pretty, pretty accurately. You know, gold's trend is much less explosive. In fact, Then Bitcoins, it's been on a hell of a tear last three, four years, no doubt.

But if you look at the gold price here, just straight up gold price. And you go over a long, long macro trend. All right. This is a linear scale. All right, linear. And then if we go log linear, get that straight line. And that's an expo trend. So gold, just like stocks, bonds, you know, I've said it a thousand times.

Exponential trends. The only thing that will give you that rainbow on the linear, sorry, log linear. scale is Bitcoin, the only financial asset, in fact, that I have served to be doing that, which is pretty wild. But if we do gold, you know, you can, you can start to see these bands of what, you know, what extreme overvaluation or undervaluation looks like. So we can see in 1980, right, January for about two seconds, got to $8.50 bucks an ounce. Then it nadir in, I believe it was July of, actually, I think it was 19.

But also from 1999 to 2001, basically, it was scraping the bottom around $250. And then I told everybody a lot of caution this winter when it was going over $5,000 an ounce because it was just pushing this 100th percentile. If you just look at that, that's a 55-year trend to new highs. And it set a new high. And so we're off that. You know, we may have a little bit more of a dead cat bounce or something. but I don't see this going anywhere to fantastic Jim Rickards,

you know, $50,000 an ounce territory. Again, anything could happen, but the probabilities of supply and demand suggest something different. And if you look at the kegger of this trend, all right, it's only 5.7%, which is pretty wild. That's since 1969, 5.7%. So yeah, we're coming off of it.

You know, I could, I could project this forward. Like, let's go even out to the year 2050. And if you look at the OLS there, the first line, the price projected in 2050 for gold on this trend is $8,500. So nice, good, but keep in mind, we're at $5,000 already in February. And yeah, in February. And there's much. more data inside these trends than there is for the Bitcoin power law model, which only has, you know, as you know, 17 years worth of data, less pricing data. So I'm pretty confident to be

bullish on Bitcoin compared to gold. And it's fine. I got no problem with gold if you want to hold gold. But as we see, Peter Schiff has been wrong and wrong again. And yeah, that's kind of the update there. I can do Bitcoin in terms of gold now. Might be helpful. I think that's, I think that's where the signal is. Yeah. Bitcoin price and other commodities. Right. So here we got Bitcoin dollar. We got gold dollar. Now we'll go Bitcoin gold. All right. So this is interesting. First thing to notice is it's a power curve. Okay. Go log log, the straight line. All right.

So the Bitcoin price in terms of gold that the power regression dominates here, like it's not an exponential trend, which again shows us that something's going on more in Bitcoin land than it is in, you know, the world of gold. But what is interesting here is because of gold's massive success relative to its history in the last three, four years, you see this like, you know, Bitcoin had a major low.

right in the winter and the summer in terms of gold. I'll zoom in here. But you can see like where usually we have these gaps is between the 90th 100th percentile, right? Here we had a huge gap between the bottom and the 10th percentile, which is fine. But I think it just shows people that you can have these probabilities on both ends of the spectrum, depending on what your lens is,

depending on what your frame of references. So here, I said this at the time, again, I try to not be too arrogant with these calls, but I was pretty confident with this one that this trend was just way too strong for Bitcoin. I saw it bounce from the 12 ounces of gold. I said, I think 10 ounces of gold is out of play. And there we go. So think about this. If you were a gold holder back in February, March, you could have got Bitcoin for 12, 13 ounces of gold. We could have gotten one Bitcoin. Now, just waiting eight months,

it's going to take you 20 ounces of gold to buy Bitcoin. So it might not seem like in the last eight months, Bitcoin has done that great, right? Even though it has had a great recovery, especially from August, as I mentioned, which does surprise me. Look at that change, right? The price is almost doubled in terms of gold,

which shows you Bitcoin is on a way stronger trend line. than gold is and quite unique, quite good. Again, we could retest again so that it's growing all the time. So the lower trend now is 15 ounces of gold, right? I think we still could test it in the fourth quarter area. You never know. But I do think 10 ounces of gold might be. I do think 10 ounces of gold is out of play.

I mean, forever, or in like a massive black swan. You just look at this chart. Look at the probabilities. Look at the way the trend line grows. it's pretty incredible. And the trailing 12 of this trend, by the way, is 36.7%. So actually a little bit shallower.

The Bitcoin dollar trading 12 month trend is a little under 40%. The gold takes a little bit of that return away. But still, you can see that the name of the game here, it's Bitcoin's power curve way more defines what's happening in Bitcoin world than, like you said, sentiment or money supply even, you know, as we, I know this is another quarterly update here with the base money. So I can show you that. I think this is the main thing. We've been doing this long enough, right? I don't know how long I've been talking about the power trend for, but I've been tracking this long enough for.

This is the main story for Bitcoin and how it's growing. And I think it's way more descriptive of what Bitcoin is doing. And it should give people a lot of calm. presence, you know, take that frame of reference and try to expand that to other areas your life, you know, touch grass, see how good Bitcoin does relative to these other assets and hopefully it will give you some peace. Yeah. No, I think Bitcoiners need to do better. I'm sure you saw the headlines of the fusion reactor turning mercury into gold and every Bitcoin and their Bitcoiner and their mother running out saying, oh, Peter Schiff, we can use alchemy to turn mercury into gold now. Yeah.

It's not the first time. It's not the first time that such news has broken. But yeah. Well, it's like that. If you look at it's like, I think mercury is something like $14,000 a gram to like to do something like that at scale. And then if you do successfully use a fusion reactor to turn mercury into gold, you have to vary. underground for like 20 years to let it uh right to let all the nuclear waste uh dissipate from from the asset but the point it's like you just look at that you don't need to discover alchemy to

shit on the gold bugs just look at this trend correct correct and it's still not the first instance i think in history where it's someone has demonstrated in a lab where it's possible to create gold uh it's been demonstrated years, years before, as far as I know. So, yeah. So that's it. Yeah. I mean, let's go into base money now because I am interested with everything going on.

Yeah. So, well, one more here on the, I had these quarterly candles now. Just a simple one. I think these are actually helpful. If you look at the down trends, right, in prior cycles to 2015, as you mentioned, was a real long one, 2018, 2019, relatively shorter, although we did have that fall. 2019 again. 2022.

But bottom line is I think if you if you just gloss over these trends, right, of all the cycles down, it's at least four red candles. And we've had three full red, right, from 2025. So 2025 fourth quarter was red. First two quarters this year were red and green. Now we're actually currently in a red. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if we have a red quarter here. And I think this is, again, just to warn people like, yeah, you can always be megal bullish, great.

But probabilities, I wouldn't be surprised at all if this quarter is red or first quarter next year's red. Just something to keep in mind. Okay, so that's quarterly. Let me show you this one. This one I think is really insightful. So again, this is the old monetary base update. It's a little bit slower. than I used to because I got some broad money stuff in here as well, which we can talk about.

