Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Update, World War 3, Printer is Coming, Gold vs Bitcoin, & UAP Disclosure | Matthew Pines - THE Bitcoin Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
It seems like every time missiles start flying, people go, is this World War III?

(00:04):
And I think my read of the situation is we've kind of been in World War III since, you could say, COVID,
you know, if you're being a bit more conspiratorial, or at least since the Russia-Ukraine war popped off.
So that's why I think Bitcoin is going to be very important in my mind.
It's because it's not only is it like an ethos and a political movement,
but it's a vortex for actual financial capital, which is to first order political capital, right?

(00:29):
Like, if you have this, this, this, this memetic engine that is, like, attracting people, capital, and is now kind of now swirling in and bringing in, you know, Simon Wealth funds and BlackRock's and presidents and, you know, like, staffers for central banks.
Like, we're having, you know, Fed staffers come to our Bitcoin policy summit.
Like, this is this, like, black hole that's, like, that's accreting here.

(00:52):
When you're in these phase transitions, you know, a lot of the things you think are going to survive don't.
and it's kind of not obvious, like, what makes it through and what adapts.
It's funny. It's like, people ask me, okay, you're involved in both kind of the Bitcoin stuff
and now, you know, increasingly so on the UAP side.
And, like, Bitcoin is a very serious thing.
And I think Bitcoin monetizing to parity with gold is a serious thing.

(01:14):
That's obviously the subject of my professional work.
But if I zoom out, right, over the next five, ten years,
like, what's the most important thing?
It's actually not the Bitcoin stuff. It's this UAP side.
Like, this is the thing that's going to change the lives of my children
much more so than Bitcoin.
Bitcoin will give them a good life,
but this thing will change the future of human civilization.

(01:41):
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(02:07):
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(02:27):
Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk.
Matthew Pines, welcome back to the show.
It's been eight months since you came on here,
but I did get to bump into you in Vegas, which was nice.
Are you fully recovered from that?

(02:50):
uh about although i went straight from that to another trip uh and then uh from that i went to
disney with the family oh nice just got back two days ago and disney's not exactly relaxing
that's that's not i haven't i've never i've never been there with kids but i can imagine uh that is
uh that is difficult yeah you're walking about 10 miles a day uh in the in the heat you know the

(03:16):
kids had fun. But then coming back and then hitting the ground running, we've got two weeks
now until the Bitcoin Policy Summit. So I'll sleep next month. We'll see.
Well, yeah. And I want to give a shout out to that because I'm very excited to come to the
Policy Summit. I'm going to go ahead and give it a hard plug here. June 25th, 26th, Washington,

(03:39):
D.C., bdcpolicysummit.org. Disclaimer, you guys are not paying me in any way to say this. I'm just
trying to direct people to it because I love what you guys are doing. And you can use promo code
Walker for 21% off your tickets. And I did not get a kickback from that. You just get to come for
21% off. So isn't that nice? Plug aside, I'm really excited for that. I think it'll be very

(04:01):
different from, I've obviously watched the live streams of your prior summits, but I feel being
there is going to be a very different sort of vibe from what I'm used to at Bitcoin conferences.
I mean, certainly there were a lot of suits in Vegas this year.
I assume there will be all suits in D.C.
Fair assessment?
Yeah, yeah.
Definitely a suit occasion.

(04:23):
Maybe you can get away without a tie.
But we're trying to dress it up.
That's kind of been the bit since the beginning is speak the language of D.C.
and the form and format of D.C.
And so the first summit was basically in the aftermath of FTX,
And it was like BPI saying to the administrative state, like, crypto is different than Bitcoin and Bitcoin is not that.

(04:46):
And Bitcoin is here to stay and will be around.
And so you should take it seriously and not, you know, write it off entirely.
And then the next year we did it was kind of like, see, we were right.
It is still here, but it was more a matter of, OK, well, how to think about it and how to frame it in the context of these other kind of policy areas, human rights, national security.

(05:07):
the environment, energy systems, et cetera.
And now we're in the third year,
and it seems like each year has been like a step function jump
in terms of the level of seriousness
and the level of engagement that we're getting.
And obviously the larger political and geopolitical salience of Bitcoin as a thing
has scaled up orders of magnitude.

(05:29):
And so we're expecting, again, to double the size of the participants.
We're having an absolutely packed agenda.
It's designed essentially to generate as much high signal discussions and presentations as possible per unit time.
So everyone is basically given like five, ten minutes for lightning talks and presentations.

(05:53):
And it's like every muscle must be tight.
And so we have a few panels, but the panels are there essentially to maximize participation on the stage.
And again, it's very much like focused, deliberative, not like jibber-jabber sort of filler content, right?
Because you have to kind of fill up a bunch of airtime.
It's like, here are some hard discussion points that we want to get into the minds of essentially the DC machine, which is now being told from the top down, right, from the president that Bitcoin is a strategic asset, a digital gold that they intend to hold for the long term and maybe even acquire more of, you know, per the analysis being done by the trade secretary.

(06:36):
and the Commerce Secretary on budget-neutral ways of requiring additional Bitcoin.
But now that sort of signal is being filtered through the bureaucracies.
And so everyone from the Energy Department to the Department of Defense
to the Intelligence Community to the Department of Treasury to the Department of State
has to think about, well, what does this mean for my particular area?
And they have very specific sort of technocratic mandates.

(06:58):
So we're going to have folks from the executive branch, staffers for Congress,
other sort of non-Bitcoin related think tanks, experts in economic statecraft or AI, technology
policy, energy systems, all of which Bitcoin is kind of touching in increasingly significant ways.
And so I'd say like Bitcoiners might actually even be like a minority at the Bitcoin policy

(07:20):
summit, right? We're definitely going to bring a contingent of Bitcoiners and we're going to have
them on stage and kind of preach the good word in a very serious fashion. But the main objective
of the policy summit is to move the Overton window inside the policy conversation inside DC
across the administrative state. And Bitcoin is now, I think, fully legitimized as a subject,

(07:41):
right? That's kind of been the work of the last several years is to just legitimize it as a thing
for these people to address seriously within their responsibilities or within their professional
domain. And now that that's happened, it's okay, well then now what, right? Like it's legitimate,
But then what does it actually mean? What is what is good Bitcoin policy actually look like beyond just number go up? Right. How does it actually affect our energy systems, our human rights, you know, our commitments to liberal values, our commitments to technology, innovation, to freedom to transact, to, you know, the national security interests of the United States?

(08:15):
Like these are all complicated issues.
And so we're going to have, you know, senior policymakers, you know, elected representatives, government officials, folks in civil society, human rights activists, you know, executives, technologists, our policy experts, everyone on stage, just kind of like bang, bang, bang.
And then we're going to have, you know, we're going to have a fun party the night before.

(08:35):
We're just going to have a day on the hill the day after on the 26th to bring Bitcoiners to their elected representatives' offices.
and yeah so I think it's going to be a really
significant event obviously we're putting
a lot of work into it we think it's going to be really
impactful and yeah
I think if time is still
available to
snag a ticket grab that discount code

(08:57):
while it's still available
we're coming up on
what our target cap is for the event
we want to keep it
manageable we have a much
larger event this year than we've had in years past
but even then it's going to get
pretty filled up. So, you know, snag it while you can. You know, just speaking of kind of shifting
that that Overton window, you guys certainly kind of seem to have blown it wide open. And obviously,

(09:22):
not just you guys, but the work that you guys have done has clearly been extremely significant.
And this is evidenced by facts like the vice president, sitting vice president of the United
States, calling out BTC Policy Institute on stage at the Bitcoin conference, unprompted. And I think
You were on the news desk at that time as that was happening, right?

(09:42):
I mean, that's pretty incredible to see.
And yes, there have been politicians who have been campaigning at the Bitcoin conference before, and there have been sitting senators and things.
But this was a sitting vice president.
This is a huge deal.
And to see that shift, I mean, that's pretty remarkable to see.
It's not just, okay, we can talk about Bitcoin.
It's like we can talk about Bitcoin policy.

(10:04):
We can talk about how this is actually strategically significant and important for the United States of America, why it's a strategic priority.
I mean, this is kind of like – that's got to feel pretty good to see your work really get called out on such a truly national stage.
Yes.
I had the privilege of speaking with the vice president the day before in a private meeting.

(10:25):
And I think he gave a speech the next day and it was kind of two speeches in one if you were tracking.
It was kind of the prepared remarks he was reading off the teleprompter that was kind of meh.
It was kind of like warmed over, you know, kind of banal stuff about blockchain for health care.
And it was clearly written by some staffers and like, you know, a bunch of people that didn't really know like who they were going to talk to.

(10:49):
And I don't think it was going over so well.
And he's a smart guy.
I think he realized the room wasn't like responding well to his remarks.
And then he decided at the end of his, you know, prepared remarks to kind of riff for like another five, maybe 10 minutes.
And that was a very different sort of speech. Right. And it was his sort of extemporaneous kind of elucidation of how he's thinking about Bitcoin in this in this larger strategic context.

(11:17):
And that was kind of reflective of the conversation we were having.
Thinking about Bitcoin not just as this sort of niche asset from a particular political interest group that cares about it or that's part of this sort of industry that's lobbying for more favorable regulation, but as a network and an asset that is rapidly transforming how we think about the next several years of technology competition and the monetary system and U.S. geopolitical interests.

(11:45):
And that shifting the frame from like a kind of a narrow kind of inside the beltway, you know, industry, I'm going to give a speech to an industry lobby, right?
I'm going to say things of the like to a, hey, this is now going to be a significant thing, even more so than it already is.
And it's on this curve, like AI is on this curve, that are going to be, you know, one of the more significant drivers of opportunity and risk for the US government in the next few years.

(12:14):
And it's all taking place in the context of, you know, a lot of geopolitical instability and competition with China.
And so he was kind of just thinking out loud.
And he sort of said, you know, this is a complicated ball, basically, right?
A complicated knot that has AI and China and Bitcoin and stable coins and gold and the monetary system and geopolitics.
It's like all and our internal political kind of, you know, sort of valence that we have across these different issues.

(12:39):
Like AI, in his view, maybe were sort of liberal coded and Bitcoin and crypto is more sort of right wing coded.
So these are all like highly complicated kind of issues all bound together.
And he sort of had a call for the community to kind of have a two way conversation to help them essentially untie that, not to help help frame Bitcoin as aligned positively with U.S. strategic interests and values.

