#739: Quarterly Monetary Base Update with Matthew Mežinskis

Summary

TFTC Podcast #739: “Quarterly Monetary Base Update” with Matthew Mežinskis

Host: Marty Bent
Guest: Matthew Mežinskis
Date: April 25, 2026

---

Episode Overview

In this episode, Marty Bent and recurring guest Matthew Mežinskis dive deep into their ongoing series of quarterly monetary base updates. The episode focuses on the relentless monetary expansion by central banks, the latest trends in Bitcoin’s price and network growth, the technical underpinnings of its value proposition, and the broader geopolitical landscape shaping financial markets. Matthew shares his data-driven perspective on the comparative dynamics between gold, fiat currencies, and Bitcoin, while both reflect on how macroeconomic turbulence is reinforcing Bitcoin's relevance. The conversation culminates in a spirited discussion of U.S. and global geopolitics, the risks of authoritarianism, and the societal ramifications of shifting reserve currency power.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Central Banks, Fiat Debasement, and Bitcoin’s Bull Case

• Matthew’s Opening Thesis: “Money's become freer than free… 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.” (00:07)
• Both agree recent global events are highlighting the market need for a neutral, hard-capped monetary system not controlled by any nation-state.
• Geopolitical instability (e.g. Iran conflict) has elevated demand for such assets.

2. Bitcoin Versus Gold: Power Law vs. Exponential Growth

(01:02–11:40)

• Matthew explains unique mathematical properties of gold and Bitcoin:
  • Gold CAGR: Since 1971, ~5.3% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), despite gold bugs often quoting ~9% by cherry-picking start dates (02:31).
  • Bitcoin’s Power Law: Unlike gold’s steady exponential growth, Bitcoin grows along a power curve—price doubles roughly every 800 days, or ~40% annualized contemporary CAGR, with volatility "surprising to the upside."
  • Quote: “Bitcoin is interesting because…the rate of growth actually slows over time. And I'll talk about this as well, because this is something I've been sort of philosophizing about…are we going to have loans contracted in bitcoin, or will we have loans contracted in fiat currencies…?” (03:42)
• Key Insight: Bitcoin’s valuation relative to gold hit 12-13 ounces per bitcoin in January, “which just seemed too cheap…even for a gold bug.” Matthew’s bottom scenario is ~10 ounces/BTC; any drop below that is a buying opportunity in his view (13:00-15:08).
  • “If you have gold and bitcoin, you should think very hard...how cheap bitcoin is in terms of gold. Even still to this day, because it’s only 16 ounces of gold.” (13:59)

3. The Four-Year Cycle and Market Structure

(11:40–16:09)

• Despite debates, four-year cycles remain intact, supported by recent research.
• Marty and Matthew’s Bet Recap:
  • Will Bitcoin set new all-time highs vs. gold and silver this year? Matthew sees it as “directionally right in the long term,” but “have a hard time seeing us get past that [for 2026].”
  • “It’s going to be a longer rise to get there…I think in 2027 it’s possible we could get higher.” (16:09)
• Takeaway: Bitcoin has maintained powerful support on key regression boundaries; short-term undervaluation is clear when measured against gold.

4. The Monetary Base: Update and Comparisons

(26:41–32:34)

• Monetary Base Data: After a peak of $30T base money post-COVID (2021), levels have contracted to ~$26T globally but recently are bottoming and turning upward.
• “Central bank balance sheets…on average since 1970 have grown at an exponential rate of 12.5% per year. So Bitcoin growing at 40% per year…still well outperforms that.” (27:41)
• Comparative value flows:
  • Fedwire: $1.1 quadrillion transacted per year (traditional finance, USD settlement).
  • Bitcoin Network: $25T, or 46x smaller than Fedwire, but closing the gap over time.
  • “Bitcoin surpassed Fedwire [in transaction count] in 2016 and that dominance has maintained...over a decade.” (45:50)
• Insight: Bitcoin is fully capable, technically, of replacing contemporary USD settlement—pending adoption and price growth.

5. Changing US Monetary Policy & Structural Tensions

(34:37–42:47)

• Discussing a changing Federal Reserve approach: Likely new Fed Chair Warsh advocating for more traditional interest-rate policy and less balance-sheet intervention.
• The burden of treasury market support may shift to commercial banks and opaque offshore actors (e.g., large Cayman Islands bondholders), creating new vulnerabilities and global imbalances.
• “The US is playing with fire. There are a lot of headwinds…dollar hegemony is threatened and actually Bitcoin is just one of them. These multipolar trade alliances, the US is not doing themselves any favor right now.” (39:53)

6. “Power Law” vs. “Exponential Treadmills”: The Coming Economic Realignment

(54:34–62:45)

• Visualizing Stock Market vs. Bitcoin Trendlines: Since 1800s, S&P’s annual returns have quickened, currently 11.7% CAGR (without dividends).
• Jeffrey West’s “Essential Singularity”: Systemic, accelerating economic growth cannot perpetuate endlessly—something has to give.
• Matthew's View: “We’re going to run into very interesting tension...around 2035–2040—bitcoin’s growth slows (as a power law), while the financial system’s treadmill accelerates.”
• Quote: “It’s going to be fireworks because you’re going to have superior money…but in dollar terms, it’s actually growing slower.” (62:50)

7. UBI, AI, Abundance, and Deflationary Money

(63:09–66:33)

• Marty links the coming “singularity” to debates over universal basic income (UBI), the rise of AI, and broader productivity/abundance.
• Marty: “Maybe we just need a deflationary currency to pair with this form of abundance that you’re bringing to the world.” (63:09)
• Both are skeptical about the practicality and efficacy of UBI, seeing Bitcoin as the more natural fit in an AI-rich, post-scarcity world.

8. Stablecoins, CBDCs, and Financial Authoritarianism

(66:33–68:06; 76:59–80:03)

• Recent Tether freeze incidents show the inherent risks in “private central bank digital currencies” and foreshadow possible future constraints.
• Matthew: “It’s actually not that difficult compared to…stocks…Bitcoin is a positively skewed asset. The bottoms are pretty rounded.” But if Wall Street or authoritarian states co-opt Bitcoin, its growth could become artificially “exponential,” not power law, altering its nature and utility.
• Discussion of Michael Saylor’s aggressive claims about a “21%” perpetual CAGR for Bitcoin (“absurd”; 68:06).

9. The Geopolitical Edge: Russia, Ukraine, Authoritarianism

(80:03–112:59)

• Russia’s digital iron curtain, VPN bans, and persecution of dissent spotlight the immediate human need for censorship-resistant money like Bitcoin.
• Matthew provides a detailed and passionate defense of Ukraine and condemnation of Western naiveté regarding Russia’s trajectory:
  • “There are more political prisoners in Russia since Stalin…internet is entirely throttled…there is no attack on Russia, Russia’s attacking Ukraine…” (83:46–87:50)
  • “In 2026, you have a nation, a former great power that is going back, not going forward.”
• Both hosts touch on the complexities of Western politics, weak American leadership, the unpredictability of disengagement, and the accelerating costs and risks for U.S. citizens and allies.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Bitcoin’s Competitive Edge:

• “Bitcoin is about 6,000 over 6,000 days old, 6,000 in change. 13% of that number in days is about 800 days, or a little bit over two years, or 40% CAGR at the moment. So bitcoin at the moment grows at 40% per year, compounded, which is an enormous return, better than anything in the markets…” (07:15)

On Gold’s Reality:

• “A lot of the gold bugs like to quote this 9% figure, but that is directly catching the $35 an ounce, which really was even higher in August 1971...if you've been holding gold for that long, if you've gotten that kegr.” (03:35)

On Macro Cycles:

• “Odell is directionally right in the long term. But we're just. We're so undervalued at the moment. I have a hard time seeing us get past that…” (16:20)

On Socio-Political Realignment:

• “We are in a period of re-alignment…You’re getting your way. America is disengaging.” (112:52)

On Geopolitics and Authoritarian Risks:

• “All the nightmare scenarios that you think about, hear about, like, they're happening right now in Russia.” (86:33)
• "There are more political prisoners in Russia since Stalin...They're completely censored. You're going to need Bitcoin more and more." (84:07)
• “Once you lose your rights at home, it's very hard to get them back.” (111:36)

---

Timestamps for Major Segments

• 00:07 – Matthew’s opening: Central banks, fiat debasement, and Bitcoin’s role
• 02:31–11:40 – Deep dive: Gold vs. Bitcoin growth curves, CAGR facts
• 13:00–16:09 – Market structure, four-year cycles, all-time high bets
• 26:41–32:34 – Global monetary base trends, Bitcoin vs. Fedwire
• 34:37–42:47 – US monetary policy shift, global treasury market structure
• 54:34–66:33 – Power law, “treadmills,” and coming singularity tension
• 66:33–80:03 – Stablecoins, financial surveillance, the role of self-custody
• 80:03–112:59 – Geopolitics: Russia, Ukraine, US/EU, multipolarity, and existential risks of authoritarianism

---

Closing Thoughts

Matthew and Marty offer a uniquely broad mix of rigorous data analysis and passionate geopolitical commentary. Their central thesis: Even as monetary debasement continues globally and traditional financial systems accelerate toward a breaking point, Bitcoin’s steady advance along its power law curve offers a resilient, neutral, and self-custodial alternative. The multipolar, turbulent world ahead will likely reinforce the imperative for hard money, and only vigilant, technically empowered users can keep that hope alive.

---

For listeners new to the show:
You’ll walk away understanding why macro data, not mere headlines, suggest we are living through a monetary inflection point—one in which Bitcoin is not just an asset, but a potential new foundation for global economic order.

---

(End of Summary)

Transcript

[Matthew]

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

[Marty]

I had to tell you to stop sharing your screen because I want to share mine. We met at the end of January to do the Q4, 2025 update I believe. I don't know.

[Matthew]

Yeah, it's, I'm changing it up actually frankly when I'll continue to change it this quarter. It was actually Q3, it's going to be Q4 now.

[Marty]

Thought it was Q3. Last update was at the end of January. A month be before the,

[Podcast Host]

the exploration.

[Marty]

The war is a still war. Is it a ceasefire? I don't know, Whatever, whatever's happening in Iran, whatever we're calling it now, it was a month before that. And to your point, focusing on bitcoin, I mean that's one silver lining at least from our perspective of I think what's happened over the last two months is that I think the world is waking up to the need for a neutral reserve, hard capped currency monetary system that's not controlled by anybody. And I want to pull up screen share. We published this on January 31st but when we met things were not looking good for bitcoin priced in gold. Specifically as you can see here from this chart going back, it was at the lower boundary, the 0% bound of, of the power, power trend. And many people were wondering, okay, has bitcoin jumped the shark? We're living in the gold world, gold hard money world now and it seems like the tides have changed. I mean a few days after we recorded we fell down to the low 60s, tipped the high 50s and since then we were range bound for a couple months and now climbing out approaching 80k again, currently sitting at 78, $126. So a lot has changed in the last few months.

