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THE Bitcoin Podcast
Lyn Alden | The Bearish-Bullish Case for Bitcoin: Vibes, Quantum, Cycles, and Sci-Fi
01:28:19
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- [00:00]
A
A failure of a major currency block, a massive campaign of asset seizing can wake people up. A lot of the world just kind of trends toward nihilism lately. It's like a shark that can't stop swimming unless it ironically drowns. For this cycle, I would say, well, anything under 150k would be kind of disappointing as the price goes up every single cycle. OGs sell. If the thesis was true that that was the single biggest thing then in theory you should see that more centralized altcoins that have a clear quantum roadmap they should be getting a very large bid. Crazy thing about the dot com bubble is like even non tech stocks was trading 50 times earnings. The interesting thing about the new chairman proposal is he's dovish on interest rates but he's historically hawkish on balance sheet. There's really no defense for the four year cycle going forward just because the numbers for the having are way smaller than other factors. The tools are built, the system works.
- [00:53]
B
Do you think that there are more potential geopolitical catalysts out there that could drive that or push that adoption forward?
- [01:00]
A
I think a broader issue.
- [01:11]
B
Lyn Alden, welcome back. You have been a repeated guest on this show for which I am very grateful. I think between I don't know if you or Saylor has more total bitcoin macro podcast hours. Somebody should really do an agentic analysis of this to figure it out.
- [01:26]
A
Yeah, it's hard to say. I think he had more of a burst for a while there, but he's been doing a little bit fewer. I mean I've been doing fewer but I think he had a bigger trail off. So I guess if it goes long enough I can take the crown. I don't know.
- [01:38]
B
Yeah, yeah, come back up from the rear there. Well, I'm excited to be talking with you today as always. Got a number of topics I want to get into with you both from the bitcoin side, the macro side. Also want to talk about your new book which has nothing directly to do with bitcoin but is in the sci fi realm. I want to start out though perhaps just on the bitcoin side of things. Things have been weird. We saw a year's worth, a year's plus worth of choppy crab market sideways price action. We're now down in the 60 time of recording right now, 67,000 thereabouts. And while we all like to say, you know, price is the least interesting thing about bitcoin, it is also its greatest marketing tool and so just kind of want to get your general Vibe, check on. Is this where you expected us to be right now from a fiat price Federal Reserve note conversion perspective? Is this what you expected to see sort of in, you know, in February 2026 or did this defy some of your expectations as well?
- [02:40]
A
I think we're moderately lower than where I would have guessed. I usually am on the record of kind of being like a bearish bull, which is I'm generally on the more conservative side of the price spectrum. I try not to even give too many price predictions. When I do, it's usually a pretty conservative one and sometimes we undershoot even those. I mean the first time I gave a price prediction was back in 2020. Bitcoin was like the 10k range. And I said I could think you could hit a trillion market cap which at the time puts you around 50,000. We got to there and I said well I think it can go to 100k. And then we only got 69k for that cycle. Rolled over and then when pushing her quarter to give a price target I would generally for this cycle I would say well anything under 150k would be kind of disappointing and we only got the 126 so far. So I would classify this much like last time as kind of a semi disappointing cycle. And, and from what we can tell, I mean most of it is just there's a kind of a lack of top line demand. So a lot of people kind of look for reasons and we could potentially go over some of those reasons. But I think at the end of the day the core one is this cycle just didn't attract a lot of individual Hodlers basically. Obviously the ETFs unlocked some interest from people that have brokerage accounts and otherwise would like some bitcoin access and just kind of had limitations before. Obviously the treasury companies were major buyers of cycle. But because we didn't really have sovereigns come in, which I think that that expectation was too bullish. But then also we didn't really have a ton of retail come in. There's a ton of other things they can invest in like AI related things. When bitcoin gets big enough, it's not necessarily the fastest horse anymore. And so it relies on its other qualities like the fact that you can self custody it that actually, you know, it's not just a number on a screen like a stock. It is something that more like physical gold but in digital form that you can use, you can send, you can pay with. And if those features go through a cycle, just not being of particular interest to people. So we didn't see a lot of Chinese buyers, we didn't see a lot of American buyers. We didn't, you know, it just kind of, I would say it stagnated this cycle. And I think a broader issue is that one, there were some misaligned expectations early on. So for example, bitcoin slightly overperformed my expectations. In 2024, I was actually on a panel in the New York Stock Exchange and Michael Green was hosting it. Nick Carter was on the panel, I was on the panel. Eric from Bloomberg was on the panel and they were saying could Bitcoin at 100k this year. I said, well bitcoin can do a lot. Bitcoin has these moments where it does crazy things. I was like, we only had a few months to go so it's like it wouldn't be my base case. I think we're at like 60k at the time or something. So I'm not going to call for a price move that big that quickly. But I wouldn't be shocked. But because of the election we did, we kind of pulled forward quite a bit of demand because we had this new information, an administration that's going to be supposedly more friendly to the asset. But then in early 2025, the biggest question I got on podcast for a while was what do you think about a sovereign bitcoin reserve? And my view was I think they'll ring fence the coins they have, maybe buy some, but I wouldn't all the kind of calls for half a million coins or a million coins. I'd rather not price that into my expectations. I'd rather be surprised to the upside. But I think a lot of people did have that expectation. So when you didn't really see the US or other sovereigns come in, you didn't see just influx. I think people had kind of over enthused expectations. And for me, even though it undershot the expectation, it's mainly just because retail didn't come in this cycle.
- [06:24]
B
Yeah. And again, what's the old equation is like happiness is expectations minus reality.
- [06:30]
A
Right.
- [06:30]
B
So just, you know, or perhaps it's the other way around. I forget. But point being, yeah, people I think saw it seems I haven't been in bitcoin that long. Right. It wasn't after ignoring. I've ignored bitcoin for longer than I've been in bitcoin and but even in my limited time in bitcoin I've noticed that it really seems like there is that, that point where everybody's convinced it's going to keep going higher and nothing's going to stop it. And that's typically the point where it takes a dump. And then there's that other point on the converse side where everybody seems to think it's going to keep going lower. You know, you felt this in 2022 when it was around. It was at bouncing around 19K forever. Carla sang a song about 19K. You know, that was how often we bounced around 19K. And it was it's going to 10, it's going to 5 or you know, it's going to 0, negative 0 if you're Peter Zehan. And we ended up around 16, you know, only a little bit lower from that. It feels like we're at a similar point right now. Not based on any analysis that I've done, just a pure gut check where it seems that everybody, both bitcoin, bulls, bears, no coiners alike, has basically gotten to a point where they're saying, you know, bitcoin's going significantly lower. 40, you know, 58K, 48K, 28K, whatever it might be. Where do you stand with this? Are you still kind of in a wait and see period where you're saying, okay, yeah, we could have some significant drawdown from here? Or do you think most of the kind of sell pressure has been exhausted at this point?