(13:02):
And that's basically been BPI's work for the last few years.
It's been like one of our main kind of, you know, hobby horses.
It's just to try to keep kind of pounding that message.
And to have the vice president kind of recognize that while I was sitting there, like, you know, then commenting on it in real time was a bit of an out-of-body experience.
But, yeah, maybe it's, you know, in retrospect, it was inevitable, right?

(13:23):
But it is encouraging to see that come from a senior policymaker's mouth and not be prepared remarks, right, but actually be something that he's internalized and is verbalizing and is sort of clearly trying to digest it, you know, in real time almost.
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's refreshing, I guess, when a politician doesn't just read off the

(13:44):
teleprompter. And you can very quickly tell when somebody, you know, I'm guessing that whoever
wrote that speech, whichever staffer wrote that initial speech probably got a little bit of a
talking to afterwards about knowing their audience a bit better. But you know, it's nice to see
somebody riff on that. It's nice to see you guys get called out for the work that you are doing.
And again, I think that this we're at this point now where Bitcoin is not like it's, you know,

(14:07):
it's become a almost mainstream topic now.
Like this is something that's not taboo.
It's okay to talk about it.
It's encouraged to talk about it.
And people realize that Bitcoin and the Bitcoin,
let's say community, the Bitcoin industry,
can politically move the needle.
Like this is not an insignificant group of individuals.
This is quite a both economically

(14:28):
and mimetically powerful group.
Arguably more mimetically powerful
than economically powerful at this point,
but I don't want to split hairs on that.
So I'm kind of curious, you know, and we've got a, there's a lot I want to get into with you, Matt, but I do want to get your thoughts just on the strategic reserve because I know that's, that was a big policy push for you guys.

(14:50):
The last summit that you did, if I'm remembering correctly, like timing coincided kind of well with that.
You guys were pushing a lot, a lot of the language that you had supplied in your writings was used to kind of craft that, those executive orders.
We're now a few months out from that.
I know there were 30-day time limits and that sort of thing to collect this information from agencies.

(15:13):
Is there anything you can share or anything that you're kind of aware of as far as the progress that's been made on that?
Are there any changes to that?
It seems that Trump's reaffirmed that commitment to those executive orders.
What's your read on this right now?
How do you see the current state of it?
How do you see it progressing?
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(16:21):
sign up. Yeah, so the executive board was signed in early March, and then we did our Bitcoin for
america summit essentially like the week or two after that um and uh was fortuitous timing because
we designed that summit to try to like draw particular attention to bitcoin in particular
and the strategic importance of it and you know then the executive order kind of all kind of

(16:42):
amplified that message in the context of most of the crypto policy priorities in dc being focused
stable coins and then market structure and they sort of street to bitcoin reserve as an idea was
sort of kind of not even on the radar screen and kind of got memed into existence.
And then we were trying to like flesh that out as like an actual policy proposal to draft
executive orders.

(17:02):
And then, you know, we saw some of that reflected in some of the, you know, the documents that
came out and the statements that have since come out of, you know, folks like Bo Hines.
The timing we're at right now is the executive order, you know, had a number of different
provisions.
I think the most important one that's kind of the next milestone to look for is going
to be a kind of consolidated report that I think Treasury Department is mostly writing,

(17:27):
but Beau and the team is kind of the whole working group, President's Working Group of
Digital Assets is contributing to.
It's due July 22nd.
And my understanding is that's going to basically touch on everything.
It's like the White House's sort of statement of how they view digital assets across the
board.
And that will include provisions and discussion of the Street-Bitcoin Reserve.
And so what I'm looking for in that report is how they get back to the request that was made of the Commerce and Treasury departments for budget-neutral means of acquiring additional Bitcoin without essentially adding to the taxpayer's burden.

(18:02):
And so I'm aware of the fact that within several weeks of that executive order, the tasking started going down through the bureaucracies of like come up with these different ideas, right?
And they have had a number of meetings that I think review the candidate options to acquire additional Bitcoin that sort of run the gamut from pretty trivial couch cushion types of things to pretty strategic, very important scale types of things and everywhere in between.

(18:31):
And there's like questions of interpretation about the precise legal authority to use certain funds for purchasing Bitcoin, as well as the overall sort of execution of setting up a street Bitcoin reserve, right?
Like within the Treasury Department, like where does it sit?
Whose office manages this?

(18:52):
Like who staffs this?
What memos have to be signed?
Like which custodians do they use, right?
There's lots of like operational implementation questions that I think were starting to be worked at.
And then, of course, you had Liberation Day, the whole tariff, and that kind of consumed all of those senior policymakers' attention, like Commerce Department, Treasury Department, you know, in the rack of priorities.
It's like global trade war, you know, $5 on fire in the bond market.

(19:17):
Like that kind of takes priority.
I think the Bitcoin stuff kind of went to the back burner.
I think it started to creep back up, especially in the weeks before the summit.
They wanted to kind of have some weeks before the conference in Vegas.
So I think they're gearing up for this release of this report in, you know, a month or so.
That'll be a good indicator of how seriously they're taking, you know, these proposals.

(19:39):
How much are they willing to talk about publicly, right?
Because I think there's also a question on this sort of the audit, essentially, of the government's Bitcoin holdings and whether they would make the results of the audit public, which they haven't done.
Now, doing such an audit is not as trivial as it might seem.
There's lots of different government agencies that have some ability to hold crypto from either lawful seizures or for operational purposes for undercover stings or intelligence activities, etc., etc.

(20:10):
And so coming up with the actual final tabulation probably took a while and probably had to go around and actually shake the tree.
Um, so now that they have at least a good sense of what the number is, now the question is, well, do you talk about it? Right? Like, do you, do you say that that number is the number? Because, you know, it's like strategic. I don't know what the number really is. But if it's more than what people think, well, maybe that kind of deflates the urgency to get more. Right? And people might ask questions. Well, how does the government actually have that much more Bitcoin? If it's much less than what people thought? Well, there's other uncomfortable questions. What happened to the Bitcoin we thought we had? Right?

(20:50):
And then if it's somewhere around what we think it is, okay, but then you might want to, like, you know, settle on what the – like, the fact that they haven't talked about it is itself, I think, an interesting question, right?
It reveals that they're kind of trying to keep their hearts close to their chest to preserve their optionality.
I think as a citizen, though, it's my Bitcoin.
Like, I want to know how much we got, right?

(21:11):
So I want them to publish the number as soon as possible.
But, you know, this is the White House, so it's their prerogative.
but they might put that in the report
on July 22nd as part of this consolidated
review so it might just be a matter of
the process playing out so that's
kind of the inside baseball where things stand there
again it's kind of like the executive
order was kind of the captain calling

(21:32):
out like a new heading for like
the ship of the state
and it's a big cruise ship or a big aircraft carrier
and the captain has called out like
you know new heading and then everyone is
on the bridge looking around and being like
we're still moving in the same direction
Like, are we turning?
Like, well, it's a huge ship.
And like, just, you know, it takes time for that instruction to be turned into an actual turn of the wheel.

(21:54):
And then the wheel has to turn this massive thing.
And it might only look like an imperceptible little, you know, shift in course for the beginning.
But I think it's clear to me that we're now, you know, the ship of the state is about to make this turn, right?
And now it's not irreversible, right?
Just like if you're on a massive aircraft carrier and it's like, belay that order, right?

(22:14):
Well, you could easily undo it and the ship wouldn't have turned that much.
So we're kind of in this fragile period where you kind of have to keep that momentum going and keep the consistency in terms of redirecting the course of the entire ship of state.
There's just the political class, the president, these political appointees.
And then there's this entire administrative bureaucracy that could try to slow, could stall, could undermine or could amplify and accelerate the president's instruction with their various tools.

(22:42):
And so what BPI is trying to do with especially the summit coming up is try to work at that level, right? Invite all of those people, right? The deputy directors of the CIA, right? The gentleman who manages the Office of Strategic Capital at the Department of Defense, senior officials in the Department of Energy, senior officials in the Department of Treasury, folks from the Department of State.

(23:02):
so these are going to come and they're going to hear like you know this is a real serious thing
this isn't just like a memo that was signed back in march that you can kind of like ignore or like
you know pretend maybe you didn't read it's like no there's like hundreds of people here
all your peers including some senior government officials saying uh and doubling down on this
direction of travel and then it's like okay well what does this actually look like and you need

(23:25):
help right do you need ideas right do you need like you know some assistance here um so yeah so
Well, yeah, for example, I'll be doing a fireside chat with the deputy director of the CIA.
Ken Egan, who's our director of government affairs, is doing a fireside chat with Patrick Witt,
who is both the director of the Office of Strategic Capital at the Department of Defense,
and he is Bo Hines' deputy on the president's working group on digital assets.

(23:50):
And he joined Bo Hines on an official visit delegation to El Salvador,
meeting with President Bukele about Bitcoin.
I just find that like an interesting thing, right? Like this – and Patrick Witt is a very – he's not necessarily a political guy, right? He's a kind of a technologist, a security guy, kind of a career person.

(24:11):
And he's decided that – or somebody has decided to put him in this interesting position straddling core economic statecraft, national security work inside the Department of Defense and White House level more political kind of policymaking around digital assets.
And those are things that I like hypothetically have said are very integrated and connected things.

(24:34):
And now that is sort of instantiated with the senior official.
So these are just clues, I think, right? They're not dispositive, right? They could be undone, but they're indicators of maybe below the waterline how serious Bitcoin is being treated by parts of the government.
I'm not saying everyone is on board, but, you know, the deputy director of the CIA doesn't give public remarks all that often, let alone at like kind of a relatively new think tank for Bitcoin.

(25:05):
You know, it's not like a normal thing that you would expect, right?
If you just asked me a few months ago whether we would get the deputy director of the CIA to just do a pretty, pretty, you know, open-ended fireside.
It's not like a five-minute prepare-to-marks talking points like jibber-jabber.
It's like, hey, you know, we want to talk about Bitcoin and China and strategic competition and why it's important and why strategic Bitcoin reserve is important and the future of money and, you know, all this stuff.

(25:30):
I'm curious to hear what he has to say.
Have you had conversations with him before? Do you know what his position is at all? Are you going in somewhat in the dark as far as that goes?
No, no, I have not spoken to him yet.
The only public remarks he's made on the subject was actually a short interview he gave with
Pompliano, which it was actually, I saw the interview and I was like, hmm, this is interesting.

