Russia, Iran & Bitcoin: Quiet Pacts, NATO’s Drift & This Cycle’s Hidden Signal

Matthew returns from Prague to unpack a tense geopolitical web: Russia’s increasing reliance on Iranian drones, Trump’s cool stance on Ukraine, and NATO’s wavering support for Eastern Europe. Drawing historical parallels to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Matthew questions whether quiet deals are reshaping global alignments—especially as the U.S. and Israel target Iran while Russia stays on the sidelines. He closes with a dive into Bitcoin’s long-term resilience, highlighting exponential trend analysis and macroeconomic debt signals from the U.S. and Europe.

Porkopolis Economics – Episode 236

Chapters:
00:00:00 – Iran-Russia Relations and Global Security
00:03:42 – Russia’s Ambitions in Ukraine
00:05:32 – Analyzing the Iran-Russia Relationship
00:08:14 – Missile and Drone Attacks on Ukraine
00:10:58 – Ukraine’s Struggle for NATO Support
00:17:34 – Ukraine’s Allies and Bitcoin Trends
00:22:10 – Analyzing Bitcoin’s Price Cycles
00:29:12 – Bitcoin Volume Analysis and Future Implications
00:33:42 – Russia-Iran Relations and Ukraine Crisis
00:40:49 – Bitcoin and Nation-State Dynamics
00:48:08 – Impact of Bitcoin on Global Conflicts
00:50:12 – Future of Ukraine and Global Power Dynamics
01:05:15 – Debt-to-GDP Analysis Overview
01:09:59 – Impact of the Virus on Economics
01:14:02 – U.S. Foreign Aid and Debt Insights
01:17:01 – Bitcoin Trends and Economic Insights

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Porkopolis Economics covers macroeconomics, money, geopolitics and sports from the creator of the Crypto Voices podcast, Matthew Mezinskis. Data-driven. Scale matters. Smaller, decentralized states means more opportunity for liberty than larger ones.

Host: Matthew Mezinskis

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hi everyone good morning happy Monday happy midsummer solstice happy ligo happy yan to my Latian friends uh solstice was on Saturday night officially but the big Baltic Midsummer Festival is Lego Yani uh starting starting today i uh wanted to do a followup on some Bitcoin stuff of course but just got back from Prague and before Prague I did a video about how things are getting a little bit uh interesting with the Iranian Russian relationship in light of the USIsrael relationship and uh people weren’t really sure what was going to happen and it turned out that Trump decided to bomb uh in giving my thoughts a little bit here I’m just going to more focus on Ukraine but it’s uh it’s it’s it’s related and we’ll look at charts and everything but I think that this is perhaps a view that only Europeans can understand but we’re talking about global security here so I hope to get Roman on my show very soon here you see a US flag Ukrainian flag American educated i believe Trump and Putin have made their own secret Molotov Ribbon Trump pact there have been at least five official calls between them and likely more unofficial ones most occurring in June just before the US strike on Iran i was literally going to talk about this topic today and he posted this so it’s uh it’s quite fitting i’ll just read the thread it’s extremely brief no they weren’t talking about Ukraine for Trump Ukraine is an inconvenience not a priority so what were they discussing only history will tell us but I believe there was an implicit deal putin would stay out of the Iran conflict as long as Trump stayed out of Ukraine you can see that i liked it there quiet pack no signatures just like June 1939 we all know what happened after that deal was made so the Molotov Ribbon Tropact was basically what kicked off the division of Poland and the Baltics and World War II happened literally days before uh Hitler invaded Poland on September 1st 1939 it said that uh either party didn’t trust each other but it was a marriage of convenience of course we know that two years later Hitler betrayed his buddy Stalin and invaded him but there’s not really any angels in this situation um however however again I will talk about this if you are going to choose between the western world uh capitalist world world of the rule of law I’m not trying to paint broad strokes about everything here i know that everybody has their problems uh of course the democratic world like the US has led is better than a corrupt uh oligarch world that Russia has come up with over the last h 100 years trying to model their communist manifesto with a bunch of peasants on a uh German old German folklike character like Marx uh which was meant for German middle class type people anyway I digress i think the proof is in the pudding here with what’s happening to uh Ukraine in light of everything that’s happening with Iran okay um so let me let me explain let’s still focus on Russia here i I posted this uh over the weekend i’m sure the Glen Glenn Greenwald will reverse his long-standing polymath claim that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was just a border dispute as he’s always said in fact Putin has always wanted all of Ukraine its sovereignty its people surely he’ll make a correction i was uh subweeting Vicra 24 great channel if you don’t follow them okay russians and Ukrainians are one people in that sense all of Ukraine is ours he’s saying the quiet part out loud where the foot of a Russian soldier steps that is ours and again for if if you hate the United States as much as people do hate the United States they they don’t act as imbecillic as this okay yes they have problems they know that uh they can’t run a global police global empire but they just don’t act as stupid as these people i actually got a uh response from Vicera great channel again Twitter is just hilarious now they asked they asked me if I wanted to boost this it’s like a million followers i get four likes funny good morning Roman yes two coffees indeed you can come on as well my friend you can come on as well if you’d like no problem uh but yeah know I was referring to this Roman he’s he does great posts about Ukraine so here’s the situation putin is desperate for Ukraine he’s desperate to save face he’s on a war economy he’s not going to stop unless he is stopped it’s three years now uh anyone is absolutely moronic especially if you’re a Glenn Greenwald type who calls it a border dispute uh he’s saying the quiet part out loud but if you are a um Israeli someone on the right traditional right I don’t even want to say neocon because um look I I I almost I said as much on Friday this it’s just it’s highly it’s not even my wheelhouse i’m not involved in anything Middle East i don’t have a stake there um I would say demilitarized Iran is a good thing but the Israelis are going to do what they’re going to do the United States has joined them no one knows how this is going to turn