But base money is basically central bank money. It's the printing press. It's what actually central banks print to primarily by government bonds, but they also have some gold on their balance sheets. And these are the top five in the world. So the Chinese yuan is actually in first whole place right now. It's $6 trillion. Then we got the dollar itself, $5.5 trillion. The euro, $4.6.

trillion and the poor yen as you have surely been following the story of the yen over the last few months it's just getting crushed in dollar terms so the yen was actually winning you might remember some quarters we did right like five six years ago the yen was on top pole position and now it's just a distant fourth falling about under three and a half trillion then bitcoin and then the british pound sterling which is about a trillion dollars in base money so we're actually close to catching it in the quarter end. And this is only from second quarter. But you can see, I got the, of course, the

market cap I keep growing. So we can see a Bitcoin. We bounced off it. Close when we were down to about $1.2 trillion there at the end of second quarter. Now we're well back up. So, but this is it. This is really, if you want to look at Bitcoin versus the Fiat world, this is how it's growing and this is how it's going to continue to grow and I think it's an interesting just an interesting alignment there of the top five current season in Bitcoin yeah I mean just looking eye testing caveman TA this chart looks like a favorite yen uh yen euro pound going opposite of the yuan the dollar and in bitcoin

it looks like yep yep uh and I'm not sure how much the yuan will continue there. That's interesting. I mean, it's sometimes the news cycle might be overhyped on some of these technical things, but you know, you read the tea leaves, the Chinese seem to be worried about their debt. You know, they're the largest. Of course, the US always. It's a debt story, right? But the Chinese, even though they have a huge manufacturing base, they have the fastest growing debt. They have the largest debt of all, you know, developing countries and the second largest that holding country in the world, basically. So it comes with economic growth.

It's true. I'm not defending any of it. But that might face some headwinds as well. And again, all this stuff about the BRICs currencies or the yuan being like some sort of a new safe haven. I just don't see that at all. I think we agree it's going to be Bitcoin before it's going to be Chinese yuan. Yeah.

And I think that's, I mean, bringing the debt in the focus here. Big point of contention here in the United States, especially we're considering where yields have drifted to. Obviously, they've come off their highs in the last couple of weeks, but big point of contention here, which is like how high can we let these yields go as we're rolling over all this debt? Then you have the Genius Act's rules being set last week and this over-indexing on the front end of the yield curve by the Treasury with Scott Bissent at the helm. And that's been a very consistent topic of conversation on this show over the last six to eight months is what's going on with the yields and what's going on with the Treasury. I mean, the theories out there, they're trying to push everything to the front end and imbue the financial system with stable coin rails.

to drive demand even further for that and sort of do like a hot swap of this long-ended, long-duration debt with short-duration debt and try to drive the flows towards those short-term bond auctions with stable coin demand. And that's interested to get your thoughts in the whole stable coin conversation and the push to integrate it very broadly in our financial system. Yeah. Well, it's a longer term thing, first of all. I would say I think it's much larger sort of, I don't know, what's the word? Like sort of clickbait sort of a topic, right?

Because the stable coin market cap still that even 200 billion, I have it somewhere. but a hundred and some billion and you're checking me right now yeah i'm checking we got tether at 182 billion okay so it's uh rising faster than i us dc so it's like yeah 250 billion between us dc and tether yeah so 250 billion but then if you look at what m3 3rd000 three money represents, which is basically money that is most analogous to a stable coin. Okay. So M3 money is repurchase agreements, Euro dollars, which I don't have, but I do have everything else part of the M3 stack, which is the broadest money.

It's the most liquid non-bank, non-insured deposits. All right. So money market funds, repurchase agreements. those types of assets, we get your $8 to $10 trillion in size, just dollars. And that doesn't even count Euro dollars, which are offshore dollars, which are also analogous in some way to stable coins,

right? Because stable coins basically an offshore money market fund. So, and no one has a good handle as far as I can tell on what the truth. I'm trying to still get a good proxy for Euro dollars, but don't have it. But anyway, I have all the others. And if you factor even all the other M3 type instruments for other currencies, right, on top of the more narrow deposits like demand deposits, so on and so forth.

I mean, total M3 globally worldwide is about $150 trillion. I have a chart for this, about $150 trillion. So here I sort of just, I look at these again, it's kind of clickbaity. And yeah, it might be, it might drive some news stories. it might drive something there, but it's really, really small at the moment. What I do think is the bigger question, mark, back to your original question about yields is how high can the market go on this, particularly in the long bonds, because, as everybody knows, the more that resets higher, the harder it is for people to pay off a lot of that

underlying debt. And I just don't know the levels here. I can show you looking at the short. All right, here's Fed balance sheet. I have this pulled back like 30 years, 35 years. You see, so you see the craziness, right? QE1, 2, 3 from post-GFC. Then you see the pandemic high. What I do think is interesting is, remember this? The old repo seizure, right? Which is a short term seizing of the market. That happened in September of 2019. The result of that was they had to raise asset purchase.

They're doing that again. And they have been here from the end of last year, right? As Powell did what he said he was going to do. But usually they, you know, they always overshoot it. So this is, I would say, eerily similar to 2019. It's just like, are we going to? going to get that shot or shock of a, you know, a black swan, which would give them the excuse to monetize, give them the excuse to lower interest rates. Like that might even be preferable to

them. But if they do not have that, then that seems like it's going to be pretty difficult for debtors to pay their creditors. Oh, it doesn't look good either way. Bitcoin looks fine. Either way. But yeah, this is where I mostly take my analysis to the extent of it because I just don't, you know, it's hard to say. But it's absolutely, we know that if they do have that shock, if they do have that Black Swan, we know what's going to happen to the money supply into rates. Yeah.

It's interesting here. It's the one difference between now and Q4, the end of Q3, Q4 2019 is we're raising rates. it's still going up. Yeah, correct. Correct. That is a difference. It's almost like it's actually the opposite situation because here they were just the standard targeting lower rates, rates were going down and they were purchasing more printing money.

And here they're actually able to do the opposite. And how long that can go, you know, people think what is a Fed meeting coming up this week now. And people think that that's might stay the same, might be a hike at the next meeting in December. So it is diverging from the from the 2019 story. But yeah, overall, like that's sort of trying to normalize the balance sheet, right, which, which happened from 2014 to 2019. And then even pre-crisis or pre-pandemic, we had this. exploding the balance sheet again, which showed that not always well, and they're doing that again here. Even though I think they're aware of it, that's why they're trying to keep the rates higher.

But as you said, the economy is complex and the more that these central bureaucrats try to get involved with it, they're usually not on the mark. We're doing a lot all at once right now. Trying to reindustrialize, obviously terrorists. We talked about the AI trade, whatever you want to call. build out seems to be somewhat existential to the quality of economic growth moving forward. And as we're talking, Anthropic has released their S-1 to go public next week. And just reading the tea leaves here doesn't seem too confident.

The market doesn't seem too confident in what they released this morning. So that's, that's been the big, it's been the big question is like, can any of these companies get public? And if not, what message does that send the market? And there's obviously hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars even locked up in this, this trade for lack of a better term. Yeah. Is that to your point is like the 2019, 2020 equivalent of. the COVID scare this time around. Is it like a bailout of this infrastructure build out if it begins to puke?

Yeah. In 2019, well, in 2019, at least, I know people tried to read the tea leaves on, I think the yield curve inverted even in August of 2019. And there were rumors, I guess, if you really look back about what was happening in China in 2019, but really the market didn't even know at that time. So, like, I don't think. think that was really a story until, you know, January 2020. This point is, yes, I agree with you. Yes, it's very incestuous the way the capital market is treating AI right now. And yet, even though

Bitcoin is not a stock, you can see it on my website, top money, workobulus.com.com.com.com. of slash top money, we're still trading, you know, 1.6, 1.7 trillion, whatever it might be, is still a top 10 stock, even though Anthropical probably push us down a peg. So it's, there's, yes, there's a lot of incestuous liquidity chasing AI. There's a lot of question marks there. You brought up data centers, all those things. But Bitcoin, to me, it just seems like such a solid place. right now, especially when you consider all those other factors.