(25:53):
And I retweeted it.
And the director of public affairs for the CIA immediately retweeted me and followed me And then I was like oh So I talked to Ken our government affairs guy And I was like what do you think And we like we should ask And we sent it we sent the email and they were like okay well ask for details timing

(26:14):
you know, what's the scope, like who's going to be there? Like what else, what other speakers and
kind of like, is this legit? And pretty, pretty, you know, pretty quickly we were like, yeah,
they're good to go. And just basic logistics questions and security and whatnot. But,
But we haven't had any like, don't ask this or this is the canned answer.

(26:34):
But no, I'm curious to hear what he has to say live.
I'll be learning with the audience.
We'll see.
Just a day in the life of Matt Pines.
Normal stuff.
Yeah.
I love it.
This is slightly off topic.
You think the CIA just has a huge slush fund of Bitcoin that they use for operational purposes?
well again it's like i think they definitely have used it um like that's i know that for a fact

(27:00):
right like that's probably not controversial like they were um engaging in all sorts like you use
all sorts of tools right when you're trying to pay pay assets you know with yeah essentially if
i'm a spy in another country and i have valuable intel and i tell the cia i will only give you that
intel if you pay me bitcoin right well the cia is gonna get some bitcoin to give it to you right so

(27:21):
So like if you know that this is a thing people might ask, where you're going to have some in reserve, right, just so that you can just use it as an operational contingency fund.
So that seems like a pretty common sense thing for them to do.
Like how much, right?
I think this is an interesting question.
Like they might have acquired like a significant amount of Bitcoin pretty early on, and it might have been worth, you know, a few million, tens of millions of dollars for like operational purposes.

(27:44):
But that might be worth now like billions of dollars, right?
Right. So this is interesting, you know, question, right, with this inventory of Bitcoin, the government is like there might be like just like somewhat random, low level operational, you know, accounts somewhere in the agency for off the book stuff that they've had, you know, and maybe it was like maybe the accounting was like this is worth a few million dollars.

(28:08):
And then somebody wakes up one day and goes, wait a second, what happened to that?
How much Bitcoin do we actually have in there?
And it's like, oh, that's like a shit ton of money.
it's like uh-oh what do we do with that um so i think there's i think there's that there's also
um i think uh a possibility that is more crypto generally that has been seized by elements of the

(28:29):
government but not necessarily through like the official like you know sort of seizure processes
held at the marshal service right like if you're going after a cartel in south america and you
happen to just like you know come across a bunch of crypto right i don't know like are you gonna
pull that all the way back and sent in file i don't know like historically the government uh

(28:52):
you know has has seen better uses of of of those sorts of funds that they've acquired not just
crypto but you know others other sorts of things so i suspect there's probably a good amount i don't
know like it's probably not going to like move the full like it's probably not in the tens of
thousands of Bitcoin, but is it thousands of Bitcoin? Maybe tens of thousands? I don't know.

(29:13):
Like I wouldn't be surprised if it's, if it's in that range. I'm excited for your conversation
because I think that'll be a, it'll be quite interesting. Should I, do I need to bring a
burner phone to this, to this event? I don't know how this works. I'm not familiar with,
with, with protocol for interacting with high level CIA officials. No, I mean,

(29:34):
they already know they're already in my phone anyway.
I don't think you're talking about Walker.
Maybe this is a deep cover op that you're running here.
Oh, boy.
Here we go.
This is just a law-abiding Bitcoin podcaster over here.
Nothing to see.
Do you even have a birth certificate, Walker?
Oh, here we go.

(29:54):
What's your real name here?
My real name is Walker America, of course.
This says it right on my birth certificate.
It's Hawaiian, actually.
Okay.
So excited for that. And again, I encourage people, if you are in the area or feel like traveling, like check this out. I'm excited for it as a different sort of Bitcoin conference. And again, I think the work that you guys are doing is really important just because you you'd rather have government officials that are at least educated about this stuff and realize its strategic importance and aren't just Elizabeth Warren's about it. Right.

(30:30):
Like I would prefer, you know, you can ignore the state all you want, but like the state's not going to ignore you, especially as you, you know, if you're dealing with a asset that is growing in market cap exponentially, it's like we, I'd rather have them not hate Bitcoin.
So I appreciate all the work that you guys are doing for that.
I want to, I want to switch gears slightly because we are, it is Friday the 13th right now.

(30:55):
As we record this, I'll get this episode out to everyone later today.
and there apparently is a potential world war starting right now.
Can we talk about that a little bit?
You are always extremely tapped in to kind of geopolitical happenings,
and I think you have a very good perspective on not just the, let's say,

(31:16):
mainstream headlines, the legacy media headlines, but like, okay,
what does this actually mean?
What's actually happening behind the scenes?
And furthermore, what are the strategic implications of this for the United
States as we move forward?
So, I mean, what, I guess let's start out with what was your initial read on this situation?
Like, what's top of mind for you as you're seeing this news breaking last night?

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Yeah, it seems like every time missiles start flying, people go, is this World War III?

(34:03):
My read of the situation is we've kind of been in World War III since you could say COVID.
you know, if you're being a bit more conspiratorial, or at least since the Russia-Ukraine war
popped off. And we just, the way great power conflicts and regional conflicts unfold now,
when you have nuclear powers in a tightly integrated global system that's dominated

(34:25):
by elite political factions that function almost as competing mafias, they don't really want to
fight head to head, right? They don't really want to have to fight, you know, true large-scale
kinetic wars with other great powers, because those could destroy the whole planet and could
certainly lead to massive loss of like wealth for the elites in those political systems.
So what we've seen is essentially kind of proxy wars, you know, wars in space,

(34:50):
assassinations, sabotage campaigns, cyber attacks, and kind of this arc of instability
across the Eurasian periphery, which sort of, you know, structures this global conflict
that's playing out between, you could say, the Eurasian sort of autocratic powers, you know, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea,

(35:10):
and then kind of the legacy sort of Western international sort of security regime underpinned by the U.S. as the global hegemon,
but kind of the Great Oceania, right, kind of mostly like most sort of maritime commercial sort of capitalist countries,
US, Japan, South Korea, Australia, the UK, and Israel. And so you have kind of this sort of meta

(35:39):
narrative, which is kind of this competition between global orders and kind of insurgent
powers, kind of rising powers wanting to challenge the legacy system, and then finding friends,
right, to kind of do, you know, variations of alignment with. And that's kind of maybe what
you have with kind of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea. And so you have kind of these local versions

(36:03):
of this conflict, Russia, Ukraine, you have other Russian and Western conflicts that are much more
sub-Rosa in the North Sea, in the Arctic and space and other, you know, more deniable things.
And then you have, you know, the Iran-Israel kind of flashpoint that has had lots of other
sort of regional manifestations. You have Iran-Pakistan, sorry, you have India-Pakistan,
You have kind of latent conflict, you know, that's the subject of a lot of speculation, when or if, right, between China and Taiwan.

(36:31):
Then you have North Korea, you know, always a bit of a wild card there.
So you've got kind of this arc of instability here.
You could call that World War III in the sense that it is – there are regional conflicts that have their own sort of local character and their own sort of history to those sort of adversarial relationships.

(36:54):
But now they're linked into this global frame, right, and that every conflict is bringing in other regional and global powers, right?
It's the reason why Russia-Ukraine isn't just a Russia-Ukraine thing, right?
It's essentially whole Western security apparatus and then Russia getting support from both Iran, North Korea and China.
Right. This is kind of the globalization of these local conflicts.

(37:18):
And so when you say World War III, it's sort of the implication is going back to like other world wars that started local, you know, like Austria-Hungary, right?
Serbian, you know, assassinations that pulled in more and more belligerents until you had basically the entire world, you know, thrown thrown down.
And, you know, I think what we've seen thus far is we don't have the same sort of balance of power dynamic where you have all these sort of chains of alliance and mutual defense treaties, right, where it's like all of a sudden one thing pops off and then everyone is going to war.

(37:46):
We have Article 5 of NATO. That's obviously what Ukraine isn't party to. So that's kind of kept it mitigated. Israel, we have, you know, sort of mutual defense, but, you know, it's mostly arms supplies, like, and then depending on how things go, like, we could get involved.
So I see this Israel-Iran conflict. It's been playing out for a long time. And clearly this was a flashpoint that the political leadership decided to take in the context of Trump now coming into office.

(38:21):
I think the most recent indications are, one, it was immensely successful, maybe more successful than Israel even anticipated.
They wiped out large swaths of the military and scientific establishment.
They apparently had significant strikes on some of the nuclear enrichment facilities, Natanz and Fordow.

(38:44):
Although Fordow, we'll see if those are deeply buried.
And really kind of embarrassed the Iranians.
basically took down most of the air defense systems and pretty much have been operating unopposed in Iranian skies, it seems,
which is a demonstration of just technical prowess, right, strategic surprise,
and builds on sort of previous sort of Israeli operations of similar sort of strategic stealth going after the Hezbollah leadership,

(39:14):
you know, the Pedro attack.
There's various assassinations that they've conducted.
that have been very much sort of precision pinpoint strikes inside Iran.
And so I think Trump, his most recent statements today,
essentially indicated like, hey, Iran, I gave you 60 days.
I wanted you to come to the table to negotiate a grand bargain.

(39:34):
I think the contours of that grand bargain were you give up your ambitions to a nuclear weapon
and we'll help basically facilitate the development of a civilian
and highly sort of regulated nuclear industry
will unlock a bunch of frozen funds,
remove some sanctions,

(39:54):
allow you to kind of economically develop and get rich.
And that was like 61 days ago.
And so he said, 61 days are up.
And now he gives the green light for BB to go
and start merking some guys,
including some of the guys that he said
were on the other end of this negotiating table.
And he's like, well, they're dead now, right?
And so there's like a kind of a – it was almost kind of darkly comical in the sense that like Trump was like almost bragging about the guys that were like being hard asses on the other side of the negotiating table.

(40:28):
They're dead now.
So if you want to replace those people, Iran, maybe you should come up – maybe you should send people that are going to be a bit more cooperative.
It was pretty blatant with that.
I'm skeptical this will lead to a total conflagration in the region.
I think we've had lots of occasions of missiles flying back and forth.

(40:51):
And I think the biggest reason why is that Iran is actually now looks not very strong at all.
I didn't see a single Russian fighter trying to intercept an Israeli fighter.
And the fact that Mossad was able to operate with a large footprint in-country means it had a massive network of in-country facilitators.
And the fact that they were able to target so many of these senior military and important people at the same time means that they can track these people pretty well from the outside.