out okay but what I want to focus on is the Iranian Russian relationship here okay i want to focus on the Iranian Russian relationship to try to make my point so let’s look at this russian casualties in Ukraine over a million now cumulative dead captured um MIA down from Trump’s inauguration period uh the average of casualties per day about a thousand remember it was 1 1500600 down from uh six months ago Russian economy is very weak but still that is what it is as much as the Vatnik try to control the Ukrainian narrative they still only control about 20% of the country and now it cost them 9.2 two soldiers cumulatively per kilometer to occupy Ukraine that is casualties that’s not even alive soldiers walking around this is just casualties 9.2 Votnik dead captured or MIA to still control 20% of Ukraine now here’s missiles i haven’t actually shown this this is missiles is the cumulative number sent into Ukrainian territory uh glide bombs missiles 3,300 nearly nearly 3,400 the daily is the black line okay daily average uh you see a rough day is 50 to 100 okay there’s 88 here in December 2023 great right around Christmas sorry around New Year’s just what Russian terror likes to do again you see around the inauguration really brutal nights for Ukraine and now there’s sort of a cluster here but um these are what the numbers look like from missiles we haven’t looked at this now let’s look at drones change the title here these are actually Iranian drones even though most are mass-produced in Russia now these are Iranian drones this is the signal of the Ukraine war and perhaps all warfare now all right 41,700 drones attacked on Ukraine the daily average is 150 and that’s rising so again we’re just talking about Russia and Iran now let’s just look a little bit at the history russia really started to take this on in early 2023 with this company Alabooga all right where they would uh start taking in drones and also producing drones based on the plans okay so this started during the war all right to expand their production rate as you can see it’s been quite uh successful but Ukraine has of course fought back here’s one from September 2024 they were also getting ballistic missiles from Iran september 2024 and then here it struck a major ammo depot it said Iranian missiles Ukraine said Iranian missiles had arrived at the site shortly before the attack is this one cautaban arsenal okay we have this as well drone saturation center for strategic and international studies Russ uh Russia’s shahad campaign this just issue this just goes through how uh you know obviously this is the signal not the noise of the war this is most costefficient when you’re talking about a uh uh I think they put a dollar amount yeah 20,000 to 30,000 20,000 to $50,000 um drone attack vector versus obviously millions of dollars for a missile you’ll get a picture like this so Ukraine is literally uh absorbing the Iranian drone program all right it’s another uh in Tajan recently very recently I think this article yeah was from June 2025 damaged more drones again Russia has taken over mostly the production here they still get some help as I understand uh from the uh actual motorized mechanisms russians are too stupid to uh you know produce these things on their own so they get help still uh but then in you know response to all of that what does Ukraine get here we have the NATO summit it’s coming up tomorrow actually in Holland zalinski is invited again but will not be seated at NATO’s table as opposed to other times during this full invasion the summit statement is likely to run to around five paragraphs on a single page nato diplomats and experts say Ukraine will only get a passing mention so Ukraine is an inconvenience for Trump just as Roman says here uh I thought this for a long time i don’t know if I’ve really explicitly stated it enough but um in my opinion the story of this entire attack of all the arguments that you’re going to see on Twitter or whatever is the fact that Russia I mean Russia just made a defense pact with Iran in January and they’re doing nothing to stop uh both the Israeli and US now attacks on the nuclear facilities one should simply ask the question why is that yes you could say Russia is sidelined in Ukraine again if it’s simply and only that sort of an AAM’s razor type of thing if you are an Israeli if you are an Israeli supporting American uh if you are sort of a traditional uh strong defense center right uh Iran which says death to America death to Israel and the hijab as basically their three tenants of civilization if you’re one of these people then you should be thanking Ukraine but more importantly how could it be that we would just sit by and accept this ukraine will only get a passing mention apparently Ukraine’s security is not still paramount in uh NATO’s or northern the northern hemisphere’s security which to me is just uh it’s unbelievable so to me this is the main actual takeaway of this whole thing no matter what Putler says about uh the US attacks and of course they have you know he’s condemned them he’s going to say more in the next few days but he’s not doing anything so again if you’re a supporter of Israel or if you’re a supporter of what America is doing here or what Trump is doing and you’re not a supporter of Ukraine Um I would certainly want to know why obviously we had this embarrassment last week Trump at the G7 saying that if Russia was still in the G7 or the G8 this war wouldn’t have happened of course completely ignoring the fact that Putin was kicked out he was sidelined at the lunch table in the G8 for invading sovereign Ukraine Crimea in 2014 putin always gets a pass but yeah this is to me this is the uh the main picture i don’t want to believe this you know i think I even commented myself can’t find it now don’t want to believe it but the data seems to be uh pointing here trump doesn’t like Ukraine he doesn’t like Zalinski he doesn’t want to talk about Ukraine and it’s really rough because if you don’t stand up to dictators they’re going to keep taking more and I see no reason why Putin will stop if there is some sort of a deal done as Roman suggests here then of course the risk is not just to the heroic Ukrainians which die every day but to the rest of Europe it’s all I had with that point but uh to me that’s that’s uh really the most important thing about what’s happening here no one knows what’s going to happen with the Ayatollas or the regime in Iran clearly it’s a evil abomination but it’s a huge country that has suffered for you know 50 years whatever it is 45 years um it’s going to be up to them internally to stop it if they want but yeah probably the US and Israel still aren’t aligned i’m sure Israel would like a full regime change trump hasn’t said that yet who knows who knows where