[Matthew]

Three months, yeah, we should do price actually right now just as everybody's favorite. Just to kick it off, I got a few base money stats but yeah, a little bit. I don't know if I've shown this yet. A little bit more of an upgraded experience experience here on the, with the Charts. And yeah, I'm continuing to go through the process, but it's going to be. It's gonna be good. And eventually we'll have access to two subscribers where people can get this as well. Because people are asking all the time and I have some good unique data that you really can't get. It's a lot of painstaking work. There's no APIs for this from the IMF or whatever. But in any event, the gold thing is very interesting and just to remind our listeners, viewers here what the power curve is. It's a different type of growth that really only bitcoin is exhibiting, which is really unique. So here is a gold chart, just gold dollar back to 1971, right? And you can see the January top right here, right? We got up to $5200. Now we're down to $4800 gold. Okay. As of this recording. So far. This is. If you talk about actual trend lines, this is not like Elliott wave ABC 123 Corrections. This is just statistical analysis where everything is in sample. I have a lot of data points here. Gold in general is. It's an exponential asset, but it's growing on the Trend only about 5.3% CAGR. See that from 1971, August 15th to today, 5.3% CAGR. I have this extended out to 2050, but this is the CAGR till today. A lot of the gold bugs like to quote this 9% figure, but that is directly catching the $35 an ounce, which really was even higher in August 1971 because it was breaking the peg to today. They just do the quick back of the math or back of the envelope with the present value, future value calculation and you will get. This has been a rising figure, by the way. It used to be like 7, you know, 8%. But with this boom in the last couple of years, it's now 9% CAGR. But the question of course is if you've been holding gold for that long, if you've gotten that kegr. But the big thing here, and the thing I just am relentless about, I try to remind people all the time is go. Whether it's gold, apple stocks, bonds, that stuff grows exponentially and exponentially basically means constant growth. So like say these keggers, you can pick any point on this curve, this black line here, the ols, and you can just pick from one point to the next on a compound annualized number. It's only 5.3% growth. You could have more than that if you buy under you could have less than that if you buy up and that goes down. But that's the bottom line. Now, bitcoin is interesting in that. And I'll go back to the dollar bitcoin chart here. Right? So as you said, we're getting close to 80 grand. Okay. Bitcoin is interesting because if you just look at this chart, which you know very well, I know very well, you look at in log linear scale, it's not a straight line. You know, I'm relentless on this, but it's just not a straight line. It looks different. The R squared is a very good fit, 96% and it's not a straight line. And the best fitting curve is a power curve. And so what that means is, is that unlike this gold chart, which again, can be volatile, it can be up, down, whatever, but it is constant and it can be volatile. Bitcoin can also be volatile, but bitcoin has actually less volatility to the downside. It has more volatility to the upside, which is interesting. But it also, the rate of growth of bitcoin actually slows over time. And I'll talk about this as well, because this is something I've been sort of philosophizing about a lot lately, because I think it has a lot to do with when once we get to a bitcoin standard, once we get to this cypherpunk ideal of everybody having bitcoin as base money, are we going to have loans contracted in bitcoin, or will we have loans contracted in fiat currencies with unlimited amount of fiat interest on top of limited amount of satoshis? These are real questions that I think we're going to come to very soon. When I say soon, I mean the next 10 to 15 years. Primarily because Wall street is completely in the game now. But again, I get on all these side tangents. I'm sorry. Just to sum up, what happens with bitcoin when it grows is for every. About the brass tax of it is for every 13% increase in the life of bitcoin, the price doubles. It's very different than gold, which basically is on this constant growth rate. But it's very volatile. And it's been very volatile over long periods of time. As you can see here, right from the 1980 top of 800 bucks for about two seconds on the COMEX down to the, you know, mid-200s in the late 90s, early 2000s up to now, where it's 5,000 today. The bottom line is that's a 5.3% CAGR which is a doubling, you know, every 12, 13 years. And Bitcoin doesn't do that. So Bitcoin is about 6,000 over 6,000 days old, 6,000 in change. 13% of that number in days is about 800 days, or a little bit over two years, or 40% CAGR at the moment. So bitcoin at the moment grows at 40% per year, compounded, which is an enormous return, better than anything in the markets, although gold has actually competed with that in the last two, three years. But again, you got to go back to the full history of gold to see the actual trend, which is it actually means. And anyway, if you take it back to bitcoin, it's unique in that the growth, it usually surprises to the upside, but it's actually pretty stable when it goes down into its bears. And I tell you, Marty, I mean, it's just. It's hard to be right. Every time I come on your podcast, it's hard to be right. But look at this. I mean, look at this nice 0% bound of the. Of the quantile regression for bitcoin. It's very basic. You know, there's a lot of people in the power law industry now, which is kind of cropped up, and I've been following this almost as long as anybody that are trying to do, like, very refined differences and change things about these curves and stuff. But the bottom line, this is a very simple curve here. It has turned out to be a very nice support of bitcoin, and we've bounced nicely off of These low to mid-60s since the start of the year. And then what's interesting is, so now look, we have bitcoin in this nice, beautiful power law, which is like how networks grow. It's how cities grow. It's very different. Nothing in the financial world grows like this. Everything in the financial world grows like this on these straight lines. But they can be volatile. And when you combine the two, when you have bitcoin in dollars, that's power. You have gold in dollars, that's exponential. What do you get when you do bitcoin gold. When you do bitcoin gold, it's also power. So it shows you the fact that bitcoin dominates this relationship, and it turns it into a power law, shows you that it's an extremely strong trend. And it turns any exponential asset, whether it's. You could do this in Apple stock, gold, dollars, it will turn it into a power law. Now, I was talking about this a lot on my stream at the end of last year because people Were wondering, okay, are we going to have this blow off top and we go Back to the dollar chart here where we go above the 90th, 80th, 90th percentile. As we were in the fall last year, people were wondering. Some people were saying the four year cycle was over. I was cautioning a lot that it wasn't primarily as a just don't fix what's not broken thing. But actually Giovanni, a big power law guy, came out with some research that actually shows the four year so far is kind of endemic to bitcoin. Or endogenous I guess would be a better word. And the so far the cycle is actually completely intact. That could actually be broken next year. We'll have to see. Because some people think that it could blow up in 2027, which I'll get to in a second. Bottom line. Bottom line. One thing I was really, I try to not make too many bombastic calls. But as we were. As the screenshot that you shared from our last conversation. Right. So it was in January. We were chatting, you know. So here we are already almost to May, but in January we were just down, down to like no bottom in sight as far as bitcoin gold. And it went to about 12, 13 ounces of gold per one bitcoin. And that is the one call that actually thought would hold pretty solid as it wouldn't go below 10. Because in 2022, the old SBF scam, when that fully materialized, we went to about 9.5 ounces of gold. And that just seemed too cheap to me even for a gold bug to get bitcoin. And so far this has worked as a nice boundary. Again, I don't know the future. This is all probabilities, but basically the levels that we set as we move forward in time here become stronger and stronger and stronger. And anybody holding bitcoin should have a lot of comfort. If you have gold and bitcoin, you should think very hard. Again, never financial advice, but you should think very hard about how cheap bitcoin is in terms of gold. Even still to this day, because it's only 16 ounces of gold. But that's not as good as it was in January, which was 12 ounces of gold for one bitcoin. And I think that this was a pretty. It just goes to show it was a pretty rare event. But it doesn't change anything about the way that bitcoin grows, which is a power law. And it does not invalidate the power law that the gold bitcoin price was going way Way low in percentile terms. It just shows you that when circumstances arise that you need to change your probabilities. You change your probabilities. It's still the case on the bitcoin gold chart that the 10th percentile, which means 90% of the time relative to the trend, the price is going to be above that line. It's still the case right now today that the 10th percentile of Bitcoin is 37 ounces of gold per Bitcoin. The actual price, 16 ounces of gold. So it's an enormous buy. It's an enormous buy if you have gold right now. I have no problem with gold. Hold some gold. Wish I maybe had a little bit more to buy more bitcoin with. But it's just these are all probabilities here. We've, yes, we've extended the lower end of this band with the bitcoin gold ratio. But it doesn't change the power law. It doesn't change that bitcoin grows in this very interesting, unique way for a financial asset. And that's where we are. So, yeah, I think it's good to look back with this chart in particular because yes, gold is a very analogous asset to bitcoin. But all the signs say statistically that this relationship is holding just fine. It's a 95% R squared and Bitcoin gold price is probably going to go much higher. That means worse for gold holders relative to bitcoin.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, you called it.

[Marty]

When we met in late January, we were looking at the silver, the bitcoin ratio. That's when silver was going above 120, gold was above 5,000. And he had you put it out there. He said, hey, I don't think you can go much lower. And of course we bottom tick that at 0% bound and have been creeping up. Question, I might have asked you this. No, because we didn't make the bet yet. I haven't asked you this yet. Matt Odell, the other Matthew in my life, the other Maddie in my life, we made a bet. What do you think the chances of bitcoin making a new all time high priced in silver and gold are this year?

[Matthew]

Low.

[Marty]

Okay, good. Makes me feel better.

[Matthew]

Yeah, still low. But you could see that obviously we're at the very, very low boundary. I mean, to get to. Let's just go to the end of the year. What was the bet? Just all time high. He said it was going to be all time high.

[Marty]

The silver to bitcoin and gold to bitcoin ratios just had to tick A new all time high. At some point in this calendar year, he wins. If not. And both have to hit. Both don't hit. I win.

[Matthew]

Yeah, that's very good for you. So we're looking at the all time highs are 35, 36 ounces of gold per bitcoin. Which again just shows you how. I mean Odell is directionally right in the long term. But we're just. We're so undervalued at the moment. I have a hard time seeing us get past that. You know, anything is possible. Anything is possible. But yeah, it's. I think it's going to be a longer. A longer rise to get there. I think in 2027 it's very possible that it could get higher. But yeah, that'll be an interesting bet in fact because sometimes when things fall so fastly they can spring back fast. And I think a lot of the gold bugs that have been in the business like the. The real professionals, you know, like the Rick rules of the world and Peter Schiff when he's not. When he's doing something opposite of what he's telling you. Talking his book. Like they've sold a lot of their hard metals and you know retail is going to be left holding the bag here on this channel. Which again here I told you I thought this was going to be pretty. You know, this was pretty much close to the top. That is dollar gold price. So yeah, I would agree. I would agree with you. It's still going to take some time. But we could probably next year take it out again. Because it is insane that even if you look at again look at the Q the 10th percentile. Just take it off again. So it's like the second worst percentile by the end of the year. That is. That should be an all time high. So it's possible. It's possible. It's so undervalued at the moment. That is bitcoin priced in gold as possible can spring back. But I'm just one of these more like sort of gradually follow the signal. Don't worry too much about the noise. So that'll be an interesting bet to follow. That's for sure.

[Marty]

Sup freaks?

[Podcast Host]

Guess what? Just booked my tickets to Vegas headed for Bitcoin 2026. It's that time of the year, April 27th to 29th in Las Vegas. I'm going to be there. A ton of people are going to be there. You better get your ass there. You know what it's a. People are calling it bear market. You know these are the Best conferences I've been going since 2019 when it was in a parking garage in San Francisco. If you want to get the best possible ticket prices, make sure you use our link and the code TFTC. You go to 2026B TC, use the code TFTC, you'll get 10% off. You can bundle with a hotel room to save big and make the most of your experience staying on site at the Venetian. That is where I will be. Ticket prices are increasing, so make sure you get yours today. Join bitcoiners from all around the world. It's a global endeavor. It's a, it's a, it's a pilgrimage, if you will, for the ultimate networking experience. There's gonna be a ton of people there. You can hear from the biggest names in the industry. Sailor's gonna be there, Matt and I and the pub key boys and the bugle boys. We're gonna have live hot style takeover. That's gonna be there too. All in the Venetian. Everybody's meeting up. It's gonna be Fun.