(41:22):
But to get where they sleep in their bedrooms across all these different cities and hit them all in real time means that they had extremely strong in-country intelligence.
In fact, I sort of – I somewhat suspect, although it's definitely a little bit more of a speculation, that they probably have more than just an intelligence network inside the country but probably have a set of individuals in the political apparatus that are very much opposed to kind of these hardline Islamist faction that wants to take the country to war.

(41:53):
And, you know, if if Israel is there to kind of wipe out your political opponents for you, you know, all you have to do is like help them out with where they sleep.
And boom, like most of your opposition is dead inside that country.
It's kind of a win win for you. So we'll see.

(42:13):
I think in general, like I try to fade geopolitical risk. Right.
It's always a sell the news or buy the news event.
There's obviously failure modes here where very bad things could happen.
I think the worst case scenario would be like an attempt by Iran to try to close the Stradiv Hormuz or to conduct large-scale terrorist attacks in the West.

(42:38):
Because if it looks like they can't actually respond kinetically, which it looks like they really can't.
They tried launching some drones.
Almost all of them got intercepted.
Their command and control apparatus is basically in tatters.
They could reconstitute it, but we'll see.
And meanwhile, Israel was able to strike most of their or a lot of their ballistic missiles and just kind of defang them, it looks like.

(43:00):
And we'll see. Right. It's been only a day or so.
So it would be too premature in judging it.
But if they can't, you know, credibly respond in a way that, you know, allows them to maintain a bit of dignity, then they'll turn to their asymmetric options, which are, you know, essentially their terror cells that they've established overseas.

(43:22):
A lot in South America, a lot even in North America and Western Europe to attack, you know, sort of softer targets and to try to, you know, impose pain and retaliation.
And what that then triggers as a Western counter response, you know, depending on how deadly they are, could be the thing that tips over Western public opinion, right, to engage much more militarily in like a regime change operation, which I think is the main thing that is like dividing the kind of MAGA movement or the national security apparatus inside the Trump administration, which is, you know, I think divided between like Iran hawks, the kind of, you know, the Lindsey Grahams of the world that are just like out for out for blood.

(44:04):
and the folks that even include, you know, Vice President Vance, which is, you know, he was a Marine and his whole line has been no more, you know, no more foreign wars in the Middle East, right?
No more, you know, getting dragged down into these interminal conflicts where it's often the poor that bleed out in the desert to fight for the elite.

(44:28):
So I think there's a strong opposition to U.S. engagement with boots on the ground or with anything that could trigger a larger conflict.
Israel certainly wants to try to bring us in because if they really want to take out the nuclear program for good and not just set it back a few months, they would need U.S. strike support.

(44:49):
And so I think that's what they're trying to angle for.
And this has been a bit of a rambling assessment.
But the last point I would make is I think the most important thing that Israel is trying to get out of the next few days and weeks as they're going to continue these sort of rolling targeted strikes, one, their amount of sorties they can field is limited.
Even if they've established sort of air supremacy, they just don't have – it's a long way for those fighters to fly.

(45:12):
And eventually, you know, hitting these deeply buried targets requires munitions that the Israeli military may not actually have or have in sufficient quantities to have a strategic effect.
So they would need U.S. munitions or strike support with targeting these deeply buried facilities like at Fordow, which is like 200 feet in Iraq with the centrifuges.

(45:36):
So I think BB's line here is to Trump now, hey, look, like we got their pants down, like they're vulnerable.
Like if you just ante up just a bit, you know, send a few more strikes in to help take out these facilities.
Like we can we can turn this from a month's long setback to a year's long setback and dramatically improve your negotiating position.

(46:02):
And I think for Trump, who is very much always like a go-by-his-vibe-in-the-moment kind of decision-maker, I could see him getting convinced to support some targeted strikes on some of these critical facilities where it's like once you've popped the seal of hitting Iran, and if you're expecting Iran to retaliate kind of regardless, well, you might as well just go all the way, right?

(46:28):
Now, then the question is if you knock out their nuclear program, like not for good, but like very much substantially, then you get to this next point, which is then Israelis go, well, look, we basically pants them.
We've knocked out their air supremacy.
We've knocked out the nuclear program.
We've killed most of their senior generals in both the Quds Force and the military, the chief of staff, a lot of the intelligence systems.

(46:52):
Let's just go for Khomeini.
Let's just take them out.
Right.
Like full-on regime change.
That term, regime change, has very much like a – gets people to start to scratch.
And that would be very much a radical proposition a few weeks ago.
But if you get to this point where each incremental strike looks like it's easier than you thought, well, then actually changing the political environment inside Iran becomes less of an impossible proposition.

(47:25):
And there's a lot of people inside the national security apparatus that would like – that are going to constantly be chirping in that direction.
So I guess that's the thing to watch.
Not World War III, but just does the ratchet of successful strikes increase the chance of U.S. engagement because Trump wants to basically get the most leverage he can?

(47:46):
And the last point, sorry, would be think about Iran in the context of the China kind of trade war and negotiations there.
Like there was – like that's the main dynamic that Trump is kind of concerned by in the sense that China has a lot of leverage over us.
We have a lot of leverage over China.
We're somewhat equally matched.

(48:06):
Like we basically came to blows, Liberation Day, massive tariffs, almost a mutual embargo.
that started creating almost economic catastrophe inside China because you have entire cities that
are just like, you know, now don't have an economic purpose if they can't export. And so there's a lot
of potential internal instability being triggered, as well as financial instability in the West,

(48:26):
right? If you have inflation, you have bond market instability, you have 5% plus, you know,
30 year that, you know, Besson started getting, you know, worried about high move index,
sort of mutually assured economic destruction. And so we kind of came to the table in Geneva,
and then it just had the most recent, you know, meetings and phone calls to try to, you know, recalibrate, come to a quote deal.
And a lot of it was like the rare earth stuff, the Chinese students stuff.

(48:49):
But I think Trump, Trump wasn't like a master planner looking at all of the, you know, advantages and disadvantages.
He just was like, let's go for it. Let's figure it out.
And now I think he's now discovered kind of just how much leverage China has over us and also how much leverage maybe we have over them.
but like where the actual points of leverage and pain are.

(49:09):
And I think he's looking at Iran and realizing that Iran exports 2 billion –
I'm sorry, 2 million barrels of oil a day, mostly to China.
And if China is choking off your rare earths,
maybe you can help choke off some of their energy supply, right?
So it's like another sort of asymmetric way to kind of get additional sort of bargaining power

(49:31):
over your main rival, which is China here.
So anyways, that's, I'll stop talking.
No, I appreciate the analysis.
I did just want, uh, when it could, because you mentioned Lindsey Graham, I just thought
of, uh, this, uh, Holden blood feast, uh, meme, uh, which just, uh, gets, gets me every
time.
But I, I, I digress every time I see that meme though, it's like, Oh, Oh, that's, that's

(49:52):
Lindsey Graham.
Um, so, I mean, I think that's an interesting perspective, basically this idea that, because
you see a lot of sensationalism because talking about world war three, uh, definitely gets
clicks and views and engagement. And so much of our attention-based online economy is literally
just run by that. It's run by, okay, how are you going to get the most eyeballs on this? And usually
sensationalizing and catastrophizing and, you know, let's say, doomerism tends to get more than,

(50:20):
hey, this isn't so bad. Actually, this is pretty much just status, you know, status quo as it's
been. And we can all like freak out a little bit less because really there hasn't been much of a
change. So I think you really need to work on your fear mongering, Matt, you know, like really
step that up a little bit to get those sweet, those sweet eyeballs. But no, I appreciate that

(50:41):
perspective, because it is interesting. It's, it's basically, we were not seeing the beginning
of World War Three here. Because for all intents and purposes, we've been in World War Three,
we've been in a state of basically global conflict in a regionally distributed way for many years.
And that's, you know, it's a lot of the same cast of characters that's back at it again.

(51:06):
And is this time different?
I mean, we don't have a crystal ball, who knows?
But it certainly seems to rhyme with the past times.
So I'll be interested to see how this develops.
I am curious if you think this has any sort of, let's say, macroeconomic implications as far as, okay, new wars or, quote, wars sparking up all over the place.

(51:36):
Boy, it seems to be that usually when there's more conflicts, there tends to be more liquidity injected globally in the U.S., of course, but not just in the U.S.
Is this like, how do you think this plays out?
I mean, or do we start to see,
we've been in relatively restrictive,
relatively tight monetary conditions
in terms of global liquidity for a while.
Basically most of Biden's admin,

(51:58):
you started to see global liquidity,
you know, and we're in US liquidity as well,
tick up a little bit recently So I guess maybe a different way of putting that is you know is uh is quote world war three good for Bitcoin And I mean that in the least uh least callous way possible
Yes. I mean, so obviously there's event trades you could put on around the, your speculation over,

(52:21):
uh, this particular flashpoint. That's maybe, you know, not my forte, right. In terms of whether
you're going to have a collar spread on Brent crude or the VIX or whatever, right. I'm not
running a hedge fund there. But structurally, you know, I think it's clear, and this has been
the environment we've been in really since the Russia-Ukraine invasion, is just the securitization
of the global economic system, right? Like the general shift in the balance from, you know,

(52:46):
market-driven principles to state-driven prerogatives, where national leadership looks
at the economy not as like a battle, not as a field for competitiveness and innovation and trade,
but for like strategic advantage or leverage over an adversary.
And so like capital markets become weaponized, supply chains become weaponized.

(53:08):
And so in that environment where everyone is looking at their neighbors and realizing,
can I trust you, either my historical ally or a potential more new aggressive and empowered
adversary, as well as technology change that lowers the barrier to accomplish strategic
effects, right?
We've seen the Ukraine kind of pop up kamikaze drone attacks that took out large swaths of the strategic bomber fleet inside Russia as just an indicator of just how the overall security environment is changing.

(53:42):
And that is now changing how governments react in terms of their fiscal prerogatives.
When your back is against the wall, your focus is on spending money on defense, on reshoring supply chains.
If you can't trust as much in the global commons as much as you could, then that sort of Ricardian advantage becomes less of a thing you focus on.

(54:04):
You want to have more resilience in supply chains, more domestic industry, more buffers.
Right. So you want to accumulate, you want, you know, more reserves of gold, of foreign exchange, of commodities.
You want to have as much of your national champions, you know, privileged over over adversaries.