- [07:56]
A
The shortage is still to wait and see mode. I look for some sort of price confirmation before trying to make a bottom call. We started to see a limited one like in December, January. So for a while I was like, okay, we had a sell off in November. We started to kind of hold momentum, started to kind of build again. And I was like, you know, there's a good chance this was the bottom. But then of course January came and we had that waterfall lower. So that kind of reset the board for like the next few months. And historically bitcoin does not make V shaped bottoms. The exception kind of was spring of 2020 when just hyper stimulus made a lot of things look like a V shaped bottom. But usually because bitcoin is not a stock, it doesn't have like an earnings announcement where they can come out and surprise you. The upside and just every analyst has to upd Wall street buys instead. It only really bottoms when kind of fast money. Weekly held coins over time rotate enough into strongly held hands and then it just, then it creates that supply squeeze. Basically it becomes very tight. So it only takes kind of like just selling gets exhausted. It only takes a tiny new spark of buyers to restart the cycle. And then obviously A rising price gets new buyers on board. It kind of momentum creates its own cycle. And that because of that kind of lack of catalyst, unless some, you know, Mag seven stock or sovereign just decides to ape into usually has that more gradual bottom. So the short answer, I don't know if we have, if this is the bottom or if we have like another waterfall lower. I would say that this, the sentiment is lower than other bear markets I've seen. It was, it's. I mean in, in November 2022, literally when FTX was like collapsing and the price was in the teens, I was at Pacific Bitcoin, I think you were, you were there. You were there, right? All the conferences kind of merged in my head. Yeah, it was great. The energy was high, wasn't it? Super high. We were. Joe, I was joking on stage. Like FTX is collapsing and look how happy people are here. Because if you don't own crypto, if you're not kind of levered, then you're, you know, everyone was quite convinced and correctly so, that this was just a temporary, you know, part of the cycle. What I'm seeing this time is there's more kind of exhaustion, I think. I think after two kind of weak cycles, a lot of even longer term holders are a little bit tired, you could say. I think it kind of, I think the biggest risk people perceive is that it kind of ran out of like near term catalysts. Right. So it's like before you, there's always kind of another big thing to look for, like say the ETFs coming out, the spot ETFs and things like that. They're going to unlock new demand and at this point they're like, okay, we've unlocked all the, all the frictions and it just comes down to whether people want to buy the asset or not. I think if anything the joke is we need more podcasts. But there's, I think that's actually true in the sense that the tools are built, the system works, devs are still both on the foundational layer, but also all the companies and stuff building out the broader ecosystem. A lot of that is in really good place. But people got to want to use it. They have to know the benefits of it, see that it's available, know how to use it, not be turned off by the complexity of it, or perceive that the culture about it is something that is just other than them, that it's, you know, only like, only hardcore libertarians like it. And otherwise it's not for me, like whatever the branding issue is or the technical complexity issue, I think that's actually
- [11:29]
B
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- [16:05]
A
Right.
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B
As those currencies hyperinflated. But do you think that that is just one of those things that, you know, from a medium exchange standpoint, the average person just doesn't care. Like that doesn't actually move the needle for them. It seems like if we heard this kind of news, 4 million merchants being turned on by, by Square, if we heard that in 2020, 2021, that would have been massive news. As it was, I feel like it was kind of just like, huh, well that's neat anyway. Or people just didn't know about it at all. What's your, what's your take on that?
- [16:33]
A
I do think that was a massive announcement and I do think that in general, Jack's done more for Bitcoin in the past, call it five years, than almost anyone when it comes to defending devs from legal attacks, when it comes to all sorts of supporting it with his own companies. And I think that was a tremendous one. I think that was huge. Also, river just came out with a report today, kind of updated information on some lightning volumes with generally pretty high volumes shown. I think it's a matter of kind of scale, right? So bitcoin as depending on the price, I mean a trillion to a 2 trillion plus asset depending on where it was in cycle this time, the overall kind of velocity. So when you look at kind of how much volume happens and then compared to the size of the, the ownership, it's still not super high. And the numbers we see in lightning are, I mean they're good, they're in the billions over any decent period of time as far as we can tell. I mean the cool thing is it's so private and decentralized, you actually can't just say okay, here's how much volume is happening in the lightning network. You can. Only a company like river and Partners can go out and say, okay, the network we can see you have a pretty good snapshot and here's kind of our estimated volumes and, and you kind of go from there. But I think overall the volumes are healthy, especially for what it is, which is it's still a young volatile asset. It still needs upward volatility if it's going to grow to become like a long term store of value. Like if it's going to become a big asset, it needs upward volatility. Anytime you get upward volatility, you get leverage euphoria and downside volatility, which kind of gives it a pretty long headwind against denominating prices in it, getting your paycheck denominated in it, not just paid in it, but denominated in it, having any sort of debts or liabilities in it. And so it's this kind of asset that is challenging to use for near term working capital because you can literally get cut in half like it has recently. And it's instead mostly great for long term savings that you can also pay with. And it's very hard for anyone to stop you from doing that. I think that opportunity set is massive and I think the medium exchange aspect is essential for it. That's what makes it not just a stock on a screen. The fact that you could even if you're not doing so. I think that people say that because volumes are low, that's a bad sign. I say, well, the optionality is a huge deal. If I have a gold coin, I'm like 99% sure that whenever I die and whoever gets that coin Nexus, I'm not going to melt it down for jewelry for decades. I'm not going to use it for industrial purposes for decades. That coin represents Optionality that I don't intend to ever actually use that option. And with Bitcoin being able to send it for a lot of people, it's just that optionality that you have your Bitcoin and there might be a bunch of reasons why you don't spend it. You say, okay, well it's a taxable event. It's, you know, not all merchants accept it. All the, you know, accounting complexity because of that tax issue, just multiple reasons like that. But the fact that you could is actually a really big deal. That optionality that it gives every holder, every self custodial holder is a massive deal. And then those who actually use it on a regular basis especially, I mean NOSTR is like one of the biggest use cases in terms of the number of kind of small transactions. But obviously more broadly than that, I think that's a massive deal for the network and I think that shows the network's working.