[Marty]

Get there.

[Podcast Host]

2026 B TC. Use the code TFTC at signup Sup Freaks. This RIP A TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. BitKey makes Bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose. It is a hardware wallet that natively embe three multisig. You have one key on the hardware wallet, one key on your mobile device and block stores a key in the cloud for you. This is an incredible hardware device for your friends and family, or maybe yourself who have bitcoin on exchanges and have for a long time, but haven't taken a step to self custody because they're worried about the complications of setting up a private public key pair, securing that seed phrase, setting up a pin, setting up a passphrase. Again, BitKey makes it easy to use, hard to lose. It's the easiest zero to one step, your first step to self custody. If you have friends and family on

[Marty]

the exchanges who haven't moved it off,

[Podcast Host]

tell them to pick up a bitkey. Go to Bitkey World, use the key TFTC20 at checkout for 20% off your order. That's Bitkey World code TFTC20.

[Marty]

I know we've talked about this before, but it always fascinates me. It's like I love sitting down with you because you zoom out, you silence all the noise and the narratives around these markets and you just look at the data that pertains to the exponential growth trend or the power trend and it Always gives me a sense of calm and confidence. Okay, we're tracking then. It's just fascinating how the narratives, when you do turn the noise back on and begin accepting signals from the markets in terms of headlines narratives, how they do line up. And I think, I mean, right after we recorded, less than a month after that the Iran war started. And then you have the beautiful coalescence of factors that really bolstered the fundamental value prop of Bitcoin. It's like, oh, this is why bitcoin exists. These people, these nation states can't trust each other and a neutral reserve settlement network actually makes sense. And it seems that the start of the war, bitcoin comparatively has performed rather well, obviously coming from lows here on the power trend, but the narratives lined up almost perfectly.

[Matthew]

Yep, yep. Completely agree. The geopolitical questions surrounding Bitcoin, I think are going to rise and rise and rise, like very quickly. I am curious, I'm not following all the latest with the, you know, the Clarity act and things in the U.S. but there's, there's still a lot of tension in the U.S. it's like on the one hand you got Wall street very involved institutionally, but then on the other side you have a president who, he's running a shitcoin. He's got this World Liberty Financial. He literally, I'm sure I know you've talked about this, right. He scammed the ultimate scammer. He's pardoned him, then scammed him and Justin's son, of course. And then, you know, if there is a swing in a hard swing to the left, which would be bad as far as political, you know, sort of social, political issues. But if there's a huge hard swing to the left and Elizabeth Warren somehow can call all the World Liberty Financial people to the Hill in the fall or next year, that could be pretty bad news for the short term. We all know that World Liberty Financial doesn't represent what bitcoin does. But I'm curious how you think about that just briefly. We don't have to spend a lot of time on it, but do you think institutionally Wall street guys, Wall street wise, can sort of get through that and push that more in a better direction of bitcoin. There's a lot of conflicting narratives there.

[Marty]

Yeah, I mean, The World Liberty 5 stuff is like the biggest fucking own goal retardation I've ever seen in my life. Did you see Steve Wyckoff's son is, I guess co founder of World Liberty Fighters? Got caught with Coke at 11 in

[Matthew]

Miami he's gonna arrest a few days ago. I didn't see that. But it fits the bill, obviously.

[Marty]

Yeah, yeah, it's, I mean it's just very incestuous, obviously. You have Don Jr. I think Eric's involved. You have Steve Wyckoff's son who's running the negotiations with Israel with Jared Kushner involved. World Liberty by dude gets coffee, coke, like obviously a Trump meme coin the night before the inauguration or weekend before the inauguration, night before.

[Matthew]

Why?

[Marty]

Why, why? And to your point. Yeah, I think if you're, if you're in Trump's camp and you're thinking of ways to reduce the, the social attack vectors that exist. Like obviously, you know, the left has been very litigious and is trying to ruin your life, take all your assets, throw you in jail. They've tried for 10 years now. Like why give them another shot on goal with this World Liberty 5 thing. It's so egregiously a scam. And now I'm sure you've heard of the whole, it's an illiquid shitcoin. They're using it to take out loans and the stable coin they created and they're buying other assets, but it's just

[Matthew]

like USD1, they want some of that Cantor Fitzgerald cheddar. They see all the cheddar that Lutnik's collecting. They want some of their own.

[Marty]

To your point, yes, I could say, I mean I think that is going to be one of the low hanging fruits for the left to point at and try to throw the book at them for. But to answer your question directly, I do have confidence that Wall Street, I do think the trend in the United States, particularly with all the defi blow ups in recent weeks and months, is Wall street really separating bitcoin from crypto. And I think it's not going to be easy, it's not going to be straightforward. But I do think if that were to happen, left takes over, throw the book at Trump for shitcoining. I think there could be some short term pain for bitcoin. But I do think the market is beginning to realize that bitcoin is different than all this stuff. And I do think there are enough financial incentives within Wall street around bitcoin specifically for them to sort of brute force. Okay, yeah, throw the book at him for this Stu. But this bitcoin stuff, we're going to, we're going to keep going on with and tax. Maybe that's naive, maybe that's overly idealistic.

[Matthew]

But no, no, I take, take your point. And tax. What about tax situations around Bitcoin?

[Marty]

The Minmis fight is going on right now. I got in, I got in the mud with Coinbase a few weeks ago over that.

[Matthew]

I saw. Yeah, but Brian Armstrong didn't take you up on the offer?

[Marty]

No, he didn't. Stable coins are the best form of money ever created. You didn't know that?

[Matthew]

Certainly not base money like Bitcoin. You want me to keep going on the old base money train?

[Marty]

Yeah, let's do it. I know you do. I know you were very accommodative to record with me this morning and so you weren't able to

[Matthew]

run all the

[Marty]

numbers that you want it to run before we record it.

[Matthew]

But I think, yeah, by the time this comes out, hopefully they'll have a post on it. This will be the. This is only going to be the. I'm going to. I'll just explain in case people are really nerding out on the numbers and think it's interesting, but I've now got the currency set up to like 136 which is basically all the currencies in the world that have somewhat some value. But to do that you have to even be slower on the report to get the total number. So it's going to be, it's going to be sort of a three level thing. There's going to be, When we do these reports now, right, just to you know, our quarterly updates, it's actually going to be for the total set. It's only going to be almost like a full quarter, full quarterback. So year end is what, what is done like literally because that's the only. That's the numbers don't exist beyond that to get the full set. And then for the big ones, the dollar, euro, yen, yuan, sterling, just those big five which is over 80% of the value itself that can be as of the first quarter. And then also just a little bit of commentary on the weekly balance sheets of the Fed and the ecb. Unfortunately with the whole new system and everything and trying to do it all at once, I took on too much. So I can only talk about just a few numbers here, but basically we were at 30. The grand scheme of things, after Covid December 2021 we're at $30 trillion of base money printed now we're down to something like 26 trillion. But it's bottoming and it's been bottoming for the last couple quarters. In the US and Europe there is global chaos as you know and sort of an open question still whether Warsh well, first of all, whether he's going to come in during. He's going to come in of course next month. But Trump has this vendetta against Powell so that's still playing out until he comes in. But he might not be as dovish as people thought originally. So maybe he won't print. And I thought he would print a little bit more like for sure, guaranteed rate cut this year, we'll see. But generally, yeah, when you think of bitcoin, just remind people that are hearing this all for the first time. We're going to get back to 2 trillion in market cap very soon. That value is directly comparable not with your bank account, not with a stable coin, but it's comparable with the balance sheet of each central bank and the monetary base. So it's primarily that's cash and coin plus the bank reserves, which is basically each bank in the system. The core of the system is their bank account with the central bank. So those two things, bank reserves plus cash and coins, monetary base we're about at 26 trillion as of last quarter. And like I said, 80% of those top five currencies that you would think about probably the most dollar, euro, yen, yuan and pound sterling. So it's bottoming, it's turning around overall. If you want to think of another number that kind of I like to just throw out a lot. And this has come down, it got close to 13% a year during COVID because it's a slow moving number. Now it's down to about 12.5%. That's the global weighted compound annual growth rate of these currencies since 1970. So you want to think about what people, your brokers might say you should get. You want to think about what people say inflation is or don't admit that inflation is. The bottom line is central bank balance sheets over the course of a year on average since 1970 have grown at an exponential rate of 12.5% per year. So Bitcoin growing at 40% per year, though volatile though we go through these bear markets still well outperforms that. As long as you hold it for four years. As long as you hold it for about that four year number. Get through a cycle, get through having you're going to be winning and you're going to be winning against all central bank balance sheets in the world. So that's really the bottom line, which I don't have too many charts here, but I do have your favorite one. I do have your favorite one which is the flow of base money. So this one Just to show you again, this is the dollar value transacted on the network really peaked in 2021 still, interestingly at 63 trillion. So 63 trillion over the course of 12 months. In terms, it's actually just bitcoin flowing through the network. In dollar terms now, it's only about 25 trillion. And if you think about that versus what Fedwire does, which is still the big boss, it's very small. As you know, we've talked about this many times. You know, you like this chart and I wanted to get it updated for you. So it's $1.1 quadrillion trailing 12 month in Fedwire. So we got, we got a long way to go. But still, if you, if you just did a little ratio of that, we're getting there. We're getting there. Only 46 times smaller than Fedwire. But if you just look at that number and if you look at the general trend, we're in the right direction.

[Podcast Host]

What's up, freaks? This rip is brought to you by

[Marty]

good friends at CrowdHealth. I've been a happy Crowd Health member for almost five years now. My wife and I have had two children while we've been on crowd health and I actually just got the last bill for our third child funded. It was $6,157. Crowd health negotiated down to $2,309 and we only paid $500. Rest was crowdfunded by the crowd health network. If you're sick of health insurance premiums and having to pay deductibles and getting ripped off at the hospital, join crowd health. It's an alternative way to pay for your health care. It's not health insurance.

[Podcast Host]

It's crowdfunded health care.

[Marty]

As you can tell, they negotiate prices for you. You pay in cash, much cheaper. Overall, we're much happier. They have incredible perks. But to join CrowdHealth.com TFTC to sign up five years on crowd health, not looking back, join CrowdHealth.com/TFTC. Use the promo code TFTC. Once you set up your account, you're going to get $99 a month for your subscription for the first three months.

[Podcast Host]

Sup, freaks? When you take bitcoin seriously, you start with custody. You want to control your keys, avoid single points of failure, and make sure your savings cannot disappear because you or someone else screwed up. That is what Unchained has been focused on since 2016. Unchained is the leader in collaborative multi sig custody and bitcoin financial services that keep you in control. They secure over $12 billion in Bitcoin for more than 12,000 clients. That means about one out of every 200 Bitcoin sits inside an unchained vault. Their model is simple. You hold two keys, they hold one key. It always take two keys to move Bitcoin, meaning their single key can't access your Bitcoin on its own. Just resilient shared custody that gives you institutional grade security while keeping you sovereign. Unchained also lets you trade straight from your vault, access bitcoin backed commercial loans, open a bitcoin IRA where you hold your own keys and set up personal business, trust or retirement vaults. They even offer inheritance solutions built for long term hodlers. Or opt for the highest level private client service with unchained signature and get a dedicated account manager, discounted trading fees, exclusive access to events and features, and much much more. If you want a partner that helps you secure and grow your Bitcoin without giving up to unchained.com and use the code TFTC10 at checkout to get 10% off your new Bitcoin multi sig vault. That's TFTC tench.com I want to bring

[Marty]

it back to Wasa because I think you're the right person to ask this question again, how he's positioning, how he would like to operate monetary policy if and when he gets nominated as Fed Chairman. He's talked about really leaning on interest rate. He wants to get away from balance sheet manipulation focused on interest rates. And it seems like implicitly through that posturing, he wants to push the stimulus on the balance sheet side to the commercial banks. And this is by changing SLR ratios and all that. But he wants that base money expansion which only the Fed can really do. But he's why you're the right person to ask. Have you been following this? Yeah, qe he wants to push it to the commercial banks and basically have them be the front for monetary expansion. Is that correct?