(54:26):
So you're just going to spend a lot more money on industrial policy, on reshoring.
You know, these things also are somewhat controversial domestically.
So you need to make sure that, like, the domestic population doesn't face austerity.
Right. Normally you would see fiscal contraction after you have a period of kind of fiscal largesse, as we saw after the stimulus wave in 2020.
We never saw that. In fact, we've had continuous fiscal deficits.

(54:49):
I think it's because the political leadership knows implicitly, explicitly, like the population will not take austerity well.
Right. Like we're already having riots, you know, with like low employment and pretty good inflation numbers and like pretty good GDP prints.
like economically, you know, obviously there's a high segmentation between the haves and the
have-nots in the U.S. and around the Western world. But just like objectively speaking, right, like

(55:15):
real incomes are pretty, you know, pretty climbing. But if you turned, right, if real
incomes went down, if inflation went up, if unemployment went up, like that powder keg of
our civil society could be quite dangerous. And so I think political leadership just knows we have
Just keep spending money, right?
Like I think Lynn Alden says nothing stops this train for just like the mechanical logic of the relationship between the fiscal balance sheet now and asset prices and the fact that tax receipts are now the marginal driver of fiscal deficits.

(55:45):
And so you need to have asset prices continue to go up in order to have just the math work out.
And then you have all these embedded obligations.
But then on top of that, you have a much more risky environment, more defense spending, retiring boomers.
Like everything is basically more money printing, right?
And we're doing all this in an environment where like the global collateral is a sovereign debt market underpinned by the U.S.

(56:07):
Treasury security, which we are, you know, printing like hand over fist.
And we know we can't really issue too much at the long end without seeing rates spike.
So we have to push more out in the front end, which is effectively cash like, you know, you know, securities, which is basically inflationary.
And so, yeah, it's like that meme of Bitcoin tracking to the M2 money supply.

(56:31):
I actually think it's not like a causal link.
I think it's almost like a meta meme, which is because it's like the bell curve is like, oh, Bitcoin is just a correlate to M2.
And it's like, no, no, Bitcoin, the money supply, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, well, actually, everyone's looking at the global liquidity environment and they need like a simple meme to attach their justification for Bitcoin, you know, Bitcoin's price.

(56:52):
and they'll just go with that.
And yeah, Bitcoin is effectively a liquidity gauge
in the global system.
And everyone's basically going to have to print the way out of it.
There's just no way around it at this point.
So yeah, number go up.
I mean, I appreciate that.
It is amazing how well Lynn Alden's

(57:13):
Nothing Stops This Train memetic thesis is holding up.
Like really kudos to Lynn.
And I love seeing this get picked up
by like uh uh just more and more people too it's it's it's nice to watch it it's like and you feel
like you kind of like knew about this meme before it was cool you know and like you know now linds
this rock star and it's like i'm just happy to see her crushing it um but yeah so i'm you know

(57:38):
it's going to be very interesting to see how things continue to play out i think it's you know
almost uh everybody seems to believe we are in the midst of this fourth turning right uh and i
think that's like from a if we're going based on the theory like yes that like the timelines match
up i think we're seeing actually sort of a convergence of cycles uh as at the current

(58:03):
point like where we have i don't know if you're familiar with uh polybius's anticyclosis this is
like you know a couple thousand years old but we're reaching like the oglocracy stage of you
know uh end of democracy towards mob rule and like you could also say that we're that's coinciding
with like Ray Dalio's, you know, long term debt cycles, and all of these things kind of
converging at once at this time, where we also have this insanely disruptive technology, both

(58:29):
on the let's say on the AI front, on the, you know, autonomous and asymmetric warfare front with
drones, that we've now really seen the demonstration of that power between, you know, some warring
nations, Ukraine and and Russia, you also have a monetary revolution happening that was happening
kind of quietly for some years,

(58:50):
you know, just the nerds playing with their Bitcoins.
But now this is center stage
and people are talking about it.
And it's like so much stuff is happening at once.
Amidst this nothing stops this train moment of,
hey, we have to keep printing or it all falls apart.
Where does it go from here?
Like, does it all fall apart or does the government,

(59:11):
let's say the US government,
but like global governments more broadly,
do they have the ability to keep kicking the can
down the road indefinitely? Or does something have to give? And like, does it just because
nothing stops this train doesn't mean that train doesn't run out of track and fly off a cliff.
It just means they can't break before it. So I'm curious what your read is, is there any way to
quote, you know, have a soft landing on our way out of this fourth turning? Or is it just it is

(59:38):
what it is? Yeah, so I actually think the monetary aspect of this is less radical than like the
social geopolitical aspects of this because you know like you could see bitcoin at a million
dollars and gold at 10 000 and the world would kind of work almost the same way it does now
for most people right like people holding bitcoin people in gold would feel much richer

(01:00:01):
um but like the relative it would just be a marginal rebalancing of like capital pools
like a few percentage points in you know tens of hundreds of tens of dollars in global assets just
marginally shifting to these harder assets.
And you could be in a world where Bitcoin is 10 times higher or more.
And from Bitcoin's perspective, that would be like a pretty transformational thing.

(01:00:23):
But I think because we're so focused on it, like we over-index on that one variable and
think about global change.
But global change in history is a very nonlinear process.
And it's failure modes are like specific breakdowns, you know, global war.
and famine and, you know, like absolute state collapse.

(01:00:44):
I don't think we're in for that.
So when people say fourth turning, you know, Ray Dalio's thesis,
they're pointing to kind of long-term debt cycles, political cycles, generational cycles,
and they, you know, all indicate periods of turbulence and instability and system change.
And, you know, but it doesn't necessarily determine, well, what's the nature of that system change,
like that phase transition?

(01:01:06):
How unstable is it, right?
Because we have modes in history where we've seen very, very unstable modes where basically civilization almost collapses.
You get dark ages.
You get, you know, massive population fall off.
And then there's versions that are just essentially like, you know, just difficult periods in history.
You know, civil wars, but, you know, or like handoffs from like the UK to the US.

(01:01:28):
And we read them out of our history books.
But people living through them, unless you were like really unlucky or in a particularly vulnerable spot, right?
you kind of made it through, right?
It wasn't like an end of the world, right?
I think that's, sometimes people don't
lay out those scenarios, right?
Like, fourth turning, instability, global war,

(01:01:48):
oh, it's kind of this,
the system's going to collapse kind of thing.
And I don't think the system's going to collapse.
Because when people say that,
like actual systems collapse,
means global supply chains collapse,
which means just-in-time delivery collapse,
which means we get no more advanced microchips,
which means most of our food supply, right,
becomes imperiled,
which means our population probably shrinks, which means like our standard of living dramatically shrinks.

(01:02:10):
Like that's a very, very bad outcome.
Like that's a terrifying outcome.
I don't believe that is like a probable, if not above like 1% scenario.
But I think we are entering a period where what we think of as like the legitimate institutions in society are being shaken up, right?
Which is, I think, the single most important feature of these sorts of forth-turning generational cycles is that you have a characteristic process of kind of institutional creation that you could, say, go back to like the 1930s and 40s.

(01:02:44):
You know, the generation that fought World War II that came out of that conflict, you know, with kind of this mandate to run the global system, they built new institutions.
They built the national security state.
They built, you know, the federal government up.
They built international institutions.
And the first generation had a lot of momentum, sort of technical and technocratic capacity.

(01:03:06):
They had a lot of unity as a generational cohort in the elite, managing this new system as it was sort of growing and had a lot of energy and momentum behind it.
And it had a sense of purpose and creation.
And you can kind of see that, right?
And then they handed it off to the second generation.
And they're kind of like, oh, they were trained by the first generation.
they kind of understood you know kind of the ethos the the heuristics involved in managing a

(01:03:31):
complicated new institutional apparatus um and kind of you know adapting it to a changing
environment then they hand off to the third generation and it gets kind of attenuated
and they maybe are just kind of like caretakers of it they don't really understand its original
founding purpose maybe they're not as like the best and the brightest anymore because
best and the brightest go off into like build new things right the third generation inside

(01:03:52):
these institutions are kind of like, here's the rules, follow the rules. And that selects for a
certain type of person that just likes to execute rules. And you have institutions managed by those
types of people. After a while, they start to kind of become less effective, right? They don't adapt
well to changing conditions. They become sclerotic, sort of rule-bound. And then they reach a point
of fragility, and when the environment basically gives them a crisis, and they can't respond to it.

(01:04:16):
And that's when the fourth generation that's either in the institution that goes, oh, this
thing is totally cooked right uh and they go well either we need to like break this down to the studs
and rebuild it or exit and build new institutions and that's i think the environment we're in right
now and i think there's a you know a distribution of people that are in different positions that
either see the existing institutions as sort of still having a kind of a skeleton worth worth um

(01:04:39):
worth saving and they started to strip out you know all the say woke woke nonsense but there's
a core ethos, is a core substance that needs to be rebuilt upon. And there's others that are a bit
more radically inclined that are saying, oh, no, no, this needs to be start, we need to start fresh.
Legacy institutions were designed for a fundamentally different era. They're fundamentally

(01:05:01):
corrupted. They're fundamentally not fit for purpose anymore. We need to start sort of de novo.
And I'm kind of like a not either or type of person. I'm like a, you know, there are institutions
we need to save and sort of rebuild.
And there are also, I think, new institutions we need to create, right, that the existing
apparatus can't deliver, right?
And so I think Bitcoin is this interesting interplay, right, between the old and the

(01:05:24):
new, right?
It certainly is a fundamentally new type of institution itself, but it's sort of, you
know, going through and sort of almost co-opting and maybe remaking, you know, existing institutions,
right?
And that's, I think, part of the contention inside the Bitcoin community is how much of
this is state co-option versus, you know, are we taking over the state?
right uh and it's kind of i think it's ambiguous at the moment right it doesn't it's not a clear

(01:05:47):
answer to that question right is is is because when you have that sort of interpenetration
right it's it's never clear well who's gonna is it is it this gonna take over this or is this
gonna take over this or is the new thing that gets created off out of that out of that um that
that sort of dynamic uh is it just a new thing right and it's kind of hard to say well who won
or who lost or who co-opted who there's just a new thing that got created that the people

(01:06:11):
involved in it feel is a new thing that's legitimate and that has sort of new sort of
energy to restructure the world system.
So that's why I think Bitcoin is going to be very important in my mind.
It's because it's not only is it like an ethos and a political movement, but it's a
vortex for actual financial capital, which is to first order political capital, right?