But quantum in AI breaking ECDSA, it's here. We're screwed. It's going to zero. Yes. Yes. If I had a nickel, I had a sat for every time I heard quantum over all the years that I've been in Bitcoin. But this time it's real.

AI is really smart. It's really smart. Well, we've seen how AI has been able to penetrate certain. people's stash for sure there's a hardening going on but uh i mean yeah i mean we haven't spoken i don't think you've been on the show since cold card yeah and all this um all these vulnerabilities have been uh identified and exploited by my people leveraging these AI tools do you think it's a hardening that's been going on the last three months do you think we're out the woods you think i think it's definitely a hard

I don't know if we're out of the woods, but, you know, like what Kale and those guys have been doing, around the track is white hat, you know, actors in space. It's fantastic, I think. There can only be, there can be no other way, right? Like, it's not government regulation that's going to save us here. So if AI is exploiting people's stash and very sadly so, first of all, there were plenty ways to mitigate that. Again, I'm not definitely not happy for that situation, but the fact that I think new software releases can be so much clearer now in the way that they're implemented as far as checking for bugs and the bugs are out there and

the potential attack services are out there. It's just, it's going to be this cat and mouse game, but I absolutely think that we're attacking this all in the right way, I was trying to, you know, protect people. So, freaks, this rip was brought to you by good friends at Square. Bitcoin a block is creating a whole ecosystem of companies cash app, BitKee, and Square to make Bitcoin everyday money. The way Square does that is by enabling eligible businesses to accept Bitcoin over lightning. This is a superior way to do payments compared to incumbent payment processes.

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It's scary. It's unnerving. And that's the other thing. That's why I love talking to you. And I say this every time you're on. I'm just like looking at the charts to detach yourself from the narratives of the day is extremely important. And not going to lie, it was very discombod.

Vulating end of July, August, September. It's like, what the hell is going on? But like every other day, something was happening. And I think one thing I've been telling people behind the scenes is it was never ever going to be easy, right? You're going to have these trials and tribulations on the road towards the Bitcoin standard.

This is just par for the course. You've got to go through these, these hardening experiences. And, I mean, I was dead. definitely guilty of this in the past, but I think in recent years have become more sober about Bitcoin's path to ultimate success. And it's arduous, not a straight line. And I think we're still learning how to interact with Bitcoin correctly. We're still discovering what this alien technology is, how to interact with it, and what we can do with it, and how to secure it. I think the conversations that have been had over the last three months about how we secure Bitcoin,

how we audit the code and what products are actually needed right now. It's been a lot of hard conversations, but I think very important. And in the long run, we'll be a massive net positive, but you just have to realize we're in the middle of the storm. And you can't let the storm sort of dictate. your view of Bitcoin in the long term. Yeah. And I mean, like anything, there's a wall of worry, right?

None of us know the future. We can do these charts with these probabilities to try to chart out the relative range of where we think the future could go. The more uncertainty that is posted or the more volatility that is posted on these charts, it's true. The range of probabilities widens, right? But at the same time, you gain more confidence that those bands, you know, are relatively accurate.

And that's why I was pretty confident in the winter where I said that gold was reaching, you know, at top. It's just as matter what Peter Schiff or James Rickards says, their own sort of their own odyssey that is outside the realm of reality. But if you price Bitcoin in terms of gold, price Bitcoin in terms of dollars, price Bitcoin in terms of oil or anything else, you know, you're going to start to see this really interesting power trend, which suggests really strong network effect, which I think is really exciting. And another one, I could show you here in the same vein of the chart I just showed you.

I got the different administrations up as well, bringing it back to the to the, yeah, well, not administrations, but this is actually, this is a, This is fully controlling the Congress. So the white spaces would be a mix, split Congress. And the, you know, the non-white spaces would be when both parties control, or sorry, one party controls both houses. But again, I'm not defending it. I'm not saying that I want it to happen.

But if we do have a situation where, as we talked about, they have to explode the money supply, black swan, whatever it might be, they do have room to do it, right? The last, you know, major high in the 70s here was when we were going into a petro dollar, going off the gold standard. And as I've told you probably many times, if you don't remember, your listener, like, the reason this goes down and looks better. So this is the Federal Reserve's proportion of the U.S. federal debts.

This is literally how much they, this is the monetization of the debt, the phrase you've probably heard often. Because those are monetized a debt. They don't monetize the debt. Who says that? That was a Bernanke's thing. We're not monetizing the debt. I mean, yeah, Q any sort of no-coiner there.

But the reason this goes down and actually looks better, it goes down from 16, 17% of owning the federal debt in the 70s is not because the Fed is hurting any less money. It's actually because the U.S. is taking on more debt. So it shows sort of how this thing can go on for a long time. But anyway, if you zoom in here and that we look at, you know, that Dewey 1, 2, 3, and then again, the pandemic, you can see at the height in 2021, we're at 20% of federal debt.

And this does not include agency securities, which are separate numerator, separate denominator. But it's basically, it's just gross federal debt. and how much the Fed owns of it, Treasury security. So now we're only at 11.3%. So if they need to act fast and swiftly and flexibly use all those terms that economists like to do, I think that there's precedent that they can, right? They could double.

The Fed could double its balance sheet and still be within the realm of historical possibilities. So it's another reason. I'm not hoping for it, but I'm just saying they can do it, which is again, another reason why it just shows that Bitcoin to be is a much better holding than, say, the dollar or bonds. How do you think Warsh has been doing since he got stepped in, particularly on the K-Fobb side of things? Fine, fine, yeah. I'm not a big judgeer or even train spotter on everything that they're saying in those meetings.

but you know seems to be a little bit more independent than was maybe feared by some of the naysayers i don't know you yeah i think it's i think he's definitely more independent i think it's handed uh i mean if you're handed at the reins of the federal reserve i do not envy that position no at all no and uh i do like no forward guidance i think i think it's it's good to have the markets trying to figure out things for themselves instead of reading the tea leaves. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it would be better if we didn't have central banks at all, but, you know, we are where we are. So it's also interesting, if you look at this, you know, from like basically the progressive era, really the end of the progressive area, but this is, you know, started a great

depression all the way through almost to Newt Gingrich. It was a, you know, I didn't quite realize that, right? But if you look at that, look at that Democrat stronghold on the House. That's that's the, that's the House and the Senate being run by the Democrat. Pretty wild. Yeah. Or, you know, 60 some years. And, yeah.

But whether it's Republican, Democrat, whatever, unless you're Jacksonian, ready to extinguish the debt. They both take the debt up. So it's just interesting that there was a long period of American history where it was only Democrat. Ron, House and Senate. No, I think to your point, when we're talking about the debt,

I mean, this is on balance sheet debt. I think the topic of conversation around off balance sheet debt, particularly Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, historically, a third rail, don't touch,

but that third rail is, is weakening the electric current blowing through that rail is weakening and people are beginning you're beginning to see bubbling of conversation around social security medicare medicate cutting it and then i think interestingly in parallel you have the trump accounts being launched for children to start but then last week or the week before they're going to they said they're going to come out and make trump accounts available to anybody under 40 And so you can see the beginnings of trends like hot swap social security out for this, this Trump account, equity portfolio, index portfolio for people.