[Matthew]

Yeah, he's hawkish from that side. He actually says the right things. Right. As a governor, what the Fed's supposed to be as an independent governor of a nation's currency. He does say the right things. It's an analysis. I want to do more because you can see very weird pools of money that actually buy bonds of the U.S. so again, I don't have this chart unfortunately handy, but roughly during COVID the Federal Reserve held about 28% of the government's debt, which was an all time record by far. It was rising up during QE1, 2, and 3. But in historical terms, the highest levels before that was about 18%, 17% during the Vietnam War, when the Vietnam war ended in 1975. And the only reason the percentage went down was because the gold standard had ended and people still wanted dollars. Right. So they could increase the debt. And the Federal Reserve did not have to be the only buyer of that debt. But now. So now it's down. It's actually down to Powell's credit from the massive stimulus, which you and I both would think that. And I think there's plenty of empirical and anecdotal data points to suggest was not necessary. But, you know, all the stimulus, all the fear around Covid, they balloon the balance sheet to nearly $9 trillion for total holdings of nearly 30%. Just to explain how the bond buying works. Not all the mechanics, just in general, a currency like the Zimbabwe dollar during the hyperinflationary times, you can just imagine that they're basically the sole buyer of debt of the government of Zimbabwe when you run in these thousand percent plus inflation. So they would be buying 100% of Zimbabwe government bonds. The Federal Reserve got up to almost 30, which was obviously too much. So Warsh is trying to get that down and he says he wants to get it to the banks and things like that. But still, there's a big foreign presence you got to look at there. There's a lot of rumblings that has been weaponized during actually the European fears. This gets in our geopolitical discussion we could talk about a little bit later. But there was a lot of legit. I mean, Europe actually thought that Trump was going to break US Law and invade a NATO ally in Greenland. I can't tell you how pissed the Danes are and the Greenlanders about this whole thing. But we could save that for the geopolitical part of our discussions that we like to do. But apparently that was weaponized. The Europeans said, look, we're going to start dumping. If you do this, bases are going to be closed in Europe, all the rest. I mean, it was a big deal. It was a big deal in Europe. So more and more every day, the United States is playing with fire here, with a clear. This is a clear benefit to America over the long term, has been dollar hegemony. And I think you and I can see the writings on the wall. Obviously we've been in Bitcoin for a long time, but you just can't ignore the fact that there are other ways to store wealth and the way that the US Is going about doing it. I Actually don't think has shown much foresight at all, particularly Trump. But if War says again that he's going to take. So the point is back to your question finally after laying all that out, if Warsh says that banks should bear the burden of treasury costs more, okay, but also need to see where the foreign flows are and where and how those are being used. And it's, it's very murky still. It's, it's not a purely free market.

[Marty]

Right.

[Matthew]

Like there's a, I don't know, like the Cayman Islands is a huge holder of bonds, right.

[Marty]

1.4 trillion or something.

[Matthew]

They're the largest foreign holder, I believe probably even larger than China. So then you have to ask the question, well, who's actually.

[Marty]

It's not the Caymans. It's not like the government in the Cayman's Islands, right.

[Matthew]

It's investors that hold Cayman bank accounts basically. But who are those investors? And then you know, what's the corruption there and the grift and everything else. So the US Is playing with fire. I mean those things, you know, we're just in a fast digital world these days. We saw that with the SVB collapse a couple years ago. So it's very dicey. It's a very dicey situation. I think the US is going to have a lot of issues here. And again, it's all the more reason to buy Bitcoin. I have more geopolitical things to say about that, but I'm saving them because it's just generally about dollar hegemony. And I think that I could be wrong. And I usually, I'm usually not like fear mongering over the dollar much. You know, when I come on, I'm trying to just say, okay, these are the facts, these are the figures. So far the Federal Reserve is doing better. It has, it's gotten that percentage down from like a third. It's down to like 18% at the moment. So that's better. But there are a lot of headwinds I think still for dollar hegemony and actually bitcoin is just one of them. But this multipolarity trade alliances, the US is not doing themselves any favor right now. So my answer to your question is it's much deeper and I'm not really sure that the US Banking system like absorbing more of the holdings of Treasuries is, I mean, I guess in theory it's better, but I'm not sure it will solve the problem.

[Marty]

Yeah, no, it's been, been fascinating to watch that. I'll Play it and don't feel like we need to save the geopolitical if it's to the end, because if it's pertinent to. Not pertinent, if it's relevant to this part of the discussion. Because that's, that's one thing I wonder, because I, I mean your point, like it would obviously be preferable that the commercial bank takes, commercial banking system, takes that risk. And yeah, you would think that they're, they're in a position where they have to think more critically about risk than the Fed and the treasury, which can just either print the money or issue the bonds and capital, misallocation be damned. And you sort of have this forcing function of a somewhat private market, private market actors, private market in the sense of not government actors trying to manage risk because there's actually costs associated associated with it for them it would be preferable. But to your point, I want to say it's uncharted territory, but it is a tectonic shift in how we viewed the relationship between the Fed, the Treasury and the commercial banking system for the last 20 years.

[Matthew]

Yeah. And furthermore, I mean to be clear, like the chart that we're looking at right now, this is probably the best chart that shows dollar hegemony. I mean you see how huge it is, how huge the network effect of the dollar is not just to Bitcoin but to anything else. I mean you could look at the, I think it's called chips is basically the UK equivalent of Fedwire or whatever, the ECB Euro clear. All these sorts of different ways to settle other major currencies like the euro Sterling. They don't even hold a candle to this amount which is $1.1 quadrillion. $1.2 quadrillion trailing 12 month again compared to Bitcoin's 25 trillion, just 46 times smaller. So to be clear, it's going to take some time. It's going to take some time. I don't see the, you know, sort of the flood to Bitcoin moment. This also happens to do with the fact that power curves generally don't do that. So in my view that's actually a good thing, but I think it's going to take some time. But Bitcoin has all the capabilities. So this is the one we didn't look at. Bitcoin has the capabilities to actually deal with this. So this is transaction count. Right. So Bitcoin at the moment does more than Fedwire. 373 million transactions for Bitcoin versus Fedwire 219 million transactions.

[Marty]

And to explain this you've taken out change addresses and all that too. This is like as distilled signals you can get. Right.

[Matthew]

This one actually may be gross but I don't think that's as big of a problem anymore as it used to be. A lot of people that know don't send bitcoin transactions with change and I actually just don't think it's. I'm not adjusting actually. This is gross, full on gross. But you could do that and you would get a little bit less. It might be less than. If you did that adjustment. It might be less than the Fed wire total of 219 million. But more and more that bitcoin is going to be used, people are going to probably even do better practices with batching where Basically all old UTXOs are going to get completely.

[Marty]

It is great. And this has been the case since looks like it's chart like the beginning of 2016 which is fascinating. Again looking, trying to. You're a new listener, you're bitcoin curious. The price has gone up towards 80k and you're like okay, this thing isn't dead. You're coming to listen to this and you're looking for signal through the noise. I think Matty and I have been doing this for six, almost seven years now and probably more than seven years now at this point.

[Matthew]

Yeah, probably eight.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Marty]

And

[Matthew]

seven and a half.

[Marty]

What you need to understand is what is Bitcoin. Matthew explained it briefly in the beginning. What are you comparing Bitcoin to actually base money m0 it competes with the Fed and its settlement networks and as you can see from this chart, Bitcoin is 46. Fed wire is 46 times bigger. On a pure value transacted perspective today however looking at the number transactions, Bitcoin surpassed Fedwire in 2016 and that dominance has maintained on a transaction count level since then. So over a decade.

[Matthew]

And it shows that there's nothing technical stopping it from beating Fedwire. Just adoption and price. All that we have to have is price go up. For all the arguments we've ever had about scaling bitcoin which were a lot exactly. During this time Bitcoin itself did enough technically to compete with Fedwire. Technically it's just a question of value, network adoption and time.

[Marty]

Yeah. So like Bitcoin is fully equipped today to replace Fedwire. It's just a matter of price. Look at the purchasing power of Bitcoin NX 20X 46X. The big question is can I replace the global reserve currency and From a technical settlement perspective, it certainly can.

[Matthew]

So it's exciting, man. There's a lot of room for optimism. The short term. I don't know how you feel these bears, but I'm usually just more eager and eager to have these bears we can buy at these levels. Not financial advice, but I mean, there's so many things you can do if you don't have any capital. You can write puts now on ETFs. You know, there are ways if you do have cash or you don't have bitcoin and you want to borrow against it, you know your LTV is going to do much better if this really is the bottom, which it seems like the bottom. And you can use these quantile regression percentiles just to really see where we are in the development of the market. Again, not financial advice. Anything can happen. And in dollar terms, you know this Q0, right, this one I'm flashing here, could technically set a new bottom by the end of the year. Technically, just like it did with gold at the start of the year. It would just mean that the distance between the Q10 and the Q0 expands. There's nothing fixed about this chart, but what it does is it gives you a very, very broad overview of the distribution of price around a trend. And bitcoin's trend is a very interesting power curve, very different than financial markets. And the price historically right now relative to the curve is 90% of the time. Bitcoin has been higher. So I'm extremely bullish. I was never worried for a second during this bear. Just be careful. Obviously it's not financial advice. Do what you need to do. But I think a lot of the bombasts too. It's usually people that don't know anything about the power curve. I heard a lot of people in the fall saying that the four year cycle was over. Bitcoin's on a permanently high plateau.

[Marty]

Some people were calling for a super cycle as idiots.

[Matthew]

Was that you?

[Marty]

That was me.

[Matthew]

Sarcasm. I should listen to more tftc. I confess, I don't.

[Marty]

That was on Rabbit hole recap.

[Matthew]

I mean it was a bit facetious.

[Marty]

It was like, hey, maybe this is it.

[Matthew]

Yeah, no, but there's a lot of people, a lot of people that are saying that. And I would even say, by the way, I still think even though we are, we have Wall street involved, which almost guarantees that the sort of nation state threat of bitcoin is done. My original thesis, in fact, going back to the World Liberty Financial thing, my original thesis was, I was saying you know, sometime around this, like around a year ago. So I could very much see a blow off top which we didn't have.

[Marty]

All right.

[Matthew]

But a top in, in 2025, the four year cycle continue and then the Democrats take the House after all the Trump madness and you know the World Liberty Financial is like the on a nation state level SBF Celsius Luna type event. Right. Where it's just out in the open that the President United States has been scamming his taxpayers and that would bring in the traditional bear. We still could have that news event by the way. I'm not predicting that. I'm not saying that I don't know anything more than anybody else does about what's posted in the news about that company. But yeah, you could still, we could still have a tough theoretically according to the four year cycle. Four years is a shelling point in Bitcoin. Theoretically we could have which would be good for you on your bet against Odell, but we could have another leg down by the end of the year based on geopolitical events in the United States. It's possible.