- [20:10]
B
Yeah, it almost makes me more bullish that there is such a disconnect from some of the news that we saw. And that was the biggest, I think maybe takeaway for me coming out of this last year was it didn't matter what the news was, the price wasn't moving as a function of news. We've seen river put out a, to give them another shout out. They put out a, Another Interesting graph recently. I don't know if you saw it, about the rotation from individuals to sort of institutional buyers. I'm thinking a lot of that was probably a function of OG selling. We know there were several very public cases, the Galaxy whale with like 80,000 Bitcoin. Presumably they have some more too. I imagine at least a couple of them lying around. So there was some massive, massive volume that went from OG Hodler hands that have, hey, I mean it's impressive they held it for that long. That is truly a, a testament to, to their fortitude. But that's rotating into institutional hands. Right. So it's almost, you know, it's dumping on Wall Street a little bit. So at least the TOM jump swings both ways that way. But, but you saw this sort of rotation and it seemed that, that at least in my mind was most likely one of the just primary drivers around this. I think it's difficult for us to kind of comprehend the actual volume that some of these OGs can move. You know we talk about, yeah, MicroStrategy is buying every week in large size, but you've got one OG whale that disposes of 80,000 bitcoin and that wipes out months and months and months of their buys. From a sell side perspective, is that kind of how you've looked at this as well? Or do you also think it's just a matter of look, the, like the excitement wasn't there. You didn't have the retail FOMO there. Maybe the retail FOMO was in treasury stocks. I don't know. How do you, how do you think about that?
- [21:47]
A
I think the, I mean the OG selling is one of the biggest factors. So I guess the two biggest factors are basically top line demand from all sources. Whether it's retail, whether it's retail owning through shares in an ETF or corporation, institutions buying into those shares and stuff. So all that kind of institutional retail demand, that top line demand, that's probably the single biggest factor. And then as, as the price goes up, every single cycle OG sell, they usually, you know, they got bitcoin, it goes up depending on how OG they are. 10x20x100x more, it goes from 5% of the net worth to 95% of the net worth in some cases. And then some of them have families, some of them want to consume more, some of them want to diversify. They say I don't want 95% of my net worth is now substantial in one asset. I mean now I can diversify in a couple other things. I can get real estate, I can get equities. Whatever you do see that selling pressure into bull markets, liquid high price markets. And one of the narratives I've seen this time is that there's an unusual amount of OG selling. Statistically I push back on that because every cycle there's OG selling. It happens every single bull cycle, for example, and it depends on how you measure but the number of coins that haven't moved on chain for a year and then that metric, that's not been a particularly strong change of hands this time compared to past cycles. Currently we're near all time highs for the percentage of coins that haven't moved in five years or more. And so you do get these individual massive whale sellers and just the broader, just kind of shark level sellers around, but that happens every cycle. And then also because bitcoin is not a 5 year old asset or a 10 year old asset anymore, it's a 17 year old asset. Bitcoin, kind of the spectrum of buyers that even count as OG at this point is bigger. There's just more people that have been holding for five plus years, call it a cycle or two at least, that can then sell into that. So you can actually have more OG sellers In terms of the number of sellers, the number of bitcoin they're selling, and yet as a percentage of older coins is actually not really elevated. So statistically I don't really kind of the bearish narratives like OGs are becoming disillusioned in it or something. There's actually statistically no evidence of that. I mean, there's always an anecdote like this whale sold for this reason. Sure. But statistically this hasn't really been an unusual selling environment for OGs. So I think OG selling pressure is kind of what exhausts the cycle every time, which is that there's new demand, there's price euphoria, there's OG sellers, and eventually that gets exhausted on the buy side. And then the reverse happens on the, on the bottom in the, in the sell side. And so I think the OG selling was a key factor this time. But I think the, the reason we only got to say 126 rather than having that kind of peak out at say 150 or 200, I think was just because top line demand was on the weaker side.
- [24:56]
B
So you don't think OG selling is driven by Quantum's imminent cracking of bitcoin?
- [25:02]
A
I do not. I think there's more data we can look into in this. So for example, if the thesis was true that that was the single biggest thing, as some analysts are saying, like if that was the single biggest factor of this cycle, then in theory you should see that more centralized altcoins that have a clear quantum roadmap, because they can decentralize, they can do that, or ones that are already semi quantum resilient, they should be getting a very large bid. Right. If that was the key reason, then you should see pretty big differentiation between the most decentralized one that has a pretty tough time getting quantum resilient, which is bitcoin, and tight block space, which of course limits quantum resilient signature sizes. And there's all sorts of complexities. If we ever want to make this quantum resilient versus ones that are in a better position because of their centralization and other factors become more quantum resilient. We haven't really seen that performance gap. So I think now on the other stance, where I give that some credit, is that I have it on good authority from very high level institutions that that was a factor in some buying decisions by large pools of capital, which is any institution comes in, they say, okay, there's a bear case, a base case and a bull case for what bitcoin can do. And of the bear Case they have catalysts like what if the US bans it, what if quantum breaks it? You know, they have all the, all the fud. Then on the bull case they have whatever, you know, sovereign, whatever base case it is what it is. Now if, if they get a little spooked by the quantum side, it kind of fattens their bear case to some extent. So they say they might have put in 5%, they put in 3%, they might have had a price target averaging 200K. And they say, well, because of this left tail risk that we can't really, we have total quantifying, we're going to bring that down to 150k. And so for example, one major, major institution said that basically people went from like 5% of institutions were asking about quantum risk to 30%. And that was given to me before the peak. So I would guess that that number for them probably got to 40 or 50%. So I do think that that was a non trivial variable in, we call it kind of smart capital that would, knows how to ask these things. But I don't think that was like B factor. I think it was just a factor
- [27:26]
B
among many, just part of that overall kind of decision weight weighting that they're doing and trying to figure out, okay, what is this actually what makes sense for us at this moment?