No discussion of Bitcoin there, though, right, with the Trump accounts? No, no, no, no. I think you have to buy indexes, I'm pretty sure. Just be in funds. Yeah, I mean, as John Williams used to say from shadow stats, I mean, you could cut every single thing in the budget, except for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, you still be in deficit. So that's the brass tax math of the U.S. federal budget.

You can cut the military. You can cut literally every single thing, except for those sacred cows, and you'd still be in deficit. So we'll see. Again, I'm, kind of again, I haven't said that this yet here. I think that there's a lot of, there's a lot of difficult things going on in the world, right? You know, where I live, it's war right on our borders and stuff. And I would just hope that, at least in the free world,

we can start to manage these problems like adults. I'm not sure if we can. But I would, I would, I would say that managing these problems, just head on, just telling people that, you know, I mean, I don't expect to get anything Social Security that I've put in, right? Yeah. It's not going to be politically popular,

but have to at least start addressing it. And maybe you can start to somehow fix the problem long term. But I still would say, you know, the West is still way better than, you know, what's going in Russia, for example. I'm always balancing those things as well. But let's see. So freaks. This episode is brought to you by Simple Mining.

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Sovereign health and sovereign health care. I've been thinking about it a lot recently, and obviously it's like one of the sacred books of Bitcoin lawyer, but like the sovereign individuals is just getting stronger and stronger by the day, whether it's what we're talking about on the entitlement side, getting out of hand. I mean, Trump was not, they didn't say Trump's going to be president, but they said some populist, will some populist outsider will emerge, will run on immigration reform. and tax reform and that's happened. And then what you're seeing in your neck of the world,

like, asymmetric drone warfare was productive as well. And that's like, I've been following that trend on both sides of that battlefield. And it's insane. I don't think people appreciate the gravity of the advancement of drone warfare. It's already affecting us, man. I mean, the Baltics, every country and Romania, Poland, we've all been, our airspace has been penetrated by airant Russian drones and the, you know, imagine getting a text, you know, that there's an air raid alert and your child needs to go to the basement. Like, I don't know about you, but I grew up in the Midwest in the U.S. and I know you did as well, but like we had tornadoes warning. And they never really happened where we were, but still had them.

Uh, the warnings, you had the drills, you had everything, but imagine, you know, you got to go in the basement, not for a tornado warning, not for a hurricane warning or anything, but a drone warning. Your child goes in the basement for that. I mean, we're already, we're already having it here. That's why we're so pressing for the free world to take on the direction of health state. But yeah, they're the two countries in the world right now that they're the two countries in the world right now that's why we're so pressing for the free world. are taking this to the next level is Russia and Ukraine and AI going to be a part of it. And it's it's it's a cost effective way to scale both offense and defense. And that's what's happening. There's just no doubt about it.

There's no there's no getting away from it. And it seems like we've crossed the event horizon too. Oh yeah. There's no like talking around this on a podcast like this is not happening. this is happening. And I don't think people in the West appreciate it unless you're like terminally online. And it's again, going back to the sovereign individual thesis, that's one of the things they predicted. I can't imagine having to like what you're, what you just described having to worry about that.

But I mean, I don't want to sound like too much of a doomer, but she'd be naive to think that this of risk is not going to spread throughout the world. Yeah. No, I said it, I think, on the last show with you, I've said a few times. Like, it's already happened to Americans on bases. You know, whatever you think about the Iran war, I wouldn't support any offensive wars of America, but they happened. And they started that war.

And I thought it was frankly shameful. I mean, that the Iranian Shah had drones. It could have been Russian augmented drones. They didn't say specifically, but it was Iran and Russia, it's one in, it's both sides of the same coin, the Shahid drone model. But that killed the first six Americans there in Kuwait and the bases. And America wasn't prepared for that. That's just, that's a, that's a war theater, right?

Like that's, that's active war. And America wasn't even prepared for that. And of course, the Ukrainians come in with the thankless. help that they always do and gave anti-drone tech to the U.S. as they continued that and they're continuing the help. But I mean, it's, you know, you saw Operation Spider-Web last year from Ukraine where they're able to knock out like a huge proportion of Russian bombers using covert drones hidden in, you know, in lorries and semi-trucks. So there's no way that there's no way that this is not even that anyone credible in the U.S.

defense department could not be thinking about this as a major threat that could happen even in the U.S. So it's for sure. Again, I'm not, I'm not trying to be a duma or scare people. I'm just saying this is sadly the state that we're in right now. And there's no way around it. You have to now be in a counter drone state of minds. Well, especially in the U.S. Because you have members of the Sinola, Sinola cartel going to the front lines to learn how to use these drones.

I mean, showing up as mercenaries, but really using it as like an education trip. It's, it's not. It's not. That's not. That's my hope. A great hope is that we're just being pushed to the precipice. And we wake up one day and say, okay, this is getting too crazy. Let's focus on the good, productive stuff. But how long that period last is yet to be determined. mean, you have the Neil Hal, acolyte saying we've got the fourth turning, probably we'll find a resolution to any of this till the 2030s after the turn of the next decade.

But yeah, I think it's going to be crazy times. Yeah, I mean, monetarily, we can stick on the military stuff for a second, but monetarily, that's what I'm seeing as well as like big things with the way the Bitcoin's growing, the trends, something that might be as large as the government monetarily. base, about $100 trillion, which might just be rounding to a number that wouldn't mean anything, but that stuff's going to happen late 2030s where Bitcoin's going to be about as large as $100 trillion, which is probably or could be, you know, $80 to $100 trillion could be a number where Bitcoin passes the growth rate of central bank money in the world.

That still just means it passes it. It might not mean banks are really holding it. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't. Also, early 2030s will pass a million dollars per coin. This again, just a round number. But I do think that late 2030s from the monetary side, at least from what Bitcoin has the capability of doing,

that shows something. But I fear much sooner than that, right? I mean, Ukrainians right now are going to have to deal with probably the most brutal winter they've ever had. You know, there's, I don't know if you've been following. There's a lot of drama with Elon Musk and Starlink in the Ukraine space. He's blaming Trump and Trump's blaming him on who turned it off, but they turned off. They finally got back to full speed.

And this is defense. This is not offense. The Ukrainians, if they go on offense into Russia with their homemade drones and ballistic missiles, which they're starting ballistic missiles now, by the way. But that says nothing to do with Star Shield. This is just defense of, you know, Ukrainian families and cities that are being bombed. So that was throttled over a week ago. And no one is owning up to it in the government.