[Marty]

Yeah. But I think comparing like World Liberty 5 to FGX, I think that's a, it's an insult to FTX. I feel like World Liberty nobody, nobody actually uses them. It's just.

[Matthew]

Sure.

[Marty]

But I think the blast radius of like actual financial exposure is way of individuals is, is way smaller than it was for ftx.

[Matthew]

I do agree the actual you know, broad bitcoin or you know, crypto exchange community is not exposed to World Liberty the way that they were to Celsius and Tara and ftx. I agree but politically the narrative will be stronger. Pretty enormous. It's pretty enormous and it's pretty predictable.

[Marty]

It's very predictable. It's like why would you. That's like the most frustrating thing. It's like why would you do this? I mean it's loot the treasury stage. I'm not sure if you saw like the press conferences yesterday, but they were like flippantly joking about some of this stuff.

[Matthew]

Well, I mean the, in the broader markets obviously, let's not waste time on it but you know, the S&P 500 mini contracts, the shorts on the oil futures, it's, it's never ending the, the grift here. So yeah, it's going to be interesting. One more, one more sort of on. Well let's do this one. Let's do this one while we're on bitcoin interest. So I think I showed this one last time. It's a very check matey type chart just utxos in profit and lost short term, long term. And you can basically see that we're in a situation where there's a lot of long term hodlers that means longer than a half a year roughly that are bleeding out. That has only happened in the past four years of these four year increments. So here I would say as well caution, we do have a little bit of green coming back for these short term hodlers that are coming in profit again. But I think that this sort of this bleeding out event it could take a little bit longer. But so far signs are pretty good that the worst of the worst was in February when gold was over 5,000. But we'll see. This is not showing any signs to me that it's like we're really on the mend here. But yeah, for what it's worth, I don't know if you have any comments on this one.

[Marty]

No, I mean James is a good friend. Follow his analysis like yours pretty religiously and I think he's been pretty consistent about this since over the last month, six weeks that things were back in a chop solidation range. So we're gonna floor may have been set. Potentially not set but going back to a range where we just set a floor and begin building up from there. I don't think he has a timeline but just using pattern recognition and vibes. Vibes analysis like I could easily see us ranging through the summer and then things popping off in the fall.

[Matthew]

Yep, yep.

[Marty]

I agree.

[Matthew]

It's totally possible. So this one I think is interesting. This, this mirrors the presentation that I gave at Peter's conference in Bedford about a month ago. So look at S and P over its total history plus a little bit of some backdated stuff. S and P only goes back to the 1950s but there are, there's the S&P90. There's some other. You can use the Dow. You can use other sort of ways to even back test even further like to the beginning of America. So I did that here and you can kind of see. So this is exponential which again it's doesn't matter your order of magnitude here it's about like base 2.2.2. But when you run trend lines they're going to be straight lines. Okay, so this is the old Jeffrey west who wrote a great book scale everybody should read. Yes.

[Marty]

I was just about to say we're talking about the treadmills here.

[Matthew]

Yep, the treadmills. And it's a little bit of an update and a little bit of some thought that I think will spur, hopefully spur some more interesting discussion on this because I think, you know, we're talking about protecting your purchasing power. We're talking about how markets are moving. They're moving faster and faster. It's clear, like even on log scale you can see it goes faster. And I'll just show that here. So again, straight line on log scale. 1800s stock market was giving you 2%. Okay, you pick. The founding of the Fed till 1971 basically was end of the classical gold standard into the dollar standard, which really only lasted like 27 years after World War II to 1971. Huge boom and spike there. Great Depression boom and bust moved faster on trend. 5% 4.8% 1971-2008, 9.6% 2008 until now 11.7%. And this is without dividends. So if you invested those dividends, you get at least 2% higher. So you'd be closer to 14, 15% now on a trend, which is enormous. Right. Think about when I was in school, we were talking about 7 to 9% equity returns and how the market was so overheated with the dot com boom. And you know, we see where we are now, but it's undeniable. What you see here is this sort of faster and faster treadmill up in a shorter and shorter amount of time. And so this is what really bitcoin's up against. And I think this will. If you look at the bitcoin power curve, basically you can see that mathematically we're going to run into very interesting tension. And what I think that tension is going to occur is probably somewhere around 2035, 2040. And I'll explain, but so we have these curves. And then if you think about how market trends actually occur, which you don't think about a lot or a lot of people might actually not think about graphing this. But if your broker says, okay, I'm trying to get, you know, 8% or 7%, how does that actually look like over time? And in exponent with exponential assets with exponential growth, it actually just looks like. So I'll take these trend lines off, it's the same thing. But I'm just going to show the percentages, they just look like straight lines across the chart. So put them all on, then I'll get out. So you can see Here, this is 2, 2% here, 4.8, 9.6. So you get those very strong straight line on the value. But if you actually just plotted the Percentage. This is how markets look. They used to be 2%, now they're 5. Or, sorry, there were 5 in 1914. After 1971, 9.6. Now they're 11.7. And it's probably even low, but that's what they are. Any questions on this so far? There's the faster and faster treadmills.

[Marty]

No, I like this visualization.

[Matthew]

Yeah.

[Marty]

So like the. And you can see, I mean, I think point of feedback here for the. For the last trend line, I would shorten it to the last data point or a little after it, that you can really see what you're articulating. I mean, you said it, you articulated, but I think this visualizes it, which is like, it's getting shorter and shorter. Like the next stair that you go up. The time of that rate of change is shorter than the previous rate of change.

[Matthew]

Yeah. And this is something that is. I've given a few presentations on this for about a year. Probably would do a variation of this in Prague as well. But this is what. There's going to be a tension here, basically. So Jeffrey west calls it the essential singularity. He's not talking about the Rate Kurzweil thing, but at some point, whether it's AI, whether it's the next step after AI, we're getting so fast in the growth in the productivity and oddly, inflation in other things. Even though theoretically the productivity is supposed to be deflationary, we know we have huge inflation in other areas like energy. There's just going to be this point where if you're just faster and faster and faster in these shorter and shorter time periods, there's going to come a point where sort of mathematically, it can't really go any further. And they call that the essential singularity. It doesn't mean he's not predicting anything. He's not predicting flying cars. He actually leaves it open in his book. And so what I've been sort of.

[Marty]

We've been talking about for like a year now.

[Matthew]

Yeah. Shamelessly. Shamelessly borrowing this idea and saying, well, it could be Bitcoin is actually what's going to happen. So at some point there's going to be a realignment and it's coming. And so I'll give you the slide I did in Bedford right here. This is basically what I see as the tension. The stair steps are a little bit different because I was using debt. Don't worry about it. But I said, say we even get to 20%, like this is today. Say we get to 20%, which we're not far off, right? So maybe we'll be at 14, 13% on the stock market for a little bit longer, but eventually we get to say we get to 20%. This is Bitcoin's growth. This is why bitcoin is so weird, is Bitcoin does not have this flat line, you know, the straight line exponential growth which slightly rises, this super exponential growth because inflation gets more and more, you know, volatile and we have to just keep papering over it. Basically, Bitcoin is actually coming in with super fast growth for all the early adopters, but then it's slowing down. So the tension is, of course, in my view, this is my reasoning here is I don't know if it's going to be technically called the singularity whenever these cross, right? Whenever the stock market say if it's 20% or if it's 30% or if it's 15%, but there's going to be major tension where you could say in the stock market get, I don't know, 20, 25% return. But Bitcoin is actually going to. Clearly it's a superior asset. But in dollar terms, it's actually growing slower. Right back to this chart. It's growing slower over time. Still massive numbers. I'm throwing a number out now. 2050 ols is 22 million. Okay? So it's all projected to be just fine in dollar terms. But this nice stable network power growth slows down whereas the stock market speeds up. So just as you see there in the slide, it's projected the price or network growth of Bitcoin is projected to be 30% hit. 30% on the downward, we're at 40% now. Go down to 30% in 2031, 20% in 2041, 10% in 2070. 2070 is too far away. 2041 is probably even too far away. Although that's about when you get to

[Marty]

100 trillion in market cap, 15 years flies by, man.

[Matthew]

It does, it does. But this is where I, you know, food for thought for you. I mean, I think, I think it's 5 to 10 years, honestly. I think it's when you get to 30 to 25%, it's really where all I can say is fireworks. It's going to be fireworks because you're going to have superior money. Yeah, go ahead.

[Marty]

As you're explaining this, I can't stop saying, because Matt and I, Adele and I were talking about it yesterday on rhr, the whole concept of universal high income and the emergence of AI, and you have Elon and everybody Else sort of preparing the narrative that we're going to need UBI or some form of sort of subsidy for the average person because their job is about to get replaced by these robots that we're building. And I don't know, as you're explaining this, the Singularity, it's just like in my mind I'm like everybody in that part of the world and AI is focused on ubi but it's like no, maybe we just need a deflationary currency to pair with this form of abundance that you're bringing to the world. And I thought Odell made a very point because I think the narrative forming around UBI or universal high income is I think more of a just a feigning of like hey, we're worried about you, like just like to save their back. So they don't get the Luigi Maggione, right? Yeah, they don't, they don't get Luigi'd in the street when it comes to like the technical implementation. Like it doesn't make any sense. Matt made the very good point yesterday. Universal high income doesn't make sense because it's universal. It's equal across the board. Like you can you get Zimbabwe dollar territory? It's like yeah, everybody can make a billion dollars but it doesn't really mean anything because the purchasing power is so diminished. And Elon the AI camp put together well, don't worry, the productivity growth of all this technology is going to be so high that it doesn't matter. Like the velocity of the productivity growth is going to be faster than the velocity of the money distillation throughout the economy. So it'll sort of even out. But still I think it's half assed attempt at a solution to this problem that is emerging. I do think half of the half ass in this is just a narrative forming to make sure that they don't get shot in the street.

[Matthew]

Yeah, totally agree man. I mean it's a very interesting signal nonetheless from the technological elite out in Silicon Valley. It's hard to know, honestly. It's hard to know how this is all going to play out. The war, the rising interest rates, energy, I don't want to say scarcity, but energy monopoly that is being sort of distorted. Dislocations as the economists would say is rising. The only good thing in many stories around the world seems to be what bitcoin is doing. You know it better than most as far as like, you know, developing markets with mining, accessing it, this neutral asset worldwide and being able to transact with anybody, with nobody Telling you that you can't. Everything else is starting to look pretty Orwellian. Well, again, I'm not a doom and gloomer typically, but to me this is a mathematical representation of how I think the fireworks are going to play out. And I do think it's probably going to be within the next 10 years.