it will go uh but to me this is the clear thing putin is weak uh but still not out of ammo plenty of drones uh plenty of people plenty of Vatnik to keep throwing at Ukrainians and it seems like at least a US-led NATO like I don’t even need to say this anymore a US-led NATO is completely uh off the table now and to me that just looks like a deal iran and Putin signed a defense pact this year in January it’s It’s such a joke ukraine might be in the very unfortunate position of having the US as an ally the only worst thing could be Iran having a Russia as an ally and again I don’t say that defending Iran in any bit so that’s what I see that’s what I see with this whole situation let me know if you want to look at anything else there uh but this is the this is what Ukrainians are suffering for for us all right so I did speak at the BTC Prague sailor was there uh God reincarnate walking on water blessing the Bitcoiners that came across his path it’s kind of interesting to see uh I did go to a side event a business event which uh heard him speak nothing really new um I did hear him say something quite interesting that he still fears you know uneducated people that are more powerful than himself so something like to that effect which to me sounds like uh governments not understanding Bitcoin so that’s the crusade that he’s on is to try to uh to educate governments but Bitcoin is still going to remain you know even though and this is probably a chart I need to get up soon you know volume retail volume is is lower but we know that that’s being made up now with ETF volume and uh Bitcoin Treasury volume and other things the Bitcoin ecosystem is growing but it does seem like the retail spot volume is weak so I I think I think we’re actually seeing that difference in price all right so we’ll see how this runup’s going to be it’s no one knows until the end but you know we didn’t have really blowoff tops as you see here in in 2021 compared to 2017 let’s say okay 2017 was clearly above the the 99th percentile we did not have that in either top in 2021 but what I want to talk about here and I think it’s a very interesting chart that I saw over the weekend uh from my buddy Smith with so you see here again we’ve just sort of been trudging along the trend line wonderful trend line it’s clearly the trend of Bitcoin as I talk about but you know we didn’t have that obviously in 2017 we’re just sort of under a trend that no one really knew that was around right I wasn’t following this trend then not until 2018 and then you You can see like we just zoomed right above the the trend line same thing obviously in 2013 of course that happened right 2013 was a little bit of a support here after the first uh top in March and then even here in 20 oops sorry in 2021 you know we had that strong summer of 2019 but then fell back down and of course you know the virus occurs fulls throws everybody for a loop but even here it’s you know a few months into the summer and then next year zoomed right above it january remember the meme memecoin madness is starting in here as well not memecoin but meme stock meme stock madness was going going on so we don’t have that this cycle all right it’s very solid uh I actually like this word that Smithson used so this is the chart I want to show you it’s from my friend Smith with Let’s go through this calls it the crab crawl i think it’s very apppropo been feeling like we’re in the longest crab crawl ever uh you’re actually right but what he found is it’s it’s even a different market than before okay so let’s just zoom in and let’s look at this analysis so he’s done exponential which would be straight lines on log linear okay so this is he’s taken exponential for the crab crawls so the crab crawls is what he calls anything that is basically below um a certain percentile let me go back and see which one he does i can’t find it but anyway you can see basically the boom fa the boom phases the bubble phases or whatever he’s not looking at he’s only doing a slope of the you know the uh the winner phases or the baseline phases and when you do that you get this sort of declining exponential right because it can’t it’s it’s it’s uh if you want to you can shoehorn exponential into Bitcoin but obviously Bitcoin is not exponential it’s power right so normally we get the slope that’s like this but you can still shoehorn exponential in for various periods depending on how you measure it so he measures this this period this period and he starts the he starts the measurement of the regression here here here here and you can see obviously it just looks normal here for each cycle right including the one before last cycle then we have this one looks like he catches just the bottom basically it’s the first it’s the bottom of the price after the the top so we have this sort of declining slope but then you have this one is now increasing again see this one right here the current cycle that we’re in is going higher than the 2020 2021 2019 2021 area which I think is very interesting so here’s here he shows you what you would kind of expect is the red dot but we’re actually higher so I think this is probably a graphical representation of what I just said you know I think micro strategy treasury companies ETFs that’s institutional interest bumping up what retail was usually sick of during these periods so I think it’s a really interesting chart good morning Anders good morning started early today for once slightly um so yeah I’m curious what you guys might think about this but I think that this is I’ll try to replicate this and get this on my own chart engine but I think this is this will tell a very interesting story after the current peak is done it’s a totally different uh trajectory than the prior uh what do you call them lame duck periods as he call them the crab crawl crab crawl periods no change i think moon is uh still end of this year maybe even a little bit start of next year but I was just explaining how this this chart from Smithston who does great he’s a great followen with uh is where he’s he’s taking the exponential uh trend lines of what he’s calling the crab crawl period basically not the boom phases of each prior cycle and drawing straight lines so exponential growth and you see that you would expect that this cycle would again be lower but it is not so it’s very interesting and this also might give credence to the idea that this cycle will be different or it will be just more kind of a following the the overall power trend line maybe maybe I I don’t know as he he concludes as well well it’s too early to tell but it’s very interesting that the current slope is higher or you know again you would expect it to be relatively lower compared to the others so I do think this is uh an interesting observation warning Tim