- [27:35]
A
Yes, yeah, basically I think whether or not the technical risk is real in any sort of timeline that matters, I would say the perception of that risk was a non trivial variable.
- [27:44]
B
Yeah, that makes sense. And okay, so smart money aside, in terms of dumb money, US retail, what do you, what do you think that it takes to move the needle in terms of really driving up the number of retail investors, participants, whatever you'd like to call them into holding Bitcoin, is this just somewhat of a function of education time and it's kind of a slow and steady grind? Or do you think that there are more, you know, there are potential geopolitical catalysts out there even that could drive that or push that adoption forward. Because I think you're exactly right that we didn't really see this massive retail interest this past, you know, these past couple of years. It just hasn't been there. You can feel that it's different, right?
- [28:29]
A
Yeah. And I think people are very, I think people like, instead of they often like they'll be against a government, for example, when the opposition's in charge, but then in favor of the same government when their party's in charge. And rather than just kind of saying like there's a lot of variables that can happen where I want to self custody my own money and whether it's us, whether it's multiple places in Europe and elsewhere. There is actually like we have in kind of our bitcoin bubble a little bit more natural skepticism toward kind of structures of authority and the ways that they go corrupt. And we're kind of in the rabbit hole. The average person is actually pretty comfortable often especially in developed markets with their legal standing and their kind of the security of their assets that they have. And so I think analyzing to people or getting people to understand why gold bugs faces for decades, why you might want to hold your own hard monies and not just either put an ETF or not just not own it entirely and just be entirely in stocks and bonds and your house. That was always a marketing issue essentially. And now the bitcoin, it's got many advantages, but it's still the same kind of fundamental marketing problem, which is there's a certain percentage of people that are kind of just naturally kind of libertarian adjacent or trusting of authority minimized or whatever the Venn diagrams of people in this field are. There's like a people that are naturally proposed. And it's like how do you expand that pocket? Because if you're just going on price when bitcoin was a $10 billion asset or $100 billion asset, it could go up dramatically. But when it's a trillion dollar asset, it's rarely going to be the fastest horse. I mean, we've seen that something as big as silver can move quite substantially. But even that in percentage terms didn't move like Nvidia stock did. For example. I've been holding silver since 16 an ounce. It was nice to see it touch 120. It's a crazy move, but it's still smaller than say the percentage move that bitcoin did from 2020 to 2021. It's a smaller move than some of these RAM stocks or GPU stocks. So the bigger an asset gets, it's less likely to be the absolute best returner. In percentage terms, it's more about risk adjusted returns. And then in Bitcoin's case, unlike a stock, it's more about what its unique attributes can give you. And because we also kind of live in an era of financial nihilism, the fastest horse often means what's the fastest thing I can dabble in in six months. Which is kind of like that temptation of altcoins. Some little micro thing can move and people think they can out trade the pros and they Almost certainly can't. But that's kind of the temptation. It's like, well, I'll just yolo in. It's kind of lotto type gambling rather than having a mindset of I want to own the one with the best security, the best network effect, the best liquidity, that has the best shot at 5, 10, 15 year structural growth, that also has these self custodial properties unlike stocks that can also exhibit similar characteristics. And that, that's just, it's a, it's a challenging marketing thing overall. I think I might have lost track of your initial question, but that's a lot of ramblings about.
- [31:59]
B
No, no, no, that, that, that's fair. And it, it actually kind of brings up another one because you mentioned. Yeah, okay. People have said for a while that bitcoin's going to sort of have these diminishing returns. It's not going to make those multi X moves in a short time frame. But then we saw something like silver, like gold even making massive, you know, adding trillions and trillions to the market cap in a very short period of time. Do you what, I guess, what's your take on that from the perspective of okay, bitcoin's not going to move like something that has a market cap of 10 billion, you know, could potentially move, you know, obviously. But even with it at, you know, trying to get back to $2 trillion market cap might, I don't know how long it's going to take. Does it still have that potential to let's say melt faces, to use the, to use the degen jargon. Like is there still just given what we've seen in silver, given what we've seen in gold, does it still have that ability to make some of those outsized moves? Or do you view it still as more of like will returns like here on out still be diminishing? But you know, what's, I guess what's your read on that from kind of the longer term perspective? Like we look out 20 years.
- [33:04]
A
I think it can absolutely move like silver has moved, you know, gold, gold went from, it depends on when you measure it from. But in a fairly short period of time, gold went from 2k to 5k. Right. So I mean that's a, that's a, you know, that's a pretty big gain. Right, but it's not like a, you know, it's not like a Nvidia stock going up 10x or more gain or 20x or 30x more gain. It was a sizable gain for such a, you know, multi Multi tens of trillion dollar asset silver had a bigger percent gain because we're starting from a trillion dollar asset estimated. Obviously we can't really audit silver, but we have estimates for it. It's obviously quite a big market that moved pretty substantially, but it wasn't quite a 10x at least this particular kind of multi year period. And I think bitcoin can move like that. And I think that if bitcoin is going to be successful in that kind of 20 plus year period you mentioned, I do think that it will eventually have a cycle that's bigger than the prior cycle, meaning that there will be a time where that diminishing returns would have to be broken. I think bitcoin goes through narratives and I think it has to break a couple of things. I think one has to break the four year cycle narrative eventually because as we talked about from OG selling, that is by far the bigger impact than mining rewards getting cut in half every roughly four years. That's just because the, I mean in the early days that was obviously a giant factor because the percent inflation was huge and now it's already tiny. It's already smaller annual supply growth than gold. And so when OGs can sell 5 or 10% of all coins in a year, that's a much bigger variable than what happens with supply. So the four year cycle, it doesn't really have a reason to exist anymore other than some degree of kind of self prophecy and just because it's always been kind of correlated with other cycles like liquidity cycles and things like that. And so I think it has to break the four year cycle narrative eventually and I think it has to break the diminishing return narrative. And that could be. I mean I think part of the thing you asked before, they didn't answer was about catalysts like big geopolitical things. A failure of a major currency block I think would be a catalyst or just a massive campaign of asset seizing without charging people with crimes or things like that can wake people up or just a cluster of those happening over time. I think those are kind of external catalysts that do a lot of marketing for stuff that bitcoiners and gold enthusiasts have been marketing for years or decades of the kind of the importance of self custodial assets that are liquid.