[Marty]

Yeah, agreed. And I'm happy you brought that up because it is going to be stressful, it is going to be chaotic. And I think it's necessary, like you have to go through these, these growing pains and these, these moments of turbulence to, to really recognize what the signal is. And I think we both agree it's bitcoin. But I mean, to your point on the Orwellian tip, I mean, we had tether freeze $344 million worth of their stablecoin yesterday morning. And that is another parallel narrative that's been formed and the drum has been beaten over the last two years. The stablecoins are the biggest innovation. We're going to modernize our economy with them. Like I said earlier, Brian Armstrong was out earlier this week saying they're the best form of money of all time. But I think the market is learning the lesson and we reported on it at TFTC yesterday and I talked about it. It's like, this is like the whole, particularly here in the United States, of politicians saying, hey, we're never going to have a cbdc. We're going to, we're going to make sure we pass laws that make it so the Federal Federal Reserve cannot issue a central bank digital currency and we're going to have freedom in the monetary realm here in the United States. It's like, well, actually you're erecting a private market, a private bank digital currency system that is functionally serves the same goals, the cbdc. At the end of the day, I think people are beginning to see this with the freezing of assets.

[Matthew]

But it's not, it's not only the stablecoin guys. Marty. And this is where again, it's free real estate for me to criticize because he's obviously done a lot. But let's keep this analogy going now. So this is, this is the idea, right? Contrary to what people might think. And you still can get great returns. We'll go back to the chart. You can get 100 plus percent returns on Bitcoin if you buy at those lower quantiles and sell at the upper. Again, not financial advice, but it's actually not that difficult compared to say, more volatile, negatively skewed stocks, which they can blow up Faster than you can track them. But bitcoin actually usually is positively skewed asset. It blows up to the upside. The bottoms are pretty, pretty rounded. I'm getting on a tangent again. But the point is, bottom line, on a trend, if you really are mathematically rigorous about it and you can follow Giovanni or Steven Perrineau, a lot of these power law guys that I've gotten to know over the years, and I fully agree with all of their takes, but on a trend, bitcoin used to be, you know, 50, 60, 70% CAGR. It goes down. It actually stabilizes and goes down. Now, someone who controls a lot of bitcoin, Michael Saylor, has made the announcement, which is just purely absurd. But you know, he does it for the lulls or for the, I don't know, just for the cheeky numbers. He has said, well, first of all, besides saying all your models will be destroyed and then making a model, which he's done a few times. And then second of saying, he said recently that he thinks that the bitcoin growth rate, he has admitted actually that it's declining, but he doesn't admit that it's in a power fashion, he does this just weird thing. He says that it's going to stabilize around 21% per year. Now, besides the fact that that's just unbelievably cheeky and convenient that you pick the number 21 also happens to be 10% above your 10, 11% cost of funding to most of your investors through your own stablecoin type thing, your own stablecoin instrument. It's not real. There's nothing grounding that statement. He could say it, but it's not real. So this is really to me and I need to probably write a paper on it or something, but I think mathematically this is what we're looking at. So it's either bitcoin continues on its power trajectory and it grows like a network and nobody can stop it and the cypherpunk era is realized. Or Wall street, in particular Wall street, but probably other capital markets as well. Maybe weirdly in authoritarian countries really takes over. Truly authoritarian. You can't withdraw. And crucially, crucially, you can have endless amounts of fiat interest backing a limited amount of bitcoin. Then you could have what Saylor describes as pick your number 21%, 15%, whatever, during, that singularity, at that meeting point, which there will be a meeting point of bitcoin sort of slowing down in growth and the rest of the market speeding up in growth if they are successful and I do mean this in sort of the an M versus term, I guess. But if they are successful, that is the system, the fiat currencies, then that means that if they are successful in sort of co opting Bitcoin, then that means that bitcoin turns exponentially. So it actually means that unlike here where bitcoin goes down, but if it goes to say 21% and it just hovers above this red line, first of all, bitcoin can do fine. Like price wise, you might be pretty happy if you bought bitcoin. Bitcoin can do well. I'm already going to jump the shark. I mean not jump the shark, but jump to the point. Bitcoin can do better in both scenarios as a bitcoin holder. But the, the vision is not necessarily the one I think that we would want and probably one couldn't really, without great pain, withdraw bitcoin at licensed KYC institutions. And this is actually how I see it now. I'm fleshing it out in my mind. I'm looking at the numbers, but you're going to have a meeting point of cost of capital, return of value and interest and sort of on the other side, by the way, which aligns very nicely with the theories that have been said by many bitcoiners of the time. Jeff Booth, Seifedin, Whatever people have theorized, if it's going to be if we're going to have interest or we're going to have these sort of equity contracts, I'm not exactly sure. But it is a fact. It is a fact. This is one more thing that makes me pretty sure that like mathematically we're on the right track here, is that you cannot actually have interest in a world where bitcoin grows in power because it's not exponential. You can only have interest working in an exponential system. Do you understand what I just said there? Because I've said this a lot and a lot of people, even in the power sort of camp, I've pressed them on it and I haven't gotten good answers. But when I say that you can't actually like if bitcoin is growing, but it's growing at a sort of sustainable rate that declines, you actually cannot, for your investments have a fixed rate of interest because at the end you wouldn't want to lend the bitcoin because your bitcoin would be more, you'd have, you wouldn't get enough out in bitcoin interest compared to the growth of the investment. Does that make sense?

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Marty]

No. Yeah. I mean, you have it There contracts are equity based or very short term debt. Yeah, that's, I mean I've been partial towards that. And it's funny, a lot of, there's been a lot of commentator. I think it's PXMC trades or whatever. He's been beating the drum. Like Bitcoin will never be, will never be a medium of exchange because of the growth rate and like it just makes sense to hoard and not, not a spend and sell. But I think, I think, and I can see that argument, I can, it's a very strong argument to make. But I think it's operating from a context where the world remains in its state, at least from a monetary and economic organization perspective. And what you're putting forth here on the left is like, hey, that, that shifts and we have a new, a new way of sort of monetize, not monetizing but investing and doing capital allocation. That, that is very different from what we've become accustomed to over the last couple of centuries and last century specifically. And I think that's to answer your question or to help, try to help you answer the question. I think we're, we've both been mulling over for the last year because of your introduction of the treadmills as a thought experiment is does the market force the left? The left. Bitcoin turns the world to power law. Does the market force that? And when I say that, I mean that's getting out the technical arguments. I like to focus more on the social and just look at the multipolar multipolarity that's increasing and the lack of trust of institutions. I think there's a social aspect. We talk about it in hyperinflation all the time. Inflation is two parts, mechanical and social. Mechanical obviously the number of monetary units that exist and then social. Once confidence collapse, there's nothing that can return stability of the currency. It's just gonna devolve into hyperinflation. I think similar here was what you're describing is on the institutional side, like can they sustain enough of a reputation and sustain confidence? Can individuals sustain confidence in that system to allow them comfortably to turn Bitcoin exponential? That's where I would, I would say, I think the long term Trend, particularly since 2008, is that confidence is eroding and waning. And that side of the market, the social side of the market may force or may just end up with Bitcoin turning the world into a power law power trend.

[Matthew]

Excuse me. Yeah, no, I don't mind power law. I mean, I say power Trend. Because some people who don't know the math, like, get confused. But it's just the technical term calling it a power law. But it's an exponential. It's like exponential is a trend. Power is a trend.

[Marty]

That makes sense though.

[Matthew]

It makes sense. And this is, this is basically my thesis. Now, I don't see. I think that mathematically explains the situation, like you said, socially, all the factors are there to keep pushing Bitcoin into this area. And we know, I mean technically all the factors are there. It just needs to keep this decent, you know, self custody. Self custody actually has to dominate and you can't be afraid to withdraw. But that is a question in itself. Yeah, go ahead. I got more, but go ahead.

[Marty]

That's another part there. Like technically, like, even if you get to the world on the left, on the right, excuse me, where the world turns Bitcoin exponential. And for all the audio listeners, I'm sorry, I'm describing something visual that you may not be seeing, which is a slide. Bitcoin turning the world. Power of the world turning Bitcoin exponential. Even if there is a short period where the world turns Bitcoin exponential, if there's enough full node distribution and geographic and ownership distribution of hash rate that exists, the ability, like, yes, there may be a KYC AML regime, everything may be gated off, but at the end of the day, the literal ability to send a UTXO from one address to another signing a private key will still exist. And if that ever goes away, then why are we even doing bitcoin? So there may be some social, political sort of factors that make people believe that this is the way we use Bitcoin, but at a little fundamental. Is this thing possible? Is it possible to do this thing which is use a private key to bind and broadcast a transaction that has a UTXO land and a public address that you technically can control by yourself. Yes, that will remain true. And as long as that remains true, I think bitcoin turning the world to a power trend will be possible. And I think it's going to be an uphill battle. And I think it will come with volatility, just like the price chart does. But I think again, going back to the tether thing, I think people, I mean, maybe it's a bubble, but I think you're just gonna have more and more of that and people are gonna be like, no, I actually want to control my money. Don't want to use these tools that make it hard for me. And I think again, the multipolarity of the political landscape is going to only increase and get more vitriolic from here. And I think we're in a relative peace time in terms of operation choke point 1.0 and 2.0. But to think that that stuff has gone away forever is completely naive 100%

[Matthew]