totally possible totally possible i need to I need to put this on my chart because I like to see it where you can look at the slopes on the you know on the tool tip and stuff um the thing is I don’t know how this slope will revert to be lower as you said unless we go way lower for a long time obviously nobody wants that it could happen and if you go back to this chart you know it doesn’t seem like it has to happen we’re just on this you know extended crab crawl as he says it could also be that you know we’re actually in the blowout phase we just haven’t seen it yet and so if he No that actually explanation wouldn’t work i You know if he wants to only count maybe this phase right here you could get a slope like right here just the worst of it right after the FTX puking then maybe you could get a a line that’s more analogous to this red line which would be expected and then you know in his like in the future once we see the top we’ll see that okay actually the boom already started here with the ETF approval right which is over a year year and a half ago and then this this part would be drawn white but you also when you do this many variations from trend you get into a little bit more of the artsy of the artsy calculations you know like this one looks good this one looks good this is an interesting observation though i I I was surprised to see this yeah well that’s always uh it’s always a risk but I hope and think that you’ll be all right as far as being able to cover any loans later this year if not I’m sure you can handle the interest if you’re if you’re doing that strategy uh as long as you can handle the interest it’s it’s fine or small margin call so yeah as far as Bitcoin goes um I’ll try to get that chart up next and then probably the other thing that I think affects this I mean I’ve already mentioned it but I think it’s volume it’s spot volume it’s futures volume and then it’s tradfi volume we need to sort of graph all three of those things and I don’t I just don’t have that data yet maybe I need to talk to some data providers to get to get that all together but this is where it pays to I don’t know have have some deep pocket data providers because clearly this thing is starting to look different we might ask why it is different to me it’s those things you got ETFs now you got treasury companies we got to somehat somehow aggregate aggregate the trady volume which is different than futures volume which is different than spot volume which is obviously we didn’t have before we did have futures volume in this cycle but not in this one or this one these were only spot spot in futures and then obviously spot futures treasury companies tried ETFs so that’s my that would be my explanation of why this is higher but what that means for the future boom not sure yes good to hear good to hear and I hope you can leverage some gains that way so that’s all I had started out with the political finished up with the Bitcoin um let me put another video just to show you guys what I was talking about in Sorry all right so again this is the channel that I mentioned uh it’s quite an interesting channel i posted him on uh Friday just to go back to the conversation for this for this uh gentleman it’s obviously about um Israel right and he had an interesting video where he’s talking about how Russia was supporting uh you know Iran Hezbollah Hamas so we know we all know the side that Russia is on but again if you just back out where the United States has always stood generally it’s not on the side of imperialism generally it’s not going to be they make terrible mistakes and he talks about this in this video you know we have you know depending on which side you’re going to talk about you talk about World War II or the Korean War then you can talk about Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan wars that’s uh but at least the US position is never like this it’s never just this stupid uh wherever a Russian soldier’s footsteps that is ours all of Ukraine is ours putin is saying the quiet part out loud so again I think if you’re Israeli you’re quite happy many people are not happy with potentially getting into a huge drawn out war and again we’re going to have to see if that’s going to actually happen or not i can’t say I’m a fan of any of these people standing here uh there’s no real policy or thoughtout things uh Rubio seems like a uh just a torn soul you know especially as a Cuban American i mean there’s no there’s no principled stance there but they took the decision to strike so I don’t want to rehash everything I did at the beginning of the video for those that just joined but uh in my opinion it still comes down to Russia the relationship of Russia and Iran here will be the interesting thing to look at because as far as I can tell and Roman put it as well here this morning this is Ukrainian Roman seems that there is a an implicit deal here basically Putin who just signed a pact with Iran in January a defense pact is standing by no matter what he’s going to say he’s basically standing by and the US Trump’s US as I said is sidelining Ukraine on the NATO summit on everything it’s just more of a hindrance for them it’s an inconvenience so Russia stays out of Iran US stays out of Ukraine what could go wrong that’s what I worry about with this whole situation but I do like this message again from the video the video itself from this Israeli uh tour guide who lived in Germany oops this is not my standard YouTube account so I get these ads anyway it’s a good channel but coming from the Israeli side obviously I know that they’re quite enthusiastic what’s happening coming from people that are tired of war uh they’re not enthusiastic at all my opinion again having no stake in that side is pay attention to what Russia and Iran are doing visav United States and Israel and for Europeans they seem to be like the only help for Ukraine if they would actually step up and you know deliver on these promises of sanctions or weapons deliveries or whatever because the Ukrainians are the ones that are absorbing these casualties and these Iranianmade drones even though Russians are making most of them now still all of this was ramped up about here 2023 as I talked about i’m rehashing the start of this video now but Iran was supplying all these shot heads here from the beginning pretty low volume now Russia makes these drones to the tune of you know 150 a day on average slamming into Ukrainian civilian infrastructure i don’t know guys that’s what I That’s what I had you know people talking about how the price of Bitcoin went down over the last couple days this isn’t even going to pick it up I think because I have Yeah this is latest price to action was the 20th but you know it dipped under 99 or $100,000 yesterday people are saying “Oh