- [35:54]
B
Do you think? Regarding cycles and I'm glad you brought that up because I specifically wanted to ask about that. Do you think we've already started to break that narrative? Has that four year cycle narrative already been disproven? To a certain extent. Was it? Yeah. It obviously has had less of an impact over time as a function of the block reward having. But did it ever exist in a meaningful way or was it always also just driven by these larger liquidity cycles, these cycles that are basically superordinate to the bitcoin having cycle. And it just so happened to kind of line up pretty well with the having cycle where it sort of tricked us into thinking yes, this is the halving cycle that matters when in reality there were these other factors that were really the drivers.
- [36:38]
A
I think in the first two to three halvings it was pretty meaningful impact. Just the number of new coins that you know that changes. So we have far fewer new coins coming to market. Because when the market gets kind of an equilibrium, there's like buyers coming in, there's sellers getting out, there's new coins coming in, it kind of reaches an equilibrium. And then when you just reduce the number of new coins coming in and that's still pretty substantial number, then that kind of shakes it up in the bull's favor. And then once you get price momentum, you get others, all the marketing happens, everybody starts talking about it, a whole marketing wave happens, people get in, creates people that heard about it for the first time. So I think that was real for the first two or three cycles. As that halving becomes a much smaller percentage of new supply impact. I think it's, it's, there's a little bit of then like a self fulfilling narrative where people trade around past price action and then there's. And then I do think that liquidity started taking over as not, not the absolute variable that matters, but one of the more important ones that it was correlated with. I mean liquidity is like why everything went down in March 2020 and because the unit of account itself was like temporarily hardening because of a liquidity shortage. And that's an extreme event. But then there's multiple kind of more moderate events. And I think going forward, I think it just fundamentally there's really no defense for the four year cycle going forward just because the numbers for the having are way smaller than other factors. But I would say that the four year enthusiasts, they're still winning as long as the price actually keeps does that the ball's in their court. If we peaked in Q4 and it takes us a while to, to reclaim it. So price action wise they're still, they still got it. Even though it doesn't really make sense.
- [38:32]
B
The, the, the numbers that I'm really looking at are 58K. I just, I want that win for the 58K gang. I want to see the memetic perfection achieved there. They. They've gotten pretty darn close right now. I guess it would be the ultimate bait and switch if we just didn't quite hit 58k.
- [38:47]
A
But.
- [38:47]
B
But let's see. They've been pretty right about 58k for a while.
- [38:50]
A
I did a meme about that. I was like. Cause that day we hit 60, I was like, that's like actually the perfect pain spot because you got as low as you wanted to make everyone sad, but you didn't quite hit 58k for the memes either. So, yeah, that 59 or 60k range is actually like the, the pain point.
- [39:05]
B
It's depriving us of all the memes that could have been. It's, you know, Schrodinger's meme, I guess.
- [39:10]
A
Yeah, I.
- [39:11]
B
So I, I want to zoom out a little bit too, and talk about trains and whether or not they stop. There's always a lot going on in the world. There's always a lot going on in the U.S. one thing people have been focusing on is whether or not Trump will be able to get, you know, when his new, presumably more dovish Fed chair gets installed, what that's going to mean for markets. And I'm just wondering how much you are looking at this, paying attention to it. If you think, especially going into a midterm year as we are, that we're going to see sort of a. A push for more dovish policies, for more liquidity getting in there to juice the economy, to pump everyone's bags, including Trump. Is. Is that something that you are kind of looking at as a primary factor, or is it just one of those things where it's like, hey, look, we know long term that nothing stops this train and that, you know, the Fed and the treasury, they have certain things that we know that they need to do. And really, in the short term, there's not going to be that much of a difference, you know, regardless of who's installed as the head of the banker cabal.
- [40:19]
A
So long term, nothing stops his train near term. The interesting thing about the new chairman proposal is he's dovish on interest rates, but he's historically hawkish on balance sheet. So he's less in favor of, say, Chairman Powell's current balance sheet expansion plan, which is actually fairly mild compared to prior balance sheet expansions. I wrote about this in my February newsletter, kind of analyzing the levers that the new chairman could pull. There's a couple things to keep in mind. One is he's only, even though he would be the chairman Chairman, he's only one of 12 members that gets to vote on what happens with policy. So the fact that he can organize the discussions, that he's got the biggest microphone matters, it is a really big factor. But he's not like the Fed dictator. So it's not like a wholesale snap your fingers. Change in Fed policy just because we rotate chairmans is I think the first thing to keep in mind. The second factor, I think that most of his comments about balance sheet reduction are not going to come to fruition. In that piece I talked about, there's a couple levers you can pull that are actually pretty liquidity neutral. So the reason they switch from quantitative tightening to balance sheet expansion is because they kind of hit the liquidity floor unless they pull levers that move liquidity around. So for example, if they change regulation to let banks hold more Treasuries without running into a foul of various capital or liquidity requirements, then they basically just offload some of their Treasuries to commercial banks. Likewise, if the Fed, if the treasury were to term out its debt a little longer, they could reduce the size of their cash balance, which lets the Fed reduce their balance sheet a little bit without sacrificing liquidity. So there's a couple levers they could pull. I don't think they're going to pull them much at all, especially with just the number of people involved in that decision making process. And it's kind of like picking pennies up in front of a steamroller. So I lean toward that because of him. They're going to be a little more dovish on interest rates than they might have otherwise been. They might be a little bit more hawkish on balance sheet than they otherwise would have been. Meaning that they, not that I think that they'll shrink it, especially not materially, but they might grow it a little bit slower than Powell would have, which I think already is actually kind of slow. I keep calling it the gradual print, which is that because banks are already pretty flush with liquidity, I think that Fed balance sheet expansion going forward is going to be kind of modest in terms of percent gains. I mean the numbers are big just because the nominal system is so huge now. So it's like what's a few hundred billion between friends? But it's not like that kind of multi trillion giga stimulus. Unless something huge happens, which China wakes up one day and decides to sell all its Treasuries or Japan starts rapidly selling Treasuries or war breaks, things like that, they happen. But as a base case, I think we enter gradual balance sheet expansion, more dovish interest rate policy. And that lower interest rate is generally good for other currencies. It's generally good for neutral assets, whether it's gold, Bitcoin and so forth. And then the question is, can lower interest rates result in more bank lending, which creates broad money around the margins? I think it can, but I think it's a pretty slow effort overall. So I generally lean. I would say that I think they're going to be mildly dovish, but maybe not hyper dovish. I don't think they're just going to rapidly cut interest rates and just turn around to rapid balance sheet expansion this calendar year.