But in any event, it doesn't matter. It's clear, I think, that you can't trust one dude with Starlink if you're Ukraine. So Europe knows that. Europe's building out their own. Russia, of course, has their own. China's going to have their own. This is just what's going to happen. People are going to, you know, companies, governments,

they're going to scale out this now sort of modern drone shield. And it seems very Orwellian apocalyptic, but also it's so much cheaper than the large-scale stuff that that's just the way that it's going. There's just no way around it. You have to defend against it. Like, I can't imagine investing a trillion dollars in a naval ship today, considering like the Houthis can just get one of these drones and hit a trillion dollar asset in the sea. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's incredible what Ukraine has been doing. And, you know, mine, they have, the U.S. hasn't spent anything on Ukraine in two years. And they're still fighting. They're still fighting, even gaining territory against the Russians. So they're doing, you know, God's work for us on the eastern. flank of Europe, but I do fear this political division will keep going. And if the hard right of France say wins next year, the French president is people

who don't maybe know or may not know in the US, but the French president is probably one of more powerful presidential offices in the world based off of old Charles de Gulf. It's a 10-year term, and potentially, I mean, it's five plus five. And they have like a lot of powers. And if this Lepen gets in, who has literally taken money from Putin, if she gets in and that would i think be very bad for united europe so that's what we're dealing with over here oh by the way speaking of the sovereign individual wasn't it uh did you see that rees mog

discussion with tucker carlson i did not i mean it saw it happen i didn't sit down and watch it though yeah i didn't i didn't watch it either just watch some clips but uh he is the son i believe of the author of the sovereign individual is that right yep yeah yeah so uh you don't have a take on on that or did you see any of the clips i didn't i i saw that he was on i don't dive in any of the clips what were they talking about no it's just it was about i mean again this is people can just take a look at the map but this this thing that kind of goes back to again i'm anti-comi anti-nazzi like both baltics and poland we were occupied by both uh and the the fear that we have especially with this harder right sort of crop that is coming up that i would say teck across

represents this saying that, oh, well, you know, we should just let Hitler roll over Europe, you know, Czechoslovakia, it's not a real country, the Baltics, not real countries. You know, Darrell Cooper said, I think, somewhat famously now a couple years ago on Tucker's podcast that like World War II, the reason it became what it did, you know, is just because of Churchill, this evil villain, you know, it would have just been a small invasion of Poland. But if you actually look at a map, like all of Europe was invaded. by the Nazis and the Soviets together as they were buddies and treaty before May of 1940 when Churchill came power.

So just basic historical things like people saying, oh, you know, it would have just been an invasion of Poland, you know, the UK didn't need to do everything. That was what he was arguing with this re-smog about. And of course, Riesmog was taking the normal British position that Churchill was actually fighting, helping to fight a good fight. But yeah, it's like that's, that shit just scares us obviously on the Eastern front because I think everybody should get a vote in Europe, including the polls, including the Baltics. And that's where we're, you know, I've said it enough on the show, people that know my

views, but we're actively being threatened right now every day. And people got to think about it. Like there's, there's two accounts. I just saw one, this Kirill Dimitriyev. He's the head of the sovereign wealth fund in Russia. He's Dim Filby, which those who follow Michael Weiss, his great reporter on Russia in Middle East from the insider. He calls him Dim Filby.

This is a reference to Kim Filby for the old Cambridge spy group. I mean, just an absolute, if you're going to spy for Russia, you've got to be an absolute moron. And Kim Filby wouldn't live the rest of his days. Soviet hellscape, Russia. But Whitkoff has to be like the lowest IQ individual. You called Putin humanitarian the other day. I don't know if you saw.

I mean, it's just, it's incredible stuff. But anyway, Philby and Kushner, right? So they're going over, they're dealing with Putin and everything. And these guys are dealing with this. Carol Dimitra F as the counter as the counter guy, like the direct counterpart. And he is on Twitter posting like some AI slop of like the US and Russia fighting together against the EU and Britain. And this is just Russian disinformation. I mean, all the while, just so people know if you're listening to this, Twitter is banned in Russia.

Just want people to know that. If you see sock puppet accounts for Russia, pro-Russian stuff, Just know that Twitter is banned in Russia, Facebook, YouTube. They're all banned. So this is the problem with like the, I think the disinformation world space these days is like the hellscape of Russia, the mafia, communist hellscape of Russia, and then the communist orwellian technocratic whatever of China. You know, those two states in particular, they use our platforms. but we can't use theirs, right?

Like TikTok famously is a very different experience in China than it is for our low brow, low IQ, American population. Right? So like that is something that people really need to think about. Like, why would it be that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, it's all banned in Russia. But you see, you know,

Giro Demetriou for this other guy's name Soloviev. He's like the chief Gables. propagandists of Putin. They're on Twitter out in their propaganda. And yet the platform is banned. So I would just, I would encourage people to understand that if you are liking or retweeting something that just seems so wonderfully sovereign in Maga and US. But really, it's put out by some Russian hellscape. They don't even care if it's right or left. They just want you to fight. Right. This goes back to, we always talk about Yuri Besmanov, wonderful popularizer of the useful they don't care they don't care if you're right or left they'll fund Jill

Stein they'll fund you know tenant media all these guys Dave Rubin him pool the woke righties so it's dangerous it's dangerous out there I would just say it's dangerous be careful you know yeah I'm not I'm not a I'm not a I'm not a left to come I tell you that but it's I fear I fear them both right now like the hard left hard right and Yeah. Yeah, like you see what's going on in Brazil. Mm-hmm.

And it just feels like stuck in the middle with you situation. It's like, all right, let's just. And it's funny because, I mean, you know this. I've had many, many people on the show who are very pro, pro-Russia. It's interesting to get both sides of the perspective. I guess one, I guess neutral comment that I make that I think is, what I like to see is like Europe finally realize like at the end of the day regardless of what you believe or not on both sides of the argument I think it'll be in that

positive in the future that Europe's like okay we can't put on the US we got to do our own yeah no I mean and that also to be fair although I'm I'm fine with sort of the Trumpian attitude there, but that was already happening after the invasion of Crimea. I would again say, this is where I think normal Republicans have more to say here. Doesn't mean you have to fund, right? I mean, like, the taxpayer has paid zero dollars for Ukraine in the last two years. Europeans have bought systems on behalf of Ukraine from the U.S. But that's a reimbursement of prior old systems that the U.S.

purchase. It's like Shrinker Act and warehouse. But the taxpayer hasn't paid anything. But the point is it was already happening. We had already been funding a lot of our defense. You know, that 2% whatever NATO threshold, which is way higher than that now, the Baltics, Poland, Finland.

That stuff was already happening in 2014. But I think where the normal, like Republican, strong defense, strong American values, you know, peace, prosperity, all these things, you have a lot to say. there because when did Putin invade Crimea, who was president then, Obama? When did Putin invade Ukraine for the full scale, who was president then, Biden? It's pretty self-evident, in my view. It's a weakness of American strength and power. It doesn't mean you have to, you know,

go full force. We're talking about, I'm not talking about invading Iraq here, right? I'm talking about, as you know, I'm always talking about defensive freedom and liberal values. But I think when the U.S. has shown weakness is usually where the free world kind of gets screwed. So though I take your point and I agree that, you know, U.S. or sorry, EU funding their social welfare programs, you know, since they have a shield of American NATO dominance, right? And I think the U.S. and Canada, or the EU and Canada has arguably done that over the last 30 years in particular. that really was not the case for the people that were really in danger. Like we were always.

And in particular, from Crimea, right? Like once Crimea occurred in 2014, like there was just no, no turning back. There were a lot of new NATO things that started at that point, like to work on protecting us and everything. But it's a savage house thing, man. Let me show you a funny one. Have I shown you this one? Hold on. Is I showing you this one?