and it's going to come down to people rallying around probably political. And Peter Todd talks about this. We have to bring it back to the geopolitics now. So I mean Peter and I might be the loudest supporters for Ukraine and freedom and against Russian tyranny. I'm not going to go full, full throat into that as I usually do. But. But I will say it's always been strange to me. Just lay out the example. So it's always been strange to me that on the sort of libertarian free market right, we have this hard right faction which you could goes to Tucker, who does this sort of Walter Duranty type interview of Putin. This is the guy that from New York Times basically glossed over the holodomor and all the terror that the Soviet Union was doing in the 20s and the 30s. But he's not doing real journalism with Putin. And you have sort of, he is throwing out this angle which I think is very appealing to Americans that are fed up with American empire, which is correct in some ways. Right. Which I would agree. I mean the war to Afghanistan, Iraq, Iraq in particular, completely unjustified, called shameful by the British intelligence the way they were dealing with Americans back at the time. We could go on, on and on and on. But there's an appealing thing here in a free world west also pushed by. This is where you have to be careful on social media. It's like in China and in Russia, they can't, they, their bots can use our Internet. We'll talk about their Internet usage in a second. But they can use our social networks, we cannot use theirs. So in the free thinking west, they are manipulating you. Every day, every day in the trenches they're manipulating. But what is happening? What I'm seeing is, and you tell me, I know that you're more involved with the Human Rights foundation. And so you probably see this more than most. But I've looked, I've asked AI to provide me examples of this sort of right wing bro, kind of hard right now podcasts at various levels, whether it's Tucker's show, whether it's Rogan, Dave Smith, all these guys, have they ever talked about the tyranny in Russia that is coming down the pipe right now today? And for those that don't know, basically right now the Internet is entirely throttled in Russia. You can't go onto any Western website. Okay? Everything is throttled for Russians. Telegram is completely shut off. 95% VPNs, like 486 VPNs were just attacked and targeted. Putin is calling it their digital sovereignty. He's basically saying that there's an attack on Russia. There's no attack on Russia. Russia's attacking Ukraine. But we are, we are very close now to this sort of, in my view, this sort of Orwellian tipping point, this sort of. What's the word? Like an event horizon where at least in the very authoritarian countries, you're not quite sure what's going to happen after. Like, where are. To me, to me, where are all the cypherpunks? If they are sort of center right or even, you know, hard right, are they aware? And I think you are aware, but are they. This is why I'm glad you allow me to talk about this. But, like, are you aware how authoritarian it's going right now in Russia? I mean, it's completely censored. There's more political prisoners in Russia since Stalin. They have something called the foreign agents, where actually they just. I saw that the great granddaughter of Khrushchev himself, which Khrushchev ironically stopped the Stalin purges. I'm not saying Khrushchev's a good guy. He was actually bad during the NKVD times as well. But when he came into power, he stopped the ridiculous Stalin purges. His great granddaughter is on this list. She's a foreign agent. And so basically, you're taxed higher. Your travels are stifled, all your accounts are basically blocked. You're going to need Bitcoin more and more. But, like, the radioactive canary in the coal mine is actually not the U.S. it's in Russia. We can talk about the war in Ukraine in a second, or at least some things that I think will affect US Hegemony. But, yeah, it is unraveling, like, fast in Russia. And I just say that to sort of warn people in the west, like, you really need to be careful because they're the. First of all, Russia's not someone you want to cheerlead. I mean, two in five Russians don't have a toilet. There's 1200 schools in Russia where children don't have a toilet. 1200 schools. This is supposed to be like a superpower. Trump wants to do, you know, $12 trillion of business. Scoffing buddy Steve Woodkoff, as you mentioned, is the, the chief negotiator with Ukraine and with Iran and Israel, like he could do everything. And his son in law as well. But his golfing buddy, real estate developer Steve Witkoff, they are like, he's being titillated by $12 trillion of apparently deals that Russia's gonna do with them. And Lavrov, the Frankenstein foreign minister, has been quoted in saying in some of these leaks that happen in Hungary, that once we get the Ukraine war out of the way, we can do business with the Americans. All of this is very much in Trump's mind that he can be this sort of dealmaker. But in reality, I mean, the Russian economy is 2 trillion and falling. They're being attacked every night because Ukraine is taking out their air defense. So there's a whole war going on right now for freedom. And thank God the Ukrainians are fighting as heroically as they are. But I just want to say all the nightmare scenarios that you think about, hear about, like, they're happening right now in Russia. There are, you can't, you can't assemble in Russia. You can't protest this. There's a good, there's one journalist from the, from Western countries, from the BBC actually. His name's Steve Rosenberg. He's still there. They haven't kicked him out. He's still there. Everybody knows it. Like, he goes to their little press conferences. He's never allowed to ask a question. He's kind of like Putin's beard. Like, if Putin's a gay authoritarian, which he is, but he's like Putin's beard to the West. Oh, look, we have this BBC guy here. Everybody else is kicked off. There's no Americans there, French, whatever, they can't go. They're at risk of being thrown in jail themselves. But they leave Rosenberg just kind of as like a token. And he just did a very interesting documentary. I'd recommend it. Just, you can search BBC Russia, you'll find it. He's going through, he's talking to some of these people that are on the foreign agents list, the people that have tried to put protests not against the war in Ukraine, which they should, but they tried to actually run a government approved protests against the closing of the Internet. And of course these protests are denied. I mean, it is right there. So like we are at a level right now in 2026, where you have a nation, a former great power that is going back, not going forward, but going back. So everything that you just talked about, like you have this radioactive canary in the coal mine that is Russia. And I just think that the last line of defense, as Reagan said, is in United States. There's nowhere else to go. So you have to be careful about them encroaching on your freedoms. I've been more worried on the right now because of the Trump admin, but I'd be just as worried on the left when they come in what's going to happen. So everybody needs to take serious account of what's happening in Russia.

[Marty]

I was telling you man, I covered on R yesterday, the banning of VPNs pretty big.

[Matthew]

That's not even scratching the surface though. Like it is. There's nothing. The business is cratering even. But they're doing it because they can't control the narrative of how shitty their country is.

[Marty]

Yeah, well no, I mean we've been going back and forth since what, 2022. This war popped off almost whole thing.

[Matthew]

Yeah.

[Marty]

Four years now. Just over four years. February 2022.

[Matthew]

Yep.

[Marty]

Nothing is shitty on us. Like, I mean I don't like Zelensky and I like, I don't, I think he's an authoritarian in his own right. My perspective in many ways, like I think the Russian people and the Ukrainian people are cannon fodder for this proxy war between Russia's view of the future and what I would deem to be like the Davos class West view of the future. And to your point about like here in the United States, the right, you have all these right leaning politicians passing all these anti Semitism laws which is like hey, I don't think you should be out there being overtly anti Semitic and who even knows what the definition of that word is these days. But the fact that you have free speech infringing laws being passed here in the United States is not good. And then on top of that you have this, I mean I described this with Tom Luongo. I think you two would disagree vehemently on your worldviews. But last time he was on like I, I think this is the best way to describe how I try to be all these things. It's through different lenses. Like particularly why I love having you on and then sort of a wide variety of, of guests with different perspectives because it helps me put on different lenses. I mean your, your lens is the pro Ukraine, anti Russia Baltic view, which I think is very important and very valuable for me to have as a perspective and for everybody to have as a perspective. Then you have others which is, I mean the Luongo sort of lens is that we are trying to break free from our, our sort of the Height at the hip nature with European economy, with your European politics, as, as it may be and break free and get out of all these forever wars. Which Iran was like something I look at and like this is, this is a mark against this, this lens. But you go back to like the national security strategy that was laid out. That is something I agree with. Like I think we should get out of these forever wars. We should focus on the Western hemisphere, we should secure our border. But then you look at the day to day murkiness of reality and it's just so hard to believe. Were so hard to understand what is real and what is not. And that was just like a long winded rant monologue. But is this the guy that says

[Matthew]

the, like the UK still controls the US or whatever City of London?

[Marty]

It's different than different.

[Matthew]

I do, I do vehemently disagree with this. Yeah, look, just a couple things. Firstly on the war, Zelensky, Gary Kasparov says it right. Every politician in the world today is a clown. Leave it to a comedian to actually be the new leader of the free world. Whatever you're hearing about Zelensky, whether he's on coke or he's corrupt or whatever, that's just not the case. He was offered a ride out of Kiev by the Biden administration. He said I need ammunition, not a ride. He's leading his people truly in a Churchillian effort against a much larger power that has much greater resources, that thankfully they're just so inept. And not only inept, but they are corrupt to the core. They extort. They're just a terrible outlook on life. They're imperial. That Ukraine, which you know, like Russia, the phrase is basically Russia is, is sending slaves to liberate a free people. Like what Ukraine is doing is unbelievable. Now the United States role in that. I know there's a lot of people listening to this who say, well, you know, just fuck it all, need to get out. Cut bait. Fine, you're actually getting your wish. But I would say the way that it's happening is more and more a sign of American weakness than strength. Just one clarifying point. You said the Iran war was a strike against this view or not that, that about the forever wars.

[Marty]

Yeah, strike against forever wars in this. If you believe what was put forth in last year's national security strategy, which is we need to untangle ourselves foreign involvement and focus on our hemisphere, we'll be much better off like three months later start bombing Iran.

[Matthew]

Well, I think, yeah, but I think what you should take from that first of all, is actually the deep state is not as deep as you think. It's very clear that Trump himself, and Trump alone started this war that he does on a whim. Well, I mean, no, you could say he's forced by Bibi, but if you're going to say he's forced by Bibi, is that. Does that absolve Trump from starting the war?

[Marty]

No. No.

[Matthew]

So I have no problem with people saying that he was forced by Bibi, but he alone started the war. And I think it's pretty clear to say that this was not a sort of deep state. And it actually should make people even more convinced, if they weren't already, that Bush clearly, I mean, it's been on record, all the intelligence services of the uk I can't remember her name. It's a she on the record saying that the. Just what the Americans were trying to do, laying the groundwork for Iraq, particularly the Bush administration, was shameful. This is UK intelligence services saying that. So it's really not the deep state. It's just overreaching US Admin. And if that's not under control, then it can happen. But I actually don't. I think this is even more example of how the US if we had our shit together, we could do even better, but we don't, so we do worse. So, again, I'm not fully disagreeing with. I'm saying you're going to get your way, by the way. I mean, you are disengaging. This is a sign, this war in Iran, the way that Trump has dealt with Russia, these are signs of weakness, not strength. This is American weakness, not strength. The way that you're dealing with allies, basically insulting them every moment. And for us in the Baltics and Poland in particular, who have been ravaged by war in the 20th century, occupied twice by the Soviets, once by the Nazis, it's hard. It's jarring. It's jarring like coming from a 1989, 1991. I was quite young at that time when, you know, the Wall came down and the Soviet Union eventually fell. But it's hard to see the United States is sort of. There's not even a moral authority right now in Europe. So this is, again, for those that haven't quite picked up with this, my American accent. I'm a. I'm a dual national, so I'm dangerous, dual loyalty. I'm like Jewish. Right? You have to be scared of me like a Jew, because I have two different. I have an American nationality and I have a European nationality passport. And this is very scary. But no, I mean, bottom line is there is, in my view, the free world we talk about. You know, I don't want. I want to go too much on this tirade, but the values of the free world started in Europe, they continued in America. That's a fact. The US is choosing a different path right now and it's usually not. Usually it is overtly doing it in a sign of weakness that's going to continue. So I'll just say be prepared. This is my recommendation. We can't control this stuff, but be prepared. I've been in Europe for 20 years, Marty, and $5 gas has been the norm. All right? You gotta do the conversion from euros or $5 gas has been. Why do you think they drive these stupid fucking cars over here? It's because we can't drive gas guzzlers in Europe that it's the norm. And that's coming to you. Here's the other thing I wanted to say. One of the things, again, not talking about the Iran war, specifically not talking about who caused what, but one of the more shameful things that the Trump admin has done has been failing to learn from heroic Ukrainians defending their land against tyrannical 2 and 5 toilet Russians who are again living in this weird fantasy land and going back to Stalinist ways. Right now, as we speak it canary in the coal mine. The Internet is shut down in Russia. No mobile Internet, they can't get on any Western sites. By the way, there's one more thing I didn't mention. There's this app. Just research it chatgpt and ask about it. It's called Max. It is the most Orwellian thing you could ever do. No one in Russia wants to use it. They're buying separate phones if they have to, to like register something we talked

[Marty]

about a couple weeks ago on rhr.

[Matthew]

Yeah, it take. I mean, this is not new, guys. This is coming and it's been this. It takes control of your contacts. It's just a full takeover of your phone. Everything you've been talking about on rhr, TFTC for years and years. It's not. It's not originating. It's not flowering right now in the us it's in full throat genesis basically in Russia. And this is just typical for them. They're an empire that they just cannot. The real reason for the Ukraine war. I'm going to get back to my thing about Americans being prepared for rising costs. The reason Putin started the war is a wagdadog war.

[Marty]

All right?

[Matthew]

Putin could not have a free democratic Ukraine bordering him. That's why he started the war. It's not about anything else. It's not about NATO, it's not about Nazis in Ukraine. It's because Putin cannot have a free democratic Ukraine. That will be the end of him. So he's not stopping this war. He can't stop the war. So the war is going to drag on, unfortunately. And the Ukrainians are now moving there. They're already. The United States hasn't put a dime in. So again, you're getting your way. I'm going to say right now you're getting where the United States hasn't put a dime into Ukraine since Trump came into office.

[Marty]

I'm going to go back to my argument that everybody's assholes on all sides, like focusing on Europe, the eu, specifically European Parliament. Like, I don't think. I think they're tyrannical. Justice trend, like in trending?

[Matthew]

Not even close. Not even close.

[Marty]

You want to know why you're trending in that direction?

[Matthew]

Not even close.