(01:06:35):
And so you have this mimetic engine that is, like, attracting people, capital, and is now kind of now swirling in and bringing in, you know, Simon Wealth Funds and BlackRock and presidents and, you know, like, staffers for central banks.
Like, we're having, you know, Fed staffers come to our Bitcoin Policy Summit.
Like, this is this, like, black hole that's accreting here.

(01:06:58):
Um, and, uh, yeah, I don't know.
I don't try to project out too far.
Cause I think people, when we try to project out three, five, 10 years, we always look
at our current system and we just think, oh, it's going to be like that, but with like,
you know, better screens.
Like, and I think when you're in these phase transitions, you know, a lot of the things
that you think are going to survive don't.

(01:07:20):
And it's kind of not obvious, like what makes it through and what adapts.
Um, so I try not to make predictions.
I think the basic lesson I have for Bitcoin is you have to be a very adaptive system in that environment.
The reason why I think Bitcoin, not just for these money printing reasons, is likely to succeed, in fact, accelerate through this phase transition, this sort of fourth turning generational sort of reset, whatever you want to call it, is it's sort of the sine qua non of a self-adaptive corrective system.

(01:07:48):
There's no central point of failure.
There's no committee that's deciding, that's planning.
And when the environment's changing so radically, you know, those sorts of centrally planned, you know, technocratically managed institutions are extremely vulnerable.
Because even if you have the smartest and the best and the brightest, it's hard to keep up, right?
It's hard to make the right decisions in real time, especially in a complicated, you know, global environment.

(01:08:09):
So Bitcoin is just this thing that can just adapt, right?
And it will respond.
It will go up and down.
But as a network, right, it's kind of self-healing.
It's highly redundant and resilient.
um that's like a model to structure what i would call like socio-technical institutions
right for an era of digital disruption right you can have lots of accelerating change in ai
in sort of global networks trade technology communications being sort of reconfigured

(01:08:36):
as you know all these things happen and geopolitical conflict accelerates and you need something like
bitcoin i think you know as like a as like a a new network kind of um establishing a structural mesh
around which new institutions can kind of be catalyzed.
And capital is an important thing to fund new institutions.
A bunch of rebels can show up to a ramshackle hole in the woods

(01:09:01):
and be like, we're going to take down the federal government.
It's like, all right, good luck, guys.
But when you have the elites of a system with billionaires
and lots of capital go,
oh, we're going to restructure the political environment.
We're going to build new institutions.
Well, that's the history of all human institutions.
That's literally what the story of the foundations of all the major countries and political systems is.

(01:09:24):
And that's just, I think, the process we're seeing play out.
Just as you were saying that, is the question of are we co-opt?
Is Bitcoin co-opt in the state or is the state co-opting Bitcoin?
It just makes me think of that meme that's like, I'm not trapped in here with you.
You're trapped in here with me.
That's Bitcoin right there basically being like, you think you're co-opting it, but really you yourself are being co-opted.

(01:09:47):
you don't change Bitcoin, Bitcoin changes you. That's all of the, let's say, cliches I have
on that subject. But no, I think that it's going to be fascinating to see how not just the United
States, who has obviously taken a early lead in this, let's say, Bitcoin race, not as early as

(01:10:10):
El Salvador, but in terms of El Salvador, it's a great country and they've done incredible things,
but it's very, very small compared to the United States, obviously. I'm curious if you see with all
of these, you know, these geopolitical tensions, these different flashpoints that you've touched
on and explained in this kind of, you know, belt of instability, all of these different powder kegs
sort of popping off. If you see there being more of an incentive for, let's say, a flight to a

(01:10:36):
neutral reserve asset like Bitcoin, or perhaps it's a neutral reserve asset like gold, because
it's what people know. And something that I think we may have talked about a little bit and like
eight months ago when you were last in the show, but this idea of, okay, strategically,
if there's a move towards a global reserve asset and the United States has gold, the United States
has Bitcoin, American citizens have gold, American citizens have Bitcoin. What makes more sense to

(01:11:02):
put your economic weight behind as a nation state, if you're the United States, or if you're one of
these other countries. For China and Russia, maybe it's gold because I think Bitcoin is also
somewhat ideologically incompatible with an authoritarian state. It's not that they won't
use it, but it's ideologically incompatible with how that state is organized. I think it's

(01:11:25):
ideologically much more compatible with the United States. So do you see a shift away from the dollar
as the global reserve currencies to a neutral reserve asset like gold or Bitcoin? And do you
see the United States with these moves it's making right now with Bitcoin strategic reserve,
all of the work you guys are doing, how tapped into you are, do you see this as actually being

(01:11:46):
something that legitimately replaces gold or that the US puts its economic weight behind because
there is more strategic benefit in supporting a Bitcoin reserve asset for international trade,
even, versus a gold as a neutral reserve asset, which many of our, let's say, enemies have quite
a bit of versus how much Bitcoin they have proportionally, if that makes sense.

(01:12:10):
Yes. If I just do the numbers, we collectively, as American government, American companies,
ETFs, individual holders, probably have between 30 and 40% of the total available Bitcoin supply.
And we probably have about 8 to 10% of the total above ground gold stock.
So if you're just thinking about scenarios in the next three to five years where hard assets like gold and Bitcoin are going to be increasingly monetized in the global financial and kind of official government sector, that's kind of your starting condition.

(01:12:45):
And if you had no other considerations and you're just a national security guy, you're thinking in the next five years, like if you have two hard assets that are going to get monetized, which one do we stand to gain more from?
It's like pretty obvious we stand to gain more from Bitcoin relative to gold.
And Bitcoin tends to move like much faster than gold.
So if you, you know, it's not necessarily an either or.

(01:13:07):
It's like a both and sort of situation because I think there's also the second order effects you have to consider,
which is the current system is highly leveraged to gold as a reserve asset.
It's already institutionalized.
It's already kind of integrated into international frameworks, central banks.
It's well trusted.
It's kind of a known thing.
And so you kind of have to do like a measured mix, right?

(01:13:30):
A mix of the old standby that's highly, you know, de-risked and well-known and, you know, everyone's comfortable with it in those existing institutions.
And you don't want to just break those institutions.
You don't just, you know, create more uncertainty and instability because people aren't ready for the new thing.
So you have to kind of have this gradual transition where you let kind of both monetize.

(01:13:52):
But I think they also see the strategic advantage that's quite asymmetric that we have for Bitcoin relative to gold, right?
Four to one in just present holdings and probably an additional, I don't know, five to one in terms of how fast it's going to go.
So maybe that's a 20 to one relative advantage between allowing gold to go to, say, five or six or $10,000 and allowing Bitcoin to go to a million or two million dollars.

(01:14:17):
And then you up in a world where gold is still probably the primary reserve asset.
Bitcoin is like a close second in terms of a hard asset, right?
I think in that environment, though, this isn't the end of the dollar, right?
Like gold at 10,000 and Bitcoin at a million or 2 million isn't the end of the dollar.
I think that's what people sometimes, you know, sort of overstate.
Because the dollar is a network.

(01:14:37):
The dollar is as a medium of exchange and unit of account, you know, interpenetrating, you know, global foreign exchange swaps, interest rate forwards, and global trade finance.
It's not going away anytime soon, right?
And even this bullish scenario of Bitcoin in a million dollars is like maybe Bitcoin helps facilitate single-digit percentage points of international trade.
Maybe.

(01:14:58):
And that's still a world with Bitcoin in a million dollars plus.
So I think people need to think about the numbers here.
The numbers matter for these general statements about shifts in the global system.
And I don't think the dollar is going away as a global reserve currency.
I think this geopolitical fracturing, a multi-currency sort of world order in terms of how nations store their wealth, that would be increasingly geopolitically contingent.

(01:15:20):
So the folks that the U.S. can still kind of keep inside its tech tariff and security zone, right, that it kind of re-securitizes, right, and essentially says you want access to our advanced technology, our AI systems and our other spooky stuff.
You want to be protected by a nuclear umbrella. You want the U.S. military to secure global trade.

(01:15:41):
You're going to have to essentially help underwrite that security commons.
And that means you have to hold our debt.
And there's all sorts of complicated negotiations happening right now on that basis, right?
Like with Japan, for example.
There's a reason why Japan and the U.K. are actually buying more debt, right, even though they're kind of not in the best shape themselves.
It's because we're sort of forcing them to.

(01:16:02):
And we might set up like a joint sovereign wealth fund with Japan where we sort of stuff a bunch of long-dated bonds in there.
And it's kind of a – it's an obscured way of kind of doing QE, of sort of monetizing debt.
We're doing a very series of duration swaps.
That's kind of what I would expect is for the treasury market to become less a global market, less a thing that greases global – the global financial system.

(01:16:28):
And I think the senior policymakers in the Trump administration are even saying that that's what they want.
They want to impose like a tax on essentially foreign holders of U.S. bonds.
They want – they don't want there to be this kind of dollar Dutch disease that has undermined the defense industrial base and led to this sort of imbalanced trade system where China has all the manufacturing and we have all the debt, especially when you're rivals.

(01:16:52):
So they want to change that system.
So they both have a strategic policy objective to change that system, to move away from the treasury security as a fundamental collateral liquid and safe asset.
They still want it to be there strong enough within a certain regime where it's kind of like you can impose financial repression on other balance sheets and not your domestic population.
so you know the australians and the japanese and south koreans and the taiwanese and some

(01:17:16):
middle eastern partners and and western europe are are going to be kind of you know depending
depending on how much how clever we are and how much force we have we can kind of you know stuff
this stuff these these uh these losses into their balance sheets but but that's kind of what they're
gonna do they just need to bring debt ggp from 120 to like 70 or 80 so run the economy a little

(01:17:36):
bit hot um i think a lot of it's also potentially like how bad like how much how much pain they have
to impose is is like how actually does ai play in here like do we actually get um the massive
productivity breakthrough right uh with with robotics and ai um and uh i mean at the end of

(01:17:57):
day in the 2030s all this conversation is going to be moot anyways because a lot of things are
are going to happen that we've talked about in other in other episodes that are going to be
They going to render the sort of fiscal projections out of 2040 like you guys are smoking Like yeah we on a bunch of hockey and uh the 2030s are are when you know all this conversation becomes a bit moot yeah well i and i want to be conscious

(01:18:21):
of your time because there are certain topics that uh that it would be inappropriate of me to
to dive into with little time left uh as i would want to make sure you have the the full time to
get into them. But is it by the way, you still have another few minutes? Yeah, I'm good. I'm good.
Yeah, 15 minutes. Okay. So I mean, maybe we can we can get into one of them a little bit because

(01:18:44):
we've I appreciate the context on kind of Bitcoin and somebody in the Noster chat soap miner pointed
out that this is the kind of gold Bitcoin back and forth is, you know, a modern bimetalism,
almost that we might see. So I thought that that was an interesting way to frame it, I guess,
a physical and digital bimetallism. But I would be remiss if I didn't ask you a couple of

(01:19:11):
questions. The first question is, I just wanted to send the regards from the Vibes Capital Management
team, because they did want to say hello. And I'm just curious if your Vibes have detected anything,
Has there been any shift in your vibe towards Vibes Capital Management recently?
And yeah, are you detecting a Vibes shift?