No. population using safely managed sanitation services. So this is literally if you have a toilet. I'll just read it because some people, it's from the World Bank. There's a population using an improved sanitation facility that is not shared with other households and where excruiter are safely disposed of in situ or treated off site. Improved sanitation and facilities include flush to piped sewer system, septic tanks, or pit latrines with a slab, including

ventilated pit drains and compost and toilet. So this is literally if you have a toilet, not the outhouse. All right. So, and I, it's, you're not making, I've heard like trolls try to say like, oh, it's a septic tanks. Septic tanks are in here. If you have a septic tank, this is an improved sanitation facility. There's the US, you can always improve this, started in 2000, 96.67%.

Now 97%. So no matter what the lefty, the lefty commies say, we actually improve for everybody. Here's Monaco, just to show you 100% as possible. All right. Now, here, I showed this to a pro-Israel audience. So I just wanted to show this. Israel actually did really well here from 2000 to 2010, past the U.S. But even, you know, whether you're Jew, Gentile, Arab, here's Jordan, not as good, but right next to Israel, started at 70%. Now they're up to 80%. here's Ukraine, actually started 87 passed by Israel, but now at 92%. Okay.

I know where I'm going with this, but China, good old China. Let's look here. A lot of this, by the way, reflects moving into cities, but this is pretty wild. This is pretty wild. So China started the century at 13%. Now they're at 68%. Dang. India started the century at 90%.

9% and now they're at 63%. All right. So whether you're Jew, Gentile, Arab, Hindu, Buddhist, everybody's moving well. Now, you know what I'm about to do here. Last one. Russia, you ready? Yeah. Russian Savage Hellscape started at 54% currently 58% behind every single country on this chart. Literally. This is why. why i literally tell you people look who's banned on twitter they are literally spouting propaganda for a shit hole sorry to say it but the country is a savage housecape shit hole they two and five do not

have safely managed sanitation services according to the w hl so i don't think turker carlsson knows this w h o or world bank did i say world bank sorry w h o Yeah. Do we trust the WHO? That's the question. Well, I mean, do you think they're specifically singling out Russia? Usually, usually these world bodies cover for Russia. Usually these world bodies, usually these world bodies cover for Russia, right? Go in the UN where Russia has a veto of the Security Council and see what it says about their savage hellscape invasion of Ukraine. I think this of all of these countries, all right, are going to be fairly accurate,

equally or fairly inaccurate equally. What, um, do you think there's any resolution to the, or maybe resolution ending to this? And we're coming up on what, five years? Coming up on five years. Yeah. They're going to keep fighting, right? You look at the polls. They're going to keep fighting again.

they're not asking for Americans fight. They just won't support. I keep fighting because it's a tyranny. It's a dictatorship. There's no private property. There's no rule of law. So they're going to have to make it too expensive for Putin to tell even his people. Like, yeah, I'm just going to keep slaughtering 50,000 of you a month.

Because he's getting close to 50,000 now a month. that are getting killed, captured, maimed with his invasion. It's insane. That's the scale that's like more than half a million year. Yeah. Yeah. It's hardcore. And again, this, like, you can see, I think if you look at this war and you look at actually

what happened from the beginning until now, first of all, it's a completely different war. All right. So back then, it was traditional war. it was even like, you know, 1914 trench warfare. There was the errant shahead that would come in to allied or, you know, and there were Americans helping Canadians, whatever. I mean, not officially, but there were plenty of foreign legion that was helping Ukraine. But on the Ukrainian side, you would get some errant drones coming in.

They were very, like, inaccurate and, you know, not very successful. That's a complete, it's a completely different. military theater now. I mean, there's a kill zone of like 50 kilometers or so. Basically, it is competitive still. And Ukraine has actually showed that they can retake territory. So it's still competitive. But what, for example, but this just shows you, it might just be the way of the world.

And like, you know, people like to use counterfactuals and stuff. But our counterfactual on the, and let's say the hardcore. national defense against the savage Russian health state, right? Because the Baltics, Poland, Romania, Finland. We would have been, I think, more comfortable at the start of the war five years ago saying, and we were trying to say like, look, Ukraine is asking for no-fly zone. We should just do it no-fly zone. I think that actually would have worked because what it just means is basically you engage.

I mean, if, you engage, if there's missiles coming in, if there's drones, which drones were like not exist in five years ago, really, on the battlefield coming in. But you just engage and you try to save the population from the air. But it does mean that you engage. It does mean like pilots would get a risk. And again, I'm not a military guy. I'm not going to try to fight any battles, certainly in terms of like, let's say, 2020 hindsight or something.

That was basically what was being said from people that thought that NATO was, which NATO was legitimately strong enough to protect Ukrainians here. That didn't happen. We didn't let that happen. All right. So now, five years later, Savage Russian health state is still coming, but Ukraine is defending, and now the world is completely different.

So we have this cheaper, cost-effective, just massive drone theater. And now the whole world is having to adapt. from that. So it's, I kind of just look at it as, like, if we had at our way, where like the old world could have stepped up and saved the day, let's say the old free world, like kind of like the US did in Kuwait or something. And I know this is hard for a lot of people listening because they think, oh, you know, just US militarizing. That's not at all what I'm talking about. I'm not, you know, if you were against Bush's invasion of Iraq, I cannot see how. And I don't know, you mentioned, I actually didn't know that you had like deliberate pro-Russian. voices. I'd be curious. It's not really pro-Russian. It's more like pro-Trump, like the whole geopolitical. Well, you see you see Trump, Trump I don't think knew how to solve it either, right? He said he'd solve it in one day. It's been two years. He hasn't solved it. Uh, you know, he's got must to try to cut off the, the, the more accurate description is amenable to

Trump's foreign policy as it relates to Russia. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's all I can tell you there is that's a fool's errands. Like there are no, there's no way that the Trump family is going to get the access to any Russian assets. And there's like any cash flow that's tied to a Russian asset in Russia. And we'll see what happens with this luke oil deal because that was one that's been speculated, right? They're luco's foreign assets.

They might try to, at least people connected to Kushner. We'll see. Again, this is, if the Biden administration was doing this, by the way, this is blatant, blatant corruption when you're carrying out the national interest of, you know, being commander in chief. But let's just put that aside. Let's put that aside. If you are actually trying to do deals with Russia in Russia, you would be completely and utterly fucked. And you just have to live next to Russia to understand this. But like, I mean, IKEA had a line item for corruption when they're operating in Russia. Like, and they're all gone now. Like, the people that stayed post

invasion, right, like Dannon, Carlsberg, Nestle, and over the course of five years, they've had all their assets stripped from them. You get nothing. So, you know, you saw the McDonald's left. There's no rule of law in Russia. There's no private property, no rule of law. There's no, every court decision

at the end of the day will go to do whatever Putin wants. I mean, he is literally the not the most powerful person in the world, but he's the single most probably consequential richest person in the world. Like he has the entire Russian economy at his will. You can dress it up any way you like, but it's a $2 trillion economy that he has at his will. So that's where, you know, that's where it is. That's how I'm viewing it. And like I said, the old world, which I would have, which all of us would have wanted to see stay at the start

of the 22 full scale invasion, which would have been like let's, let's be strong here and stand up to a dictator, just like, you know, the Kuwait situation. Then I think we could have done it differently. I think we could have saved a lot of Ukrainian lives. We could have done it differently, but we didn't do it. And so now we're in the new world. And that's a, that's probably a much scarier situation. But, you know, there are glimmers of hope there or let us say more realistic things.