[Marty]

Probably destroyed the demographics with their immigration policy. You look at their energy policy over the last 20 years. You look at what they're doing for civil liberties and speech on the Internet, it's trending in that direction, too.

[Matthew]

There are many issues. We touched on this a little bit last time. Again, the entire nation of Russia is shut out of the Internet right now. Right. That's the first thing. There are corrections that the UK is taking. They need to. Of course, again, I'm not a woke left liberal. It should be clear if it's not that they. But again, whatever it is, whatever the number, I don't know, 3,000, 10,000, the people have gotten notices or fines whatever for their hate speech. It's insane what they're doing in the uk. They're going to correct it. They're correcting. But. And the radical Islam and everything. But there's a lot of holdover carryover there, by the way, from US intervention in the Middle east over the last 20 years. Right. I mean, where do those refugees go? Those refugees didn't go to the US and by the way, I see that we're trying to ship out the Afghan. I see the US is just shameful. The people that actually helped the locals in Afghanistan and now have residents in America. I see that ICE is trying to get them out of the US it's shameful behavior. But in any event, where did most of those refugees go? They went to Europe. So we can thank Bush one for that. Bush two, hold on. I want to still bring it back. Bottom line, the EU is at the bottom line of the eu. It is actually the exact same institution that all the hard right old right misses people say they want is a confederation. It's like the old American Articles of confederation. There is no supranational EU debt. I should qualify that. There was not until 2020. They did do a Covid package which you and I just talked about ridiculous stimulus money printing. It's like 700 billion. All right, 700 billion at the EU level of debt. Not like the 38 trillion on the American federal level of debt. Every debt in the EU is solely controlled by each nation state. It's not an EU policy. There's only about 700 billion. And again, that was fully from COVID and you and I would fully not support that. The other thing, the EU budget is balanced. Okay? So every, every country sort of proportionately contributes to the debt. Some countries even take a little bit or not to the debt to the budget of the eu. Some countries even take a little bit more out. I agree. Bureaucratic problem, they're going to fix it. All these things, they got a lot to do. But the percentage of what each individual European nation pays into the EU is about one to one and a half percent of their entire spending. So just as a, as a, as a raw figure brass tax number, it's actually not this Orwellian thing like Washington D.C. at all. It's a confederation. It's confederation. There's issues. We don't have time to go into it. I got to.

[Marty]

I know you and I gotta run, right?

[Matthew]

Yeah. But here's the thing again, just to warn about what I think is coming down the pike for Americans with costs and a lack of leadership in the world. I can't remember if I mentioned this last time. I mentioned it a few times on different shows in my own. In the course of this war. So when the war started, Iran lashed out at all the Gulf nations. America could not defend them. So in my view, one of the most egregious oversights that the Trump administration made about starting this war, besides all the other problems that are reported ad nauseam in probably left wing media, more than not the most egregious thing is that the Trump administration did not prepare and listen to Ukraine. For four years Ukraine has been. Ukrainians have been killed every night by Russians with Iranian design drones that they themselves have augmented. The Iranian drone is called the shahed, means like witness. And the Russian drone is Garan, which is like geranium. Russians have this weird like fetish of naming their missiles after like flowers. So it's, it's, it's a, it's a. The drones that kill Ukrainians every night now are produced in Russia, but they're Iranian designed. Okay, so they've been working hand in glove the last four years. The Russians and the Iranians and the Americans that were killed the first day in the strikes were killed by drones. Russian augmented Iranian designed drones. And they're, they're. It's been reported, you can look it up on ChatGPT, whatever. There are Russian augmented drones shooting down and shooting into American allied cities and states in the Gulf and have killed Americans. The fact that this still people don't understand these just basic facts is very hard for us in Eastern Europe who have always suffered under the thumb of Russian imperialism to understand why that's not like, that's not. People aren't understanding that bottom line, you're getting your way. You're actually getting your way. It might not be the way we like it, or at least let's say US in Eastern Europe who always pay our fair share of NATO and are asking for friends and values, friends and allies in the US who have similar values to help you are actually getting your way. But the cost will be much higher. Gas at the least, and probably other things as well. Supply chain. I'm not even talking about straight Hormuz, all that stuff. I'm talking well down the road because the Gulf states had to turn to none other than Ukraine for their defense. This is like an unbelievable own goal for the Trump administration. And Trump was even saying, oh, we have these low cost drone interceptors. He was getting those from Ukraine. In some of his random conferences and stuff, he said we had these low cost drone interceptors. Those are from Ukraine. And unlike the disgraceful performance over a year ago in The Oval Office, J.D. vance, you know, said. Did you say thank you? You know, I'm not hearing the Americans, the American admin for sure. Thank the. Honestly, it's, it's. All I can say is what Ukraine is going through right now is just as much a 1776 moment than Americans have had. And we could go on and on about this. I've said it before. I mean, the Americans weren't just some cornbread, thoroughbred, corn fed, thoroughbred Americans. In 1776, the French blockaded the hell out of the British. They had more soldiers die at Yorktown. The Poles, the father of the American cavalry is Polish. The Poles were actually losing their state to Russia in the late 1700s. And they came over and helped America win. And now the tides are actually turning. Europe is Eastern Europe in particular is still dealing with the scourge of Russia for the last 150 years. And America's unfortunately not really there and doesn't really want to help. But this is what we're dealing with. It's a true. The realignment is here, you're getting your way, it's here, you're not engaged. And I think it's probably going to be a higher cost to Americans in the long run. You might disagree with me on that, but it is not a proxy war. Like, there's no, there's no proxy between Ukraine and Russia. This is the Russian empire started with the subjugate, subjugation of Ukraine and it's ending with the subjugation of Ukraine. So from that side, me as a European, as a dual national, you know, traitorous person here talking to you right now. It's going to be good. Like, we cannot thank and support the Ukrainians for what they're doing enough. It's just from my view, I'd say it's a bit sad to see the way that the US Is handling this, like the way that he dealt with. And I don't think the Greenland story is over, by the way. By the way, Greenland was not in the national security memorandum. But Trump has been fixated on taking it. I mean, that's U.S. law. A border treaty is U.S. law. Russia has broken all laws with their border treaties, which are signed into law with Ukraine. Okay, so again, there's no justification for what Russia is doing. It's a tyrannical state right now. But what we're seeing with the US Is very dangerous, I would say, for like a traditional European ally. Because if Trump, we got two more years of this. And if Trump continues to go down the road of we don't need anybody, we're just going to take Greenland. And Fox News justifies taking like a sovereign democratic nation and an allies territory. It could get much worse. I hope that it doesn't. I think that it won't. But like, the Greenland story is big. The Danes are pissed. I mean, the Danes lost more per capita in Afghanistan than anybody. The Balts were close as well, but the Danes lost more per capita than Americans. And it's like they are, they're the best allies that America can have. They're the biggest contributors, by the way, per capita to Ukraine's defense. So you're getting it. The realignment's happening. You're getting it. I wouldn't you know, I wouldn't. When you talk about Europeans not paying for the defense and stuff, that's something for like Spain and Germany and France, but for us, for us in Eastern Europe who have always been subjugated to like a tyrannical imperial Russia, I think what you're seeing is an empire die. In Russia right now you're seeing America also die and lose their power. I mean, not die but retreat in a very disorderly fashion. And it's going to be very, it's going to be much more expensive for Americans in the future. It would be my caution. So again, all roads lead back to bitcoin. But I think you're actually going to find costs probably rise and influence dwindle fast. And I don't know. That's my caution. We can't change it. Like I said, we can't change it. But what I see is, is us losing a lot of power. Oh, one more thing. So the Ukrainians are helping the Gulf countries now with all of their air defense low cost drone interceptors. It's just another example of how Ukraine is rising above sort of the shit hand that they've been dealt. The Gulf countries in Those first like 48 hours when Iran was attacking them a month ago spent a thousand. So the Patriot interceptor, the Patriot defense missile interceptor system is the best in the world. It's the one thing Ukraine cannot replace and they're desperate to have it every night because they get bombed and droned every night. In Ukraine they have their low cost drone interceptors. But the Patriot missile interceptor is the big one. The Gulf, the rich Gulf states, they launched a thousand of these interceptors in two days and Ukraine has launched 600 over four years. Just to give you some perspective of again like the, just the crazy disparity, the distribution of these things. If you have money versus if you don't. It's a real, it's a real realignment. I don't doubt it. I think you and I agree on, you know, 80% of this stuff. But I would just say you really got to. I would. I'm more worried about the hard right not understanding the dangers of the authoritarians like the Putin's in the world than even the left, like these losers like on the left, these left libs, you know, like this Hasan Piker. I didn't know who he was recently, but I saw how, you know, Big he's become. I guess like just saying that the Soviet Union, It's a shame the Soviet Union broke up all this shit. I mean economically they're going to lose every time. And I think Americans know that. I think economically the left crazies will lose every time in their policy. But the, it's, it's kind of the hard right authoritarian, which is where I see the Trump admin right now, which unfortunately scares me more, A little bit more. But I don't know, it's not here nor there. That's my, that's my rant, man. That's my soapbox on it.

[Marty]

It's appreciated. Rant. I know you can hear people typing in the comments already, but I would caution to put the lens on view it and I think just to wrap up because I know you gotta go the, the authoritarian right. I think it's more, the missteps are more disheartening because the opportunity to do the right thing exists where, you know, the left will never do it.

[Matthew]

Yeah,

[Marty]

that's what I would say. I, I would, I mean to think, to basically build on that. Like, I think the right in America right now is completely divided.

[Matthew]

Yeah, the center has collapsed. Center's collapsed. And I don't see it changing. And I would say, I would just caution Americans that like, you're going to have to move politically, you know, if, if the government, whether it's a left government or a right government. And I can see the hard sides of it. The horseshoe theory is real, by the way. The crazies love Putin on both sides. But just look, the hellscape is there. It's this Max app in Russia. No vpn, no Internet businesses are cratering and they're just doing it because they have started an imperial war. I know it sounds familiar to a lot of Americans that are anti Iraq, Afghanistan wars and we'll see where this Iran war goes. But I agree with you. I agree with you on American imperialism, but once you lose your rights at home, it's very hard to get them back. And that's where we are. I think that's where we are.

[Marty]

We'll pick this up in the summer, be where we are.

[Matthew]

Enjoy the conference.

[Marty]

I'll try.

[Matthew]

I don't envy you, but it'll be fun. It'll be good. It'll be good.

[Marty]

It's just long. It's exhausting.

[Matthew]

You will see some good people and have some good discussions and I know that 95 of the people that you'll talk to won't agree with me on the Eastern European issue, but that's all right.

[Marty]

I'm sure many who do agree with you will find me and come up to me, thank me for having you on. And I thank you for coming on.

[Matthew]

I hope they do.

[Marty]

Yeah, they're there. They are out there. They're not as loud in the YouTube comments, but they are out there.

[Matthew]

Like I said, you get in your way. America is disengaging. So there it is.

[Marty]

Peace and love, freaks. Okay, thank you for listening to this episode of tftc.

[Podcast Host]

If you've made it this far, I

[Marty]

imagine you got some value out of the episode.

[Podcast Host]

If so, please share it far and

[Marty]

wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can, leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way.

[Podcast Host]

Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free, make sure you download

[Marty]

the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to Fountain FM to find that $5 a month gets you every episode a day early ad free helps. The show gives you incredible value, so please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time and until next time.