(01:19:34):
I mean, I think, I mean, if I'm going to be honest, and I love Steven, but the Vibes, they've sold out.
You know, they've been captured by the Bitcoin capital machine.
You know, they're going around just sort of selling Bitcoin treasury companies to every equity market in the world with sort of trapped capital.
And here I am. I'm just, you know, thus big Zarathustra on my mountaintop reading reading the willows.

(01:20:01):
And, you know, I don't I don't post vibes. I make the vibes. Right.
I consciously steer, you know, the path of history just by just subtle winks and nods.
Right. You don't have to post about the vibes to make the vibes. The vibes are ineffable. Right.
You know, Wittgenstein, you know, said, you know, there of one cannot speak there of one must be silent.

(01:20:21):
right sort of this sort of uh the ineffable esoteric domain in which we all operate um if
it can be named like the dow that can be named is not the dow right the vibe that can be named is
not the vibe so there's sort of a sort of an inherent contradiction in vibes capital management
like what do you what are you managing right like it's it's it's it's sand in your fingers right
and so i just i uh i just i go i go with the wind and uh that's my vibe

(01:20:47):
that's going to be a great sound bite that I'll have to clip out for for Stephen I appreciate that
um so the other one and I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about this too and you let me know
what level of because again I know you know in 15 minutes that's not uh enough time to do this
justice but I obviously uh you're mentioning things you know uh projections into the 2030s

(01:21:13):
being or 2040s being somewhat moot and I assume that one of the things that you're referring
there too is let's say uh heretofore uh clandestine knowledge uh coming to be widely publicly available
and what sorts of radical changes that may force on the world is that with me beating around the

(01:21:34):
bush there is that one of the things you're referring to there yeah we have uh i don't know
uh i don't know how much time but uh there's a recognition coming about the position of humanity
in the cosmos and the nature of human consciousness and the structure of reality that we're going
to have to get smart on.
That may or may not be disruptive to certain metaphysical models of reality.

(01:21:57):
Certainly it will be disruptive to our sense of what's possible technologically and the
parameter space in which humans may be able to operate as long as we don't kill each other
or eliminate the prospects for future development.
So we're kind of going through the crucible in the next five or 10 years.
and I don't exactly know the path dependency there,

(01:22:18):
but I'm pretty sure the end state is either we make it through
and we have a much broader sense of ourselves
and the possibility space for a civilization
or we don't make it.
And that's kind of an analogy to how people talk about
the AI conversation of this kind of singularity moment,
the alignment problem.
If we get super intelligence,
it's either going to uplift all of us

(01:22:40):
into some sort of transcendental nirvana,
explore the future light cone,
imprint humans' moral aspirations
on the face of the cosmos.
That's kind of the megalomania in San Francisco.
I think that's a bit delusional,
but it's gesturing at a sense
of the hyperbolic bifurcation

(01:23:01):
that's in our near future.
We are on a series of exponentials here.
And then there's this sort of long-running current, right? So the UFO question, right, has been kind of draped in lore and social taboo and stigma. The U.S. government is right now going through a series of agonizing internal tumult over how and to what degree to talk about it publicly.

(01:23:27):
And it's not just a U.S. government question. It's a global question. It's a question that involves religious institutions and our financial system as well.
So there's a lot that's baked into it. There's a lot of historical things that I think the powers that be would rather not talk about.
But there's a fundamental question here that we're going to have to own up to, which is the reality of non-human intelligence and advanced technology that's in our possession that we've been studying intensively for many decades, may or may not have derived technology from.

(01:23:55):
that's shrouded from public view.
And so this is the knot that's sort of tied up behind the scenes.
And no one that touches that knot has figured out a way to untie it in a clean way.
And so it just sits there as a very, very tight knot that only folks that touch it know about.

(01:24:16):
But there's institutionalization happening with this topic now.
if you're in certain circles talking about it with certain people,
there's kind of a recognition, just this is real.
And there's sort of coded language that people, you know,
in systems of official government, research institutions,
other parts of the social graph use to talk about the subject

(01:24:40):
as if it's a thing, and it is a thing.
And that's, we have this sort of two layers of the conversation.
We have the public conversation, which is very much absolute epistemic.
black hole or just just nonsense like if you try to follow uap twitter or listen to most uap podcasts
it's just you know the signal to noise ratio is not good um and and so we have this very

(01:25:05):
difficult environment where if you're curious and you're open-minded we think a lot of bitcoiners
are about you know what's really going on in the world or you know they want to think for
themselves they want to get to ground truth they want to like actually you know assess for
themselves the state of things it's a very difficult subject to do that in because you would
you know go to are like fraught with all sorts of grift or propaganda or you know manipulation

(01:25:32):
outright fiction or schizophrenia so uh i don't i don't begrudge anyone who approaches the subject
with inherent skepticism and um distance uh i'll just say like you know you should try
or or you know it's like with bitcoin it's like you'll kind of get the truth at the price you

(01:25:53):
deserve um and uh it could be you know a few years down the line and it could come come as a bit of a
surprise or you could adapt yourself epistemically to a sense of of what's going on in in the world
i don't have i don't have full ground truth i make no pretense to understand what's really
happening or like what's the, you know, meta structure for this whole topic.

(01:26:17):
But I know enough to know that there's a there there and there's a path we're on where more
of that topic is going to become part of our public conversation, our political discourse,
our policy decision making at the national leadership level and across the world.
It's just like with Bitcoin two, three years ago, like starting BPI, like with David and

(01:26:39):
grant, it was like this thesis that Bitcoin is going to be a serious and important thing. And
it's not going to go away. And it's going to be increasingly, I think it's going to land on the
doorstep of these national leaders. So you need to build kind of this sense-making apparatus,
white papers and think tanks and fellows and serious discourse, so that when the political
system kind of wakes up to this thing that you know is real, there's like a prepared body of

(01:27:01):
highly credible analysis and individuals that have professionalized the topic enough to kind of meet
them at that moment. Right now, the UAP topic, that doesn't really exist. There's some nascent
attempts to try to build something like that. But it's also, I think, a necessary feature.
Just like with Bitcoin, I think you kind of had to have this dynamic interplay between

(01:27:22):
the non-government, civil society, think tanks, scholars, professionalization of the topic
had to kind of happen for the government as a set of institutions to kind of treat it seriously.
and then it kind of like reinforced each other
to now the vice president talking about
Bitcoin as a strategic asset and referencing a Bitcoin think tank.
Right?
I think the same process is going to play out with UAPs.

(01:27:43):
It's a bit of a lag where
parts of the government want this
to become a part of the public conversation,
but they can't really do that.
It's kind of a chicken-the-egg problem
because they can't actually, you know,
reveal what they otherwise know
until the civil society has professionalized the subject,
until it's moved from the taboo into the normal regime,
until the Overton window is, you know, stretched enough.
And you have new institutions, new parts of the elite political system, financial system, power structure that are not part of the inner core but are kind of been socialized to the reality of this phenomenon.

(01:28:19):
That it kind of builds a bridge between the black world and the rest of society.
And so you need to kind of have those things mature to have then the conversation go to another level.
And I think we're in that, we're like, essentially UAPs are kind of where Bitcoin was maybe, I don't know, depends on my mood.
Sometimes it's 2013, sometimes it's like 2017, 2018, right?

(01:28:41):
Maybe optimistically like 2020, I don't know.
But there's definitely, we're definitely not as close, right, in terms of the normalization process.
But I think it's going to pick up, right?
Just like with Bitcoin, it wasn't like a linear process.
It was like fringe, dark web money, a little bit of institutionalization, a little bit of normalization, but still like 2020, 2021, you're talking about Bitcoin at Thanksgiving dinner.

(01:29:06):
Your aunt is looking at you like you're cross-eyed.
Like, what?
Are you sure?
What's going on with Johnny?
We're still at that stage with UAPs.
If you talk about this subject in most conversations, you still get the bug-eyed or kind of the squinty look.
It's like, what's going on there?
and I'll just say like
maybe I specialized in like

(01:29:28):
riding that part of the Overton window
as it kind of comes in and I've kind of
detected those little subtle shifts
of when a thing is about to move
right and there's
alpha in that right personal psychological
alpha that may actually be real alpha I don't know
and
I don't know like I have no
predictions but it is

(01:29:48):
it is
I don't know it's funny
It's like people ask me, okay, you're involved in both kind of the Bitcoin stuff and now, you know, increasingly so on the UAP side.
And like Bitcoin is a very serious thing.
And I think Bitcoin monetizing to parity with gold is a serious thing.
That's obviously the subject of my professional work.
But if I zoom out right over the next five, ten years, like what's the most important thing?

(01:30:11):
It's actually not the Bitcoin stuff.
It's this UAP stuff.
Like this is the thing that's going to change the lives of my children much more so than Bitcoin.
Bitcoin will give them a good life, but this thing will change the future of human civilization.
And that's a tough deal for a lot of people to swallow because that degree of radical change is not something we like.
And that's why the AI conversation is so fraught because you have everyone that's an AI doomer or a singulitarian or a skeptic.

(01:30:42):
And everyone forms these radicalized opinions on these extreme exponential curves.
and when that's the nature of exponential is like oh no it's going to asymptote to here
and so we have bitcoin on this sort of hockey stick we have ai on this hockey stick and then
coming shortly after that we're going to have this other hockey stick of maybe more social
recognition so that's a bit of a you know like a meta conversation it's a little bit too much

(01:31:06):
i get into the weeds of like why i believe that to be true or why the listener should believe
anything like that is like a plausible thing to pay attention to i'm just saying
it's how i've oriented myself and i've seen things that i can't
well no i i appreciate one of these days we we do need to have a singularly focused conversation

(01:31:27):
on that that gives it the time it deserves i mean do you think that in terms of the larger
disclosure in terms of the uh the like government conversation and being willing to actually
open some of this stuff up to the general public, is some of that just going to be a function of
the existing entrenched elite political class, you know, dying off and retiring out? Like,

(01:31:52):
is some of that just like, they've been involved, or they've, and there's some that have known about
this for so long, that it's just like, well, you know, I don't want to oversee this, the actual
disclosure of because I know the chaos it's going to cause. And I just don't want that to be on my
watch. I want to go, you know, I want to go gently into the night, basically.
Yeah, and there's a lot of things that are happening at the same time. Like an important

(01:32:14):
one is the sort of generational cycle shift, right? We talked about institutions kind of
decaying. And you can imagine the apparatus of secrecy around this topic is such an institution
that has decayed, right? So it went from being a pretty hermetically sealed, government-controlled
set of programs in the 50s and 60s to being kind of privatized, right? Like all things
were privatized in the 70s and 80s, became hyper-capitalistic and even more privatized

(01:32:38):
in the 90s and kind of went rogue to a certain extent.
And then millennials started getting into some of those programs.
And we are do-gooder millennials who are taught from a young age.
When we see something wrong, we go tell the principal, right?
And like, this is not okay.
And so now we've had a bunch of whistleblowers come out, right?
David Grush and other folks that are not public are like these millennial do-gooder whistleblowers

(01:33:00):
who are like, this is not cool, guys.
Like, this isn't a secret that we should keep from the American public or from the world.
And they're like, this needs to come out.
And so they started talking to the senior staff on the Senate Select Community Intelligence and senior staffers.
And they started to hold these secret hearings and then started to pass laws in 2021 and 2022, National Defense Authorization Acts, year after year.

(01:33:23):
And now we've gotten to the point where it's kind of this – the institutional apparatus has kind of decayed.
And they've lost the ability to kind of hold the line.
And it's kind of fragmented.
And then the fragments in different parts of this very complicated system that are integrated with our security state and our research development apparatus across different parts of the country that specialize in different things take different sides of this disclosure question.

(01:33:48):
And so there's this factional fight taking place.
How much do we want to – new power?
They want to sort of co-opt that system for their own purposes.
They don't want disclosure.
They just want – they want a piece of the action.
They want to get in on it.
They want to displace the Lockheeds and the Boeings, and they want to have Palantir and Anderil take over.
So that's one line.

(01:34:10):
I wouldn't call that a disclosure line.
That's just a new boss, same as the old boss.
And then there's the political faction, political tier, which wants to get control over these programs, which have not been under political control.
And that's an accountability question, not a disclosure question.
So that's like the Gang of Eight, Senator Rounds, Senator Schumer, Gillibrand, Rubio before he went to become Secretary of State, Todd Young, Martin Heinrich.

(01:34:37):
These are the folks that have sponsored this Disclosure Act on UAPs.
It's going to be reintroduced by Senator Rounds this year.
So there's a process taking place.
political process for legislation to try to create a more formal system to inventory all the material
and UAP records and then make a controlled disclosure campaign plan recommendation to the

(01:34:59):
president from a nine-member panel of sort of eminence grass, national security officials,
economists, members of civil society, foreign relations experts. Like this is written in law.
You can read the UAP Disclosure Act and see references to technologies of unknown origin and non-human intelligence and biological materials.

(01:35:21):
This is the U.S. Senate telling you, like, this is what we're dealing with, what we're all dealing with here.
And so this is, I think, a knot being – it's like a lump in the throat of the U.S. government at the moment here because there's also a lot of manipulation taking place between different levels of the bureaucracy to try to gain advantage.
and to gain protections for themselves, right?

(01:35:44):
If you've done illegal stuff,
you want to get, you know, immunity agreements.
There's a massive, you know,
long-running FBI investigation
that's going on into this stuff.
It's a small team, but they've dug into it.
And yeah, it's just, it's playing out,
like on the political level and the bureaucratic level.

(01:36:05):
And then, but, you know,
like I'm a strategic advisor
with this organization called Skywasher,
which is staffed by some individuals
that have had personal experience
with this subject and this phenomenon
as elements of the U.S. government
as kind of security apparatus.
And it's based on the premise

(01:36:26):
that the sky isn't classified.
And you can go out and collect information
on the subject independent of the government.
So you can advocate for the government
to disclose this information,
political process, activism,
etc and then there's just the public discovery part go out and collect data on anomalous objects
do that scientific analysis bring that information to the public's awareness and move the conversation

(01:36:49):
forward independent of government government disclosure efforts and so i think both are
happening and they're potentially mutually reinforcing um but we're just starting that
process so remains to be seen you know um how far it will go um how it might evolve um but uh but
But once you hit, it's kind of a, it's like you're at this, it's like activation threshold.

(01:37:10):
Like a neuron doesn't fire until there's a certain density of, you know, calcium ions in the synaptic cleft or whatever, right?
Like you need to have that threshold reached.
And then boom, it goes.
And so up until you reach that threshold, you're looking at the system.
You're like, not much is happening.
Like this is probably not a real thing.
Like I see a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

(01:37:31):
There's lots of psyops.
It's probably a bunch of noids.
It's cover for a stealth research program, F47.
Yeah, you can always tell a narrative to yourself up to a certain point that kind of dismisses the seriousness of the subject.
And we haven't reached that point where it's like the cascade is triggered, right?
The preference falsification that everyone kind of has goes away.

(01:37:53):
But it's hard to predict when you reach that point.
But like we are continually adding, you know, more neurotransmitters into that cleft.
and we're reaching some point, I don't know what that threshold is,
where, boom, it goes.
And it's sort of like with Bitcoin.
It's a gradually then suddenly.
It's like, whoa.
And it's kind of, there's a matter of contingency here.

(01:38:15):
Larry Fink getting orange-pilled
and certain dinners happening with certain political operatives
and then Trump deciding this is the thing he's going to support
and then, like, the dominoes fall, right?
And it was like, that was a highly nonlinear,
non-deterministic process, highly contingent.
Like, certain things had to happen in the right way
and they had to be amplified and not, you know, smothered.
And then the world had to kind of evolve in that branch, right?

(01:38:40):
And we're kind of, I see where things are happening in that direction.
I mean, I think I'm optimistic over the medium term.
Tactically, I think this administration is not ready to talk about this publicly right now.
I just don't see it.
There's a lot of churn at the national security level.
I know that a lot of the national leadership know about the subject.

(01:39:01):
You know, folks in charge of these intelligence and defense and security agencies.
This is not like this is the thing.
This isn't like, oh, like they're aware of this.
It's just a is this a tomorrow problem?
And there's a collective responsibility issue is like, all right, everyone of those officials wants to be briefed on the subject, but they don't own it.

(01:39:22):
So you're in this situation where like there's this bizarre, you know, kind of tension in the air where everyone knows that everyone else knows, but nobody wants to own the hot potato here because then it's like you own it.
And that's – I have some sympathy for these officials because it's like not clear what the upside is for them.

(01:39:45):
Like a lot of other things to deal with.
This is not like a political winner in many ways.
And it's not clearly in their portfolio.
It's like this topic stretches across much more than any sort of domain you have in a security responsibility or economic responsibility.
Like it's a – it's not even a government responsibility.
It's like a – it's all encompassing.

(01:40:08):
We don't have a UAP department.
And so this is what they're trying to get to with this UAP Disclosure Act is something like a formal institutional mechanism to handle the accountability question, take possession of these materials, and then handle the disclosure question in a more democratic fashion that's accountable to the government and to the public.

(01:40:31):
We'll see.
I mean, I don't know what the prospects for the UAP Disclosure Act are.
You know, the opposition that was there inside the House is gone, some of it at least.
But it'd be interesting to see where the White House stands.
Senator Rounds is a champion on this issue.

(01:40:51):
He's shown a lot of courage.
I applaud him.
Folks should, you know, just Google Senator Rounds UAPs and see what he said.
I've heard private remarks by him, and he knows what's going on.
And he's just one senator, though.
Um, but he's, he's not, he's not going to stop talking about this stuff and he's got
a bill that he's going to push for it.

(01:41:11):
So it's like with Bitcoiners, it's like, you know, folks that care to engage politically
can.
Same thing with UAP.
It's like, if you care, you can engage, you can talk to your congressman and be like,
I think you should support this bill.
Um, there's a, you know, there's, uh, other things going on, but, uh, yeah, I mean, it's,
uh, it's a subject I think is, is, is the most important subject that exists.

(01:41:33):
But we've been conditioned with taboo and stigma so that we don't really like to talk about it.
But it's there.
Oh, yeah, we're definitely going to need it.
Once the conference circuit dies down, we'll take some time maybe.
Because I do think maybe it's hard for some Bitcoiners to hear that there is something more important out there than Bitcoin.

(01:41:57):
but you know rest assured i think bitcoin is probably the one of the only monies that's going
to hold up in the world that is to come after some of these seismic shifts and so yeah i'm i'm
interested to see uh i'm interested to see what the white house does have to say on this and if

(01:42:17):
they decide to push it like you said there's a lot of other stuff going on maybe they don't want
to touch it but let's see what happens but i've kept you i've kept you a little long matt and i
appreciate your time here. Looking forward to seeing you in Washington, D.C. Again, for anybody
who's still hanging out in there, and I see we still have a good number of people on Noster,
so shout out to you guys. But bdcpolicysummit.org, promo code Walker, 21% off, no kickbacks for me,

(01:42:41):
just orange pill in the swamp for you. Matt, thank you so much for your time. It is always
a pleasure. And I always leave with more questions than I entered with, which I appreciate.
like a true questioner, a curious mind walker.
I'll see you in DC.
I do my best.
See you, man.
Thanks.

(01:43:06):
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode
of The Bitcoin Podcast.
Remember to subscribe to this podcast
wherever you're watching or listening
and share it with your friends, family,
and strangers on the internet.
Find me on Noster at primal.net slash Walker and this podcast at primal.net slash Titcoin.

(01:43:27):
On X, YouTube, and Rumble, just search at Walker America and find this podcast on X and Instagram
at Titcoin Podcast. Head to the show notes to grab sponsor links, head to substack.com
slash at Walker America to get episodes emailed to you and head to bitcoinpodcast.net for
everything else. Bitcoin is scarce, but podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your

(01:43:53):
scarce time listening to the Bitcoin podcast. Until next time, stay free.
Bitcoin is effectively a liquidity gauge in the global system. And everyone's basically
You're going to have to print the way out of it.

(01:44:13):
There's just no way around it at this point.
So, yeah, number go up.

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