Going back to what you said, like, I do think that Western European countries not relying on US the US security umbrella, right? Or not, let's say not funding their social safety nets as much because of the US security umbrella. I would certainly say that's a good thing. So again, I try to look at this very realistically. But if there, yeah, I'm just curious. Like if there was someone that really came on your show is like a pro-Russian stance, they

would have to, they would have to continue. with the fact that we can't use any of their platforms and they are literally, you know, spouting. Yeah. Yeah. Disinformation. Pro-Russia was a mischaracterization. It's amenable to Trump's foreign policy as a release to Russia. Well, and that, that, you know, that I think is shown to not be that good.

Let me show you this. It was a year ago tweet. And I think it was very informative of what he actually understood. like, for example, like the stuff that I'm saying versus the reality of the situation. So just on the, yeah, so I hear you, first of all, on the Trump foreign policy. Look, it was hard for me, but I did try to give him the benefit of the doubt the first year. But I think this is enlightening. He posted this about a year ago, a little over a year ago, September 2025.

We'll just read it. After getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine, Russia, military, and economic situation and after seeing the economic trouble, it is causing Russia. I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and win all of Ukraine back in its original form. With time, patience and the financial support of Europe, and in particular, NATO, the original borders from where this war started is very much an option. Why not?

Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years, a war that should have taken a real military power less than a week to win. This is not distinguishing Russia. In fact, it is very much making them look like a paper tiger. When the people living in Moscow and all of the great cities, towns, and districts all throughout Russia find out what is really going on with this war, the fact that it's almost impossible for them to get gasoline to the long lines that are being formed and all the other things that are taking place in their war economy where most of their money is being spent on fighting Ukraine, which has great spirit. And only getting better, Ukraine would be able to take back their country in its original form. and who knows, maybe even go further than that. Putin and Russia are in big economic trouble. And this is the time for Ukraine to act. In any event, this is the funniest part. In any event,

I wish both countries well. We will continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them. Good luck to all. So there's many interesting things about this. First of all, I don't think you and I on this podcast need to go back, or go over the absolute like, for lack of a better word, neurodivergent, 180 flip-flops that Trump makes on his tweets, like from day to day. I understand we don't have to do that. I also would say, yes, whenever Trump does get a call from Putin, he takes it and he's happy to hear it. He's gotten one recently, which is what the current kerfuffle is about, right? Like, he got he got calls from Putin in the early days. And this is where he said, you know, Zelensky's a dictator. Zelensky has a 4% approval rating, these things that are just literally you can tell that it came from Putin's

mouth. But here in this tweet a year ago, he's, or this truth, this truth, he's angry at Putin because Putin has not stopped his war after a year of trying. And so that's true. All of those things are true. Yes. You can say all those things about Trump. But what is, I would say sad from this side from the support, like the perspective of Ukraine, And again, this is a year ago, like he gets glimpses of the Ukrainian spirit here, like actually protecting a democracy, fighting for democracy. And you don't even have to do it with American soldiers. But I think if the American president would come down on the side of Ukraine, like forcefully, fully without, you know, remorse or whatever. And of course, we have all this corruption on the side, which is just crazy.

And again, like I said, it's never going to work out for them. It's never, it's never going to work out that they will get any cash flow producing assets into the Trump family without massive heartache and or, you know, gulag death situations. But if, if, if, you know, you go back to the traditional Republican strong defense standpoint, I think that would have helped Ukraine much more and much quicker than this. So I think this is just enlightening, let's say, of where Trump's positions have not really been. at the very least they have not been straightforward, right? And you can see a year later, he's now gone back to the other thing where he's gotten a call from Putin recently and he thinks that he can actually squeeze the Ukrainians out. And, you know, the Starlink, Star Shield thing is just one of like a million things

that's been happening where they think that they can, you know, squeeze the Ukrainian people. There'll be a lot of interesting things. Look, like I follow this conflict very close and I know that this might not be. enlightening for well hopefully it's enlightening but might not be as interesting for some people but i can tell you uh it will probably come out this is my view i haven't seen this quoted or anything but this uh former defense minister of ukraine his name's michailo federoff he did a really good job with musk at the start of the year and he got musk onto his side to get the russians because the russians were like uh spoofing and using starlink when technically they shouldn't have

And so Musk actually finally got on fully bored with Ukraine at the start of the year and blocked Russians from basically using that on the on the actual front contact line. And that was a huge thing that he did and he gained a lot of a lot of stock, a lot of currency with the Ukrainian people at the start of the year. And then there was real politic things that happened in Ukraine over the summer, very unfortunate, whatever the head of the general staff was fired and And then Zelensky also fired Federoff as well, which people were saying, oh, this is just real politic, all the stuff. And it's true.

It was. But then, and there were protests, actually, to bring Federoff back on as a defense minister. All those protests, though, dissolved in August because, and this is me talking. I don't know this for sure, but I bet you it's going to come out. Basically, he is kind of a tech. He's a tech guy. Like, he was helping them a lot. But he made this statement that, like, said.

we just have to, you know, start elections again because this is the Trump line. And we can't let Russia postpone our elections, which this has already been voted on by the Ukrainian parliament. Like, they cannot do elections in wartime. It's under martial law right now, the country. And the fact that he said that, in my view, clearly shows he's keeping up pretty close ties with Musk. And Musk really wanted to put Federov in. And it shows you how powerful someone like Musk is and how much like this real politic is going on even in the war here. And the protests just dissolved for him overnight. And so that was like a sad thing because the guy was doing really well.

He was young, bored thinking he was trying to root out, you know, corruption and things like that. And he was really trying to do a good job. But at the end of the day, Musk tried to install him basically. And you like, you could basically read that through the tea leaves. And then all the protests just dissolved because they're not, no matter what anybody says, they're not going to try to put elections on during wartime. That's just a little bit of, that's my view, my reading,

but I imagine that's going to come out at some point that he was basically trying to get on side of like Musk and or Trump. And they're not, you know, they, that, the Ukrainian people are able to actually see through that. They're not going to have elections just because, you know, Elon Musk wants them to have it. or something. So they're going to do everything they can to fight off the savage hell state. And that's, that's, you know, that's what the Constitution says. That's what they have to do. Holding elections right now would be just incredibly dangerous. I mean, Ukrainians are dying

every night, every night. And they're going to go through a huge battle this winter. It's just going to be a, you know, if there was any time, ever a time for the free world to enact a no-fly zone, it would be this winter. because Russia's last winter was like going after, you know, all the electric substations. This winter it's going to be going after they've already, it's already been leaked and they've already showed what they want to do. Like they just want to completely bomb and destroy Kiev because this is all that Russia knows how to do when it wins wars. Like this is how they want in Chechnya.

You know, this is what they do. It's what they tried to do in Afghanistan. This is tried to do in World War II. Like they just, they just come at you. And Ukrainian people are literally fighting for it, not on their own, but with, you know, with no, no financial support from the U.S., which is, you know, it is what it is. But they're going to be really tested this winter. Anyway, just wanted to show up. I just wanted to share a few of those things because that's basically what's been going on in my view.

and it's going to be, it's going to be tough for him. Yeah. I mean, as I've been saying from us five years now, I hope, maybe it hopes not, maybe it's weak here, but yeah, like you, I'm very anti-war. And would like to see a resolution to this at some point soon, same similarly with Iran.