now you know it’s a riskoff trade.” And um again I think risk is pretty high but uh I guess in light of this successful attack because the United States is calling it people saying Bitcoin doesn’t need to rise but my thesis still remains pretty strong i don’t think it has much to do at all with geopolitics i don’t think it has much to do with even the money supply i think it’s comparable to those things you can you can make the comparison but I think it’s more has to do with this trend being adopted and probably we’re on a faster adoption trend than prior cycles like Smithson says here because of Tradfi and the Sailor effect i do as well you missed this intro Anders but I was basically just going through all the you know Iranian Russian cooperation through the start of this war they started producing these drones in mass around early 2023 okay so it’s a year after the war had been going on and this is this is modern warfare now ukraine has literally shown the world you know at 20 to 30,000 what it said 20 to 50,000 a shot uh it’s way more effective to shoot these in at Ukrainians than to shoot missiles even if they’re glide bomb uh assisted missiles now because of um you know Russians didn’t have to worry about air defense for a long time here because the Biden admin said you can’t shoot into Russia and then disastrously changed that course right around here it’s all up to Europe for Ukraine it is all up to Europe because I would like someone to prove me wrong here or to uh find some information that sort of doesn’t pretend this very clear outcome which is that there is some sort of a new Molotov ribbon drop pack between the US and Russia but I don’t see that it’s also funny that you know of all the world leaders the largest world leaders that have talked about Bitcoin these two have right so that’s going to annoy everybody who’s in the liberal world that depends on or or let’s say embraces private property and markets and courts they’re going to poo poo on uh certainly crypto obviously when you got you know meme coins issued by the president but Bitcoin as well is going to be a casualty of bad information coming from from these people and bad faith actions we do have the genius act i think I can’t remember if I talked about it how Bessant has said that there’s going to be like four trillion now possibility for a demand over the next 10 years of $3.7 trillion worth of stable coins to buy US treasuries so that’s funny they’re going to fight very hard to keep their currency obviously Russia is a trash currency so they’re the junior partner in every way shape and form with China but uh the US is not going to give up on the dollar so it’s a very unique situation well maybe unique is not the right word cuz these are I think the way that Roman spelled it out here is interesting parallels with the past so this Orin from this traveling Israel said that he was a when he was a tour guide in Germany even uh he would say in his tours you know the sum the 20th century could be summed up by three words words God bless America and if you do think about that and again I’m not a wararmonger saying that we need to invade other countries uh for uh profit or whatever whatever or just for every every reason which obviously a lot of these reasons have been proven false WMD reason um but I think America has given great cover to Europe over the last 80 years and it’s amazing to see now that America is turning back you know the one thing that Merchimer has correct is that it is anarchy at the nation state level like these guys are never going to the HEG i mean Putin Putin’s never going to the HG george Bush is never going to the HG israeli for whatever you might think about that situation again I have sympathy for the Palestinian people i have sympathy for the Israeli people it’s a difficult situation but uh if there had been real international war crimes at the Israeli level that’s probably not going to be tried certainly not going to be tried by any you know any Americans they’re not going to go and stand in front of the Hague but I just think it’s such a low level high time preference uh type of a of a maneuver to try to deal with someone like Vladimir Putin in an effort to solve the Middle East crisis which they may or may not solve with these strikes it’s a lot of question marks there yeah i don’t think I don’t think it’s going to go away anytime soon i mean I really think that you know this could be the headwind of the next bear in Bitcoin it’s really not going on any data or statistics it’s just going on the idea that okay we’ve had bunch of people that have screwed up in the past too much leverage too much fraud too much debt and they get flushed out you know whether it’s Three Arrows or Genesis or BlockFi or Celsius um or MT Gauss you know every cycle in Bitcoin has such overwhelming leverage that’s unsustainable it gets flushed out in the next downturn what happens when that’s like the president i’m not saying it’s going to happen but you know you you got these memecoin shitcoin wannabe stablecoin generators and entities like World Liberty Financial what’s going to happen when they overdo it in the next downturn and maybe the answer could be different if Trump is in office versus not in office you know but and certainly you’re going to find people you know you saw the uh what was it the BTCE exchange that Russian uh founder hacker who whatever was in arrested in Greece and now they’re trying to get back his coins or maybe they already got him back because I believe he they got him back um nation states are going after Bitcoin and then of course nation states are going to leverage Bitcoin very interesting i think we’re already we’re gone not gone but we’re we’re out of the stage where it’s just retail or some hobbyists or some scammers that could lever up and cause problems in Bitcoin it’s now at the nation state level yeah I hope you’re right Tim i hope you’re right i think it’s from a uh from a from a personal sovereignty standpoint it’s probably good to just try to stay away from the big conflicts uh live in Madiraa live in uh the Caribbean or you know perhaps you can be shielded yeah I agree i mean I think the Bitcoin standard will mean uh once people really understand this stuff it will mean less wars it will mean less bullying that’s the hope but I also agree that this is I think it’s very far out we still got to solve this nuclear issue and we got this 100redyear legacy of just communist despotic autocratic terrible regime in Russia that they literally have no democratic values they have no private property no free speech they have shills like Tucker Carlson saying that their country is beautiful with beautiful buildings the most insane things you could say about a country that it just doesn’t understand i’m going