- [44:00]
B
Okay, okay. I mean, I think that that's, that's fair. It's, it may not be quite as many fireworks as people are expecting. I want to ask too, just about how obviously, okay, got these various cycles that ebb and flow and everything. Does AI, how does this general move toward like really fast advances now in AI and robotics and the implications of that does that at all? You know, how are you factoring that into kind of your core theses? As you look at markets, as you look at their evolution, as you look at the potential for Bitcoin or for gold or for other things to really be, to move more to the forefront of people's minds? I mean, does. Do the advances that we're seeing in sort of the deflationary or hyper deflationary nature of things like AI and robotics, do those sort of fundamentally change the calculus in any way? In that, okay, does this sort of, does this basically force them to potentially like print more to deal with this hype? What will be like a, from a productivity standpoint, extremely deflationary? Or is this something that also like how much of an impact does it make, I guess like the 5 year horizon versus like the 10 year, 20 year horizon? If that does that make sense? Like I'm, I'm trying to understand how much does this change the way you look at things from a time before these were really kind of forefront concerns?
- [45:25]
A
Yeah, good question. Overall, I think it's a productivity boosting, disinflationary force, but only on some segments, not others, basically. And there's kind of multiple parts here. So the fiat system as it's structured globally has to nominally grow. It's like a shark that can't stop swimming unless it ironically drowns, which probably some comments. But like not all sharks have that problem, but there are A lot of sharks that have that problem. And the fiat system is kind of like that. It goes back fundamentally to when they make a loan that directly increases broad money supply. When they make a loan on fractional reserve, I should say, and they don't create the interest that ultimately that loan will accrue, which ends up getting paid with later loans. So it's like it always has to expand because it's so levered. It can contract for short periods of time, but it can't just keep contracting the way it's designed. It would totally implode in a disorganized way. So it always nominally grows. Then there's a long term calculation you can think of which is there's money supply growth and then there's average productivity growth, which is kind of hard to measure. But for example, if you have average 7% money supply growth over a multi decade period and you have average 4% productivity growth, meaning we're 4% better at making a lot of things per year, then the average price gains end up being something like 3% per year because money supply is growing up faster than we're getting more efficient at making things. And then the added factors, that's not even. So, for example, the harder kind of scarcity the asset, the less good we are at making more of it. So over the past 30 years, the spectrum is Bitcoin. Obviously it's got a set clock pretty much regardless of what's going on. Fine art, as long as tastes don't change. The really Lindy art, they're not making any more Picassos, for example, they're not making any more Da Vincis. And so that's also benefiting from money supply growth because we're not more efficient making those, money supply grows up. So the more dollars chasing kind of finite art, then you have waterfront property. We're not radically better at making it. To the extent that you want to build an island like Dubai, it's very expensive to do so. So it actually takes a ton of. We have limited coastline and it's really expensive to make more coastline. So waterfront property, fairly scarce. But of course you have maintenance, you have insurance, you have taxes, all these things. But it's a fairly scarce asset class. Then you get into gold, which is over the course of 100 years, it's averaged about 1.5% estimated supply growth per year. Even in the 70s when gold went up massively, the percent supply growth didn't change a ton. It's very hard to just radically get better unless we have a crazy breakthrough at getting more gold out of the ground in a just a radically different way. So again, more dollars chasing only a slowing amount of gold stack. But then when you get into like oil, you know, we do get, you know, all of our like imaging technologies and all our stuff, we, we do get better at finding it. Not radically better, but we do get moderately better at finding it. But then you get like the long tail of like anything in the past 30, 40, 50 years that we could automate. So we already had a big, you know, before AI, it was just automation just taking a lot of things that used to be very manual construction things and having just robots do 80% of it. That was a huge boom for productivity. And then also telecommunications let us globalize. It's not an accident that that happened around when it did. Because as the world gets to talk to each other more and is not at war more, it's easy to say, okay, well, we'll put workers in this other cheap country. So between automation and offshoring, that was a huge kind of deflationary force for manufactured goods. And of course Moore's law is an exponentially deflationary force for electronics, at least until it runs into physical limits, which actually is kind of getting close to. And you have to kind of scale in other ways. So those were like the big, that's kind of been the longer term thing. Now what AI does, AI is kind of like that blue collar automation for a lot of white collar labor, which should be quite a disinflationary productivity boom, at least in the things that impacts. So it's not like a miracle cure for everything. But it takes a lot of iterative tasks and lets one person oversee a bunch of bots doing it versus just a bunch of people that have to spend all day doing it. So one accountant can potentially do the work of five accountants and one editor can potentially do the work of 10 editors and so forth. We'll see. I mean, it depends how quickly it gets gets good, how quickly people adapt. It actually takes time for companies to kind of change their processes around, or if they refuse to change their processes, they slowly get out competed by ones that have. So it should be a disinflationary force on that white collar labor. But we still have that spectrum where the more energy intensive things or just inherently scarce things, those things kind of accumulate when you have the nominal system keeps growing. Some things get exponentially cheaper because they're not inherently scarce. And then the scarce assets benefit from that difference. That's where the kind of the value accrual shows up. And another factor is there are multiple periods in time where there's a productivity boom. So what I mentioned before, you have money supply growth, you have productivity, and there's periods of time where you get an unusually large amount of productivity. So for example, the United States in the late 1800s, that was like electrification, that was like automobiles. You had unlimited land basically. And so that combination of just so much lack of scarcity and so much technological growth, railroads and discovering hydrocarbons and using them at scale for the first time outside of coal, so using oil for the first time at scale, those are all massive productivity booms. Or like Japan after World War II, it's just like this crazy amount of organization happened and they were super productive or the whole 90s, 2000s and 2010s because that was kind of this age of globalization. So in those kind of periods of productivity growth, you have a bigger disconnect than normal between money supply growth and average prices. Because we've got a bigger than normal kind of window that opened up that makes us radically better at making some meaningful percentage of things. And I think AI is like one of those, and it happens to be for services, like white collar services especially.
- [52:18]
B
There's a couple directions I want to take with that too. But perhaps before I do, I do want to ask you, do you think where we're at right now, obviously you look at like the valuations and the funding rounds that are happening with these companies and it's just like it's mind boggling amounts of money. Is there any danger of a potential short term bubble? Like obviously we had the Internet, had the dot com bubble, right? That didn't mean the Internet wasn't valuable or the Internet wasn't done. It just meant that there was a, let's say an initial misapplication or allocation or overallocation of capital kind of getting out over the skis a little bit. And then obviously the Internet today has grown probably more than people could have imagined even at that time. Do you think we see something similar with AI where we do sort of get almost this, you know.com AI moment, but then, okay, things normalize a little bit, they steady out, valuations come back to earth a little bit and things proceed from there on a more, let's say, measured trajectory? Or do you think this is like these valuations are actually totally fair and we're not going to have any sort of dot com moment in the AI industry specifically?
- [53:19]
A
I mean, I don't know if it'll be as big as the Dot com bubble. The crazy thing about the dot com bubble is like even non tech stocks like Coca Cola was trading at 50 times earnings and Walmart was trading at 50 times earnings. And those stocks went on to go sideways for the next 15 years even because their earnings had to double just to kind of catch up with their valuations. So the problem with the dot com bubble is you would like even many non tech stocks were trading at high valuations. Anything was kind of perceived as benefiting from globalization or was like blue chip. You almost never have a major new technology that doesn't have bubbles associated with like the build out of the railroads had bubbles, the build out of radio had bubbles, the build of the Internet had bubbles, telecom had bubbles. So the exception would be somehow AI doesn't have a bubble. So I think my base case is we will have local bubbles. I've been slow to call tops. I think bears jump on and just as soon as something does well, it's a bubble. Usually bubbles go longer than the bears think. And so my approach like I, because I do you know, invest in stocks as well. Like I was Nvidia it got out when it got euphoric, you know, goes down sometimes I get in, sometimes I don't get in in time. So I have to go to like AMD instead. But it's like I tend to be buyers of the idea. Whenever it goes down a ton they say okay, that was the bubble. I'm like I don't think that was the bubble yet. I think we go further. But I am careful when everything's kind of screaming vertical. And so I'm more in that moderate phase right now. I think probably RAM stocks go higher. I think overall RAM demand will certainly go higher and we'll see what happens with the share prices. But I think it just goes further than people think and then becomes a bubble. And then just like the build out of the Internet then becomes real over time it catches up with the bubble. But that doesn't mean there's broken dreams in the meantime. And in general it's like the build out. The entities that laid the fiber optics cables that made the Internet what it is, they went bankrupt. And the people that dug the English Channel, they went bankrupt. The like these things were super valuable for like the people that inherited from the bankruptcy and like from the users that like benefited from that having been done. So there'll probably be things like that where like you know, people build a lot of it. It's super expensive. But yeah, I think it's, it's I would be on the lookout for euphoric valuations and the idea that things can't go down. I would fade those. But then when do, when things do have pullbacks, it's like they're, they're actually interesting. I mean, I do think that this probably lasts a while.
- [56:18]
B
How do you factor in like the propagation of open sourcing a lot of these models to that equation? Because that's something that didn't. If we talk about prior bubbles with different industries, there hasn't really been maybe that same factor of like just the speed at which once the genie is out of the bottle when it comes to open source, it's like, it's beautiful, like. And that's somewhat of China's strategy almost to destabilize the Western side of things, right, Is to open source a lot of this stuff. We've seen a lot of open source models. I mean, there's a huge, huge interest in, you know, claudebot, right now, openclaw, all of this. But there's, there's so many models that have been open sourced right now. Does that fundamentally sort of add a different calculus where the, the moat that these larger first entrants would otherwise have is increasingly diminished and becomes that head start that they had and the capital they're able to raise becomes sort of less effective than it would otherwise be in absence of open source?
- [57:13]
A
I think partially, but I think even more broadly, I think your point on moats is the main one, which is I think that this is an inherently a less moaty space than some other major investment cycles. I think the 2010s, like the reason the Mag 7 stocks, and previously they were called the fang stocks, the reason they got so big, they had kind of the sweet spot of. A lot of them had network effect products like social media networks and things like that, and ecosystems that people get locked into, like Microsoft or Apple, they have these network effects. And so it doesn't take a ton of capex, at least relative to revenues, to keep growing. They're insanely profitable. And then they can plow all their profits back into buybacks, which pumps the stock up. And then the stocks are so high they can issue shares to employees and pay them. You know, it's really easy to attract top talent and you get this crazy flywheel where a lot of the value, trillions upon trillions, accumulates at the top. The user does get value. But like for example, in social media, it's like, okay, the corporation gets your data, you get to talk to your friends, but you also get Depression because you're online all the time, right? And it's like the actual biggest winners were really the major corporations running these things. And I think AI does not have that. It's much weaker moats. They don't really benefit from economies of scale and network effects in the same way that those kind of Internet platforms and ecosystems did. The switching ability when one model is just not doing it for you and you want to go to another model, obviously some stickiness of data can be a factor but if it's a big enough difference, people will go over and, and so they're in a big capex arms race like OpenAI. They made one of the most popular apps ever and they don't really see a path toward profitability from now till 2030. And even the hyperscalers, like those that are the Microsofts of the world and those that are kind of operating the infrastructure behind all this thing, they're the ones benefiting. But now to keep up they have to plow all their free cash flow or a lot of their free cash flow into just more and more hardware basically. And kind of like how the biggest winners from the blue collar automation, like the manufacturing automation, obviously the Intels and stuff of the world, and they did well, but it was really like all these corporations are the ones that benefited. The ones like the Nikes of the world could benefit from automation and offshoring because they could cut their costs and still sell, you know, expensive branded sneakers. And I think that the biggest winners actually are individuals and companies that are using AI to do things more productively. So they're, they're finding ways to cut costs or bring things to market they wouldn't before. So I think we have, this will have less top level accrual. And the good news is I think there'll be more spread out accrual of the advantages of AI with the really hard part that it's not even which is that those that are early to adopt it are disproportionate winners and those who get disrupted by it and don't adjust or can't adjust, they're the biggest losers.
- [60:29]
B
I think following up on that, just something I've been thinking about and memed about a little bit recently because it's the best way to share that information. This idea that okay, AI is coming for your, you know, your computer job basically like hey, if you're working in front of a computer, you're doing any, any sort of, you know, thought work basically like look, you're, you're getting replaced. I Can't help but think, okay, where is there actually out? You know, we, okay, that's the private sector, but in the public sector we have actually a much higher concentration of probably, I don't want to say useless bureaucrats, but useless bureaucrats. Like there is a huge amount of blood. The governments have never been bigger, more, more expansive and more. I mean, they're just, you know, they're not very efficient. Right. There's a lot of bloat there that could very easily be cut automated away without, you know, with probably a very perceptible improvement. Actually also a reduction, you know, might actually be able to balance a budget. Call it crazy, you know, knock on wood, you know, won't, won't hold my breath. But how do you think about that? Because there's the other part of it that obviously public sector unions, which collectively bargain against the taxpayer and we can. That's a different topic. But how do you think about the potential for AI to actually radically shrink government? Is that something that you think could happen in the relative near term, or do you think there's going to be so much pushback on it, especially from the public sector, from these unions that collectively bargain against the taxpayer, that it's going to perhaps be a lot slower to be affected than the private sector is? Just because the private sector has a, has a profit motive, you know, they have to be productive or they will die. The government doesn't, or it would have already died.
- [62:05]
A
I would answer it in two parts, headcount versus budget. I think those are two very different answers. I think in terms of head headcount, it can impact things quickly. Not that I think you'll see mass firings, but I think the combination of what we've seen will keep happening, which is you give people like incentives to leave. You know, like, hey, if you leave now, you get a more generous than average severance package. And that worked in this, this past year. Combined with attrition, you just kind of say, well, we don't really need that many new people unless you're like an AI specialist. Or we can limit our new buying, our new hiring and then let people retire while also offering people to get out. So I think it can meaningfully impact Headcount already is pretty quickly. It was the analysis that Sam Callahan and I did on Doge back in late 2024. We published it in January 2025. We called ahead of time why Doge would be so ineffective at cutting spending. And literally on the macro chart, you can't even identify where Doge Started or ended. It's like straight line. That's slightly bigger than the straight line of before in terms of federal government expenditures. The reason for that is the biggest dollar amounts flowing around are not high headcount things. The biggest Social Security and Medicare, they are like the number of people that the Health and Human Services employees is actually pretty low in the grand scheme of the federal government. Even though the dollar amounts, it's all these transfer payments and things like that. So you could cut headcount all you want, it's a blip. The only thing that's both big in terms of headcount and numbers is the Department of Defense, which is also the defense against cutting. That is all the, all the bureaucrats, all the politicians in all the jurisdiction, they say, well sure, I want to cut spending, but you know, I don't want you to stop making tanks of this type because that's in my, my district, right? And you have a, you have a 10,000 of those, right? So everyone defends their own little turf. And then the last part, I don't have the numbers offhand, but it's like, okay, that last 15%, that's like where almost all the non military federal employees are. That's all like your Department of Transportation or Department of Thing you never heard of or department or whatever. And it's like a 15% of the budget. But like most of the headcount is like in those places and it's like you could, you could cut headcount in half and you know, especially when you count their, their property, the other things they do, you might cut, you know, a quarter or a third of their spending. So you're cutting a quarter or a third of the 15% of the pie chart. So I would say there's two different answers. I think AI can substantially reduce headcount, but I think that voters and politicians, they like transfer payments and they like defending stuff in their own districts. And that's the part that AI runs into kind of a political wall. And then of course the other thing of just one of the biggest costs, especially in the US is what we eat and our health. Because, you know, like Japan can spend way less on healthcare per capita despite living older than we can because of one is how our system's constructed and then two, because of what we eat and do we have high levels of, you know, the types of things that eat up a lot of the healthcare costs?
- [65:29]
B
Yeah, total digression. But did you see the RFK Jr. Kid Rock video where they're in Kid Rock's gym. RFK Jr, I think. RFK Jr did you ever watch Arrested Development? Back in the day?
- [65:43]
A
I saw slime episodes. Yeah.
- [65:45]
B
Yeah. There's the guy Tobias in there. He's what they call a Never nude. Like, he's never naked, even around himself. Like, he always at least is wearing jean shorts. And RFK Jr. Like, just always wearing his jeans wherever he goes reminded me of that. Total digression has nothing to do with what we're talking about, but there's just a. Wow, what a strange memetic zeitgeist exists.
- [66:03]
A
I like the new food pyramid for a change.
- [66:05]
B
I do. I mean, they literally did. They did south park like, they did the. The meme. They just inverted the food pyramid, which is beautiful. And it. But it's also like. It's just. It's like common sense. Right. It's kind of crazy that we let it go this long.
- [66:17]
A
Yeah. I don't know. It's like whole. It's like whole, nutrient dense food.
- [66:21]
B
Who.
- [66:21]
A
Who would have thought? Who would have thought?
- [66:22]
B
Yeah, it's. It's crazy. It's. It's not like they know the. The sugar lobbies and, you know, corn lobbies and all that could have played any. Any part in influencing that for a very, very long time. No, certainly not. Okay, so. And maybe you want to, like, shift gears a little bit slightly here, just being conscious of your time also, because you just had an announcement that really has nothing to do with macro or bitcoin directly or any of that, but you are now going to be a science fiction author. So how much. How much do you want to talk about sort of the. The premise without. Without giving anything away. I was honored to have been an early reader of the book. It is fantastic, and I think it's going to ignite a lot of people's love for sci fi again if, like, me, you took a break from these things. And it just takes one book to kind of get you back into fiction after having so much time just reading, you know, nonfiction. Nonfiction. You can only read so much Austrian economics, you know, before you need a break.
- [67:18]
A
So, yeah, I spent. I started writing it in late. Well, kind of autumn 2024. The premise had been in my head for quite a