Because I think there's a ton of potential of do good right now, considering everything that's happening in the world of 10th, tech and productivity. And we have the potential for for golden age globally if we'll take it. But real politic gets in the way a lot of times, unfortunately. It does. But I think the World War II, you know, analogy is probably most apt right now.

You know, that there is no elected government in Russia. And they're not going to, you know, Putin's just going to do whatever he can. and he's not going to, you know, democracies actually would be more prone to stopping the war. As we know, democracies like to extend wars with the printing press, right? But they're still more prone to stopping the war due to blood and treasure being lost and family speaking out, right? Even though it could take a long time, as we saw in the history of the U.S. and Afghanistan, right? But in Russia, they don't have that. Putin doesn't have that.

that escape valve. And so what is actually in his interest is to not stop the war because if he does stop the war and he shows, look, I'm such a shithole leader of a shithole country. We have literally taken, you know, they, just to talk about the percentages at the beginning of the war, they got up to 30% of the country. All right. And then they had to retreat because Ukraine kicked them out of Kiev. And now they're under 20%, like 19%.

And they're losing ground every month. So it's less likely for a dictator to stop war because if he stops and he says, look at me, I'm such a shithole leader. You know, you guys don't have toilets. Your GDP per capita is 15,000. The U.S. is 90,000, by the way. We've closed off. We've closed you off to the free world.

You can't travel. There's sanctions, all this. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me. Obviously, he's not going to do that because if he does do that and Russia has a very strong history of this, he would probably just be a dead man. And he's not going to do that. I mean, he's prepared for revolts, like the secret police in Russia. There's probably a million.

I've heard figures of a million people that are paid well, fed well, and are ready to protect the Putin institution. So that's what that's what we have to deal with. But if it was a democracy, there would be more likely to stop war, not less. Yeah. We've got to run here in five minutes. I did want to end it on a Bitcoin thing. Yeah, that was a big, uh, no, it was good. We haven't done that.

We haven't done that like a year. I'm happy for the deep dive on that. And, uh, I think it's important. As I've said every time that we've, uh, we've, I'm glad to get on and give a different perspective because I'm well aware of the audience that I speak to. Yeah. It is what it is. But you mentioned, um, Bitcoin. Like getting integrated in the banking system if and when that happened.

And I just, I've kept it in the back of my mind to bring up because I do think it's an interesting, underappreciated data point that I've been seeing on the back end, just talking to companies involved in this area of the market, which is Bitcoin collateralized lending and the cost of capital and the amount of capital that is opening up to these Bitcoin collateralized lending desk. Yeah. Capital, the amount of capital is going up dramatically lines of credit being issued and then cost going down. So I think you're seeing like credit funds, some banks, like obscure banks, I think being willing, willing to to lend against Bitcoin at like six, seven percent to these lending deaths. Then obviously they're putting some margin on top of that. But I think the base cost of capital for Bitcoin collateralized loans is falling. And so if you're looking for a fundamental indicator and data point that things are going in the right direction for Bitcoin, I think that's one of actually the most important that most people don't have any insight to that it does seem to be trending in the right direction. Are you seeing that 6, 7% from banks or like non-bank, non-bank lenders? I think non-bank lenders particularly. And that's via competitive forces of other non-bank lenders coming in a more capital.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I think it's great. And by the way, that could be the answer to, I've posed this question a lot, but the power versus exponential question, right? And again, brass tax, I just mentioned it earlier during our projection of what could happen in the 2030s, but 80 to 100 trillion, that's what the power curve projects by late 2030s, 2040, let's say for Bitcoin. That could be about the level where this, which is the monetary base, which we've been talking about a long time, which is only about $26 trillion at the moment. But if it goes on the same trend that it's always been on, which is not that fast, actually, it's only 8% roughly weighted since Bitcoin's been around. That will get you to $100 trillion by $20.40 as well. So that could be a point where they meet. Now again, just because it's a big round number doesn't mean that anything has to happen at that point. but I do think, unfortunately, it's more likely than not that Bitcoin gets pulled into the exponential trend of the financial system than Bitcoin pulling the rest of the financial system into a power trend.

And precisely what you just said, interest rates becoming more competitive to borrow against Bitcoin, people just sort of using their Bitcoin as a facility to draw liquidity and do other things with their life, which is fine. But those are all exponential endeavors, right? Compound growth. It's just how it works. And so if you do get enough fiat units levered against Bitcoin, one would presume that that could pull Bitcoin's price back into an exponential trend.

And by the way, if it goes under an exponential trend, Bitcoin, as opposed to a power trend, which it is right now, at 40% per growth, a power trend slowly falls. Right. So it's 40% trend in 12 month growth. now. All right. So again, it's a pretty good bet. This is the sailor bet, right? He pays 10%. If you could pay 6%, whatever. And the Bitcoin power trend is 40%, a little bit under and falling. You still got plenty of coverage for your collateral before you might have to, you know, look for other places to service that cash flow, that debt. But if enough people start to do that,

and the Bitcoin just becomes another financialized asset like gold or silver or whatever, stocks, bonds, then, yeah, Bitcoin will turn into an exponential asset. And that will break Bitcoin to the upside, not to the downside. I think we are at risk of everybody not being as happy. Like maybe the project will fail. Maybe it would be too centralized. Maybe that's a K. K.

YC world. I don't know. That's a lot of questions that are out and we don't have much time. But yeah, that's where we're going. And by the way, I still don't think we're anywhere near that, even though, like you said, it's happening because here, you just look at the raw numbers. This is the broad and base money picture. So the base money is most, now this is the Bitcoin, 26 trillion.

And broad money, I have at 158 trillion. And that's less precise number. But it's not even including Euro dollars. There's probably one or two other big countries I could get that would maybe make that a little bit larger. Note, by the way, that ratio. All right. So this is like the money multiplier ratio. It's climbing again.

And that also could portend another risk in the markets because the ratio used to be around 10, which makes sense, kind of like the, uh, you know, just the traditional fraction of reserve banking 10 to 1 ratio with all the liquidity that they printed post 2008. This thing got down to six. Sorry, not four. Sorry, four. It's six right now. Four. Got down to four point one in 2021. And now it's back up to six, which is the level we haven't seen since 2011. Now again, I don't know what what this could mean. Like this, there's no way to tell when this is going to push another crisis or anything. But it's just to show you hundreds of, you know, tens of trillions of dollars is base money, hundreds of trillions

of dollars is broad money, repurchase agreements, money market funds, all that stuff. It doesn't even count. You know, stable coins are dropping the bucket of this. So there's a, you know, there's a long way to go still for Bitcoin to, like, be sizable to penetrate these markets. So I still think, just another reason why I still think, if you want to sort of relax, don't think about war as much as I do, hopefully you don't have to. the power curve and looking at the percentile quantiles of the power curve, as we're very,

very cheap right now, that could be a better way to put a touch grass and live your life because it's a pretty strong indicator of where Bitcoin has been, I think, and where it's going. You heard it here first. Look at the charts, touchgrass, log off of X every once in a while. Maddie, it's always a pleasure, sir. Likewise, my friend. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for listening to my my my my my my my my my digressions there and I appreciate chatting with you every quarter.

We're going to win. Yes, we will. Yes, we will. Freedom of democracy. Anti-commy, anti-Nazi. We're going to win. Peace and love freaks. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC.

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