to start a uh like a one pager i’m trying to figure out how to format it have a designer friend maybe help me because I might might have to get him into some tweets but after Ukraine and hopefully there is no after Ukraine as far as war but you never know uh it’s going to be Malddova it’s already Georgia uh is is basically under attack right now from Russia uh it’s going to be Malddova and then it’s going to be the Baltics we’re going to be next so I’m trying to do uh I’ve talked about this before you know like the number of toilets in Russia uh you know tuberculosis AIDS uh viruses uh GDP everything is just so shitty and you compare that to the Baltics which were in the Soviet Union occupied illegally just do a bunch of simple charts that compare those things and because the propaganda war is only ramping up from their side and it’s going to continue if if Ukraine falls or after Ukraine comes to come to some settlement i don’t know how how we get there to be honest how do we get to the peaceful situation because I think it does have to be taken out of the hands of the state but you know states still have power they have power to enforce private property rights for the good but they also have the power to enforce um quite bad things like the Iranian regime has done death to America death to Israel and basically hijabs for everybody for women uh that you know are just insane rules that are not the the history of that country or that culture you know you can still let me pull up the debt chart you can still uh borrow money as a government and not print money so I think that that is also something that people don’t take into account um when they talk about like the future utopian Bitcoin world yeah I mean it’s going to take time it take a lot of time uh let me show you this again need to draw some of these charts before I This is not probably the best one just really quick is okay so this is a fiscal we talked about this but this is the fiscal situation of the US there’s a lot of stuff on here but um All right so remember the balance is here so over time the Fed had basically they they owned no treasuries it was mostly JP Morgan financing you know World War I um this was quite a high 16 17 cents on the dollar was Treasury paper owned by the Fed in the height of Vietnam and this is this was the tarp and tal this was the corporate bailouts of uh the Wall Street crisis q123 down tried to get it up and then the virus and then down again so 18 cents on the dollar is what the Fed owns at the moment but you can also look at how this print works over time okay so here’s the here we go this is what this is the this is the the black line is the cumulative of the green the green is the action all right and it’s a trailing 12 months so it’s it’s more understandable trailing 12 months the best way to look at this so this is the print and then let me show you the deficit so if you want to talk about what Bitcoin does or solves in my opinion it really only solves the green now everything can change from that you know but but still I mean they’re the ones that control the the military planes they’re the ones that control the button i mean there’s this joke with uh who’s Dave Chappelle’s uh buddy i forget he’s got a he’s got glasses funny dude uh he’s one he was one of his writers on the Chappelle show and he’s like if you had a modernday contest between the old uh you know don’t tread on me folks that have their guns versus the government with drones you know that that contest would be over pretty quick even though we’re talking about the government not treading on again I’m not making excuses for the government i’m just saying you know you could have all the guns in the world you can be in your b bunker you could have a contest between just like one nationalist gun owner versus one member of the government who has like a drone and he did he does a whole bit about it he’s like “Well I they do interviews in the morning of this contest.” It’s like a reality show right and the gun owning don’t tread on me patriot says “I’m going to take this guy out i got all my guns i got my water i got my ammo.” And then the government guys just like well I have this drone here just going to press the button and uh you kind of see where it’s going as far as uh who has the power again I’m not saying this is good i’m not saying it shouldn’t be taken away or limited but things are way out of whack but anyway as far as the deficit goes and what the government spends they borrow the red and they only print or cover some of the red in certain times with the green so the green is what Bitcoin solves it’s better money that can’t be printed but you can still borrow money without being a printer or you can you can borrow money in Bitcoin but they’re going to keep the dollar for sure and they have the guns so it’s really only this green part in my opinion that Bitcoin solves the red part is still huge and it’s still going to go on and obviously the green part they never know what they’re doing they’re always way out of whack so here you see they were trying to destroy money when this when this green is negative they’re destroying money but when the deficits are so high and the government can’t finance it with borrowing in the public market they need the money printers so that’s where you get the green mountains and again all this time we’re the government was trying all the way to COVID the government was trying to destroy money negative negative negative here still had deficits still borrowed money in the marketplace the federal government but the Fed the central bank was destroying money here and then obviously all that went away during the pandemic just massive money printing now they’re trying to destroy it again although they’re decreasing the rate of money destruction so it’s a long winded way of my opinion on this topic which is not like black and white not very utopian uh I’m pretty sure all this is still going to be going on after we’ve left the surf this isund 110 years of data here just for the United States the theory is that the money will be so so powerful that it will restrain even deficit spending might do some of that but again they have the authority they have the guns and when I say guns I mean like the big guns the drones yeah it’s a Neil Brennan neil Brennan is the the bit that I was talking about with the don’t tread on me patriot versus a uh government worker you could just do a reality show of the theory of if government will anyway we might see more of that in action in Iran in the few next coming weeks because you know maybe I think the United States is really holding back the Israelis of course would like a major regime change the United States is holding back at the moment ready to bring the current regime to the negotiating table i’m sure a lot of free young Iranians want freedom from that regime but that’s a huge regime that also has a lot of guns also had a lot of power also has a lot of mad philosophy behind them so we’re going to see how that plays out if the masses will take down their corrupt leaders and by the way I’m not saying that the United States is in the same situation again if you if you compare everything if you compare the United States does not talk about its enemies like this just this delusional xenophobic nationalistic fake historical uh connecting of the dots like Putin did with the Tucker interview of you know this rurick fellow from a thousand years ago it’s just nonsense he’s saying the quiet part out loud he’s saying all of Ukraine is ours glenn Greenwald calls it a border dispute it could it could um am I defending that no definitely not defending it could it happen yes let me go back to the chart why did I just lose it here it is i don’t think I have a D GP i should have that one handy but give me a second i have it in another window let me open it in my flourish charts anyway like you could take a snapshot here Tim in my opinion like you could take a snapshot just right here the Vietnam War ended world War II was also over and had come way down this is now cents on the dollar right that they’re paying okay and you know the printing is actually relatively small over this time period the Fed likes to say that it was practice during the uh Great Depression it was you know yeah it was a bit crazy all this stuff was practice fed was getting started you know at the roaring 20s look they paid down deficits here by the way in the paid down debt i should say when the deficit this is a kind of a weird chart but when the deficit is negative on this chart debt is paid down just like when the green is negative money is destroyed and so now but this is obviously just crazy crazy moves here over 100 cents on the dollar but when we get to here and then going all the way to say here in mid70s you could say things were pretty crazy and then plus obviously they went off gold right here like people be really scared and gold was going to $800 an ounce newsletters this was like the birth of newsletters you you guys know I’m on this kick of just debasing newsletters because they give you a lot of words filler words with hope and fear and no substance whereas I give you great charts for free but I mean imagine the fear that was going on here in the 70s and then well we could actually even have more deficits people would buy our debt all over the world all through the 80s all through the 90s relatively little money printing and of course they still screwed it up you know more deficits here low interest rates after 9/11 bubbles in real estate they screwed up here here it screwed up during COVID but obviously no one knows the breaking point is the point but they could definitely do it all right let me pull up the flourish chart because I have some better GDP charts but I think that gives to me actually the framing of all this stuff this way is is is more comfort to Bitcoin right you could also frame Bitcoin as a panacea that solves you know everything as a lot of Bitcoiners do but I just think that completely ignores like reality and how the stuff looks normally where is the GDP here we go okay here here sorry got to switch to this i got to smooth out my uh workflow here i’m sorry there too many Too many different windows all right it’s coming here we go and here okay so just to answer your question Tim again some basic stuff it’s not like this is not super this is not super you know detailed but I don’t have Japan on here but we have the big ones china is huge obviously very close i think it was 140% was the top this is 132 as you can see uh in World War II i don’t have it back on this chart but this is World Bank IMF i got to get individual nation data to get it back further but this is just conglomerate data that all starts in 1960 as the earliest date anyway yes United States is in the worst position but is the United States like the worst economy in the world is it the worst you know is it the worst militarily equipped in the world is it the worst democratically in the world maybe uh I don’t know at the moment might have some democratic issues for sure um that’s what scares me the most about the United States is his lack of democracy but obviously I mean Ukraine fighting for their lives they’re at 107 china’s an autocracy 94% western Europe blended 89% very high we although we have very uh small amounts of defense relative to Western defense we’re very uh underlevered so to speak compared to the US and non-NATO and then look at Russia they’re even better but then on the other hand this is Russia is such a shitty country and a shitty currency no one wants to buy Russian bonds so that’s another that’s another reason why they’re not actually indebted in this version uh also you probably have seen the story is Russia is indebtting the corporate sector which is not included in this chart so they’re forcing uh companies to pay for their military expenditures basically so that’s that’s the story that’s happening with Russia anyway the point again why I think you show this is like you know people live their lives this is a whole like this is multiple generations yes we’re all higher than we uh probably ideally should be not excusing it a lot of wars breaking out certainly not good uh if you look at when 911 happened uh oops sorry generally where oops sorry my mouse I realized was on a different screen let’s think of Russia so if you look at around 911 Western Europe had the most debt US only 53% certainly everybody way lower it’s does not look good for the Western world from this perspective but if I threw Japan on there like you said gets up 250% it can happen i mean it can function that way it’s a terrible way to do it it’s not good shouldn’t do it um but it can you can kick the the can down the road a lot longer than you would expect another interesting thing which again I not quite sure how to describe this but like think about like my education into sort of the libertarian free market you know eventually finding Bitcoin world it was through a lot of newsletters so I shouldn’t poo poo them too much but it was it was the global financial crisis right it was 2008 how could everybody be so wrong at the same time it’s not like if you look back in the grand scheme this looks so terrible right like Eastern Europe was even better debt to GDP down like you know to 35% blended okay Western Europe’s a little bit higher yeah you could say all these figures were way higher than they were in 1980 and that’s true but it’s not like you look at this chart and you see okay this is a reason why there was a crisis right you can’t really tell that similarly like all these jumps right here were because of the virus no one could have predicted that in in 2019 this is where I just think economists are just obviously full of it as well as newsletter writers even though I like to show these things I like to always just put the caveat that you know I don’t think there’s any hidden secrets here i don’t think I mean how many times have you read an article that just says it’s over the world is ending US is on track to become like Japan or whatever i mean yeah it’s bad they they need to work it out they need to be more productive cut costs have more transparent government they need all those things but nobody watching this video can solve that certainly myself I can’t solve it so from all that perspective I think we all arrive at the same conclusion bitcoin is a great asset but I wouldn’t even if it was only like from the selfish perspective right let’s say if it was only and this is from a Western Europeans’s perspective like Russia decides to put this you know every every Russian boot on on a prior that that landed on some uh meter of soil is Russia’s so they try to take the Baltics in two or three years if if NATO wanted to defend us which at least the obligation is theoretically there we could still NATO could still blip up generally the US NATO Western European NATO even only could blip up their debt to GDP higher and then it could come back down and in my view that would be a completely just uh war at least to defend us and kick Russian invaders off our soil just like Ukraine is fighting a just war although we’re not really helping them as much as we could to kick Russian invaders off their soil we’re still helping them a lot anyway I’m probably on a soap box and rambling about the stuff but I don’t really see these uh these like broad economic figures as anything to ride home about like if you didn’t know the context of this 20% Russia debt to GDP oh Russia’s in great shape they’re they’re awesome when really no one wants to hold their shitty currency they have a dictator there’s no private property one in five Russians doesn’t have a toilet um and they can’t even take a country which they says is is theirs because they uh you know because they occupied it 35 years ago and they can’t even take 20% of the country so there’s a lot of nuance in these pictures in these broad strokes of like that GDP i think broad conclusion yes it’s not good overall bitcoin helps bitcoin does help but it’s like Brennan says I mean they have the guns they have the drones you got to work through this it would be a damn shame if say the Ayatollah’s fall in Iran goes back to its normal democratic 1960s 1970s lifestyle define democracy how you want there but you know at least women can be out in public uncovered it would be ironic you know Israel can now sleep better and not feel like there’s a nation that just wants to wipe them off the map it would be ironic if the US helps all of that situation happen but then doesn’t help Ukraine at all continue to fight for its sovereignty and then Putin Putin is the one that pulls out that tacular nuke or uh tactical nuke or or uh some major strike and then forces everybody to back off and then that’s how we spend the rest the next 50 years probably too much on my soap box for some people i try to try to balance all of it but those are my thoughts remember this is cents on the dollar so and also here’s another thing i talked about this before but here’s now the interest this shouldn’t be a solid line because it looks more confusing but let’s take the print off so this is the interest on every dollar so let’s describe this again the the red line remember it’s it’s the deficit on a dollar tax so if you at this point March 1992 from March 1991 to March 1992 they took in a dollar tax spent a dollar tax and spent 39 cents more that’s what this shows right so if it’s negative in this chart it’s it’s a good thing it’s paying down debt but usually it’s adding to debt what is the cost of that debt the interest it’s actually not historically high okay let’s even take this off just to show this this is just the cost of the debt to the federal government during the depression great years got up to 60 cents on the dollar of tax received okay now it’s only 22 cents again not defending it not saying it’s amazing it’s certainly uh above the alt here’s the average we’re now above the all-time average it’s 20 cents on the dollar but it’s not 30 cents it’s not 60 cents dollar is still the world’s reserve currency um US government still benefits from the uh cantilian effect where they can spend the money first before it gets devalued later across the economy anyway I guess in terms of Bitcoin if we want to just talk about Bitcoin itself when this so this is now the balance of debt that the Fed holds so this is the this is really the brass tax number okay so remember it’s coming down interest rates are up this is coming down i think if this really starts to go up right it’s 18 cents on the dollar let’s see take off the interest and what’s the trend here which is not a great trend we’re way under trend right if you look at the 100red-year trend we are under it fed is being responsible trump is pissed trump wants them to raise interest rates so Bitcoin will really have a jet fuel I guess behind it once this starts to tick up but like I said the power trend is more important and we’re right on power trend so as a Bitcoiner if you’re not overlevered I would say not too much to worry about as a citizen of Europe if you live in Eastern Europe probably a little bit more nervous what do you think any other questions did I meander through enough topics there today i do hope to get Roman on i’ve been in touch with him and this is honestly the um exact topic I wanted to talk about today anyway we can’t influence the Federal Reserve we can only every four years if you’re American well every two years really affect uh affect policy maybe if you’re in a really tyrannical regime and the entire populace rises up you can affect uh certain tyrannical governments for all the rest just uh hold Bitcoin the trend is about 130K by the end of the year start of the next year and remember I said probably to number five there or even four no actually six i mean six would be like very top but getting up to 3x in my view is the highest okay so that’s number six if you look at the tool tip 360,000 let’s go back to December you see it’s very sensitive number six now is 350,000 end of December to me that would be a uh a max all right guys unless anybody wants to look at another chart I’m going to call it for a day and uh be back with you tomorrow thank you for watching hope you guys have a great week and a happy midsummer happy legal happy Ana happy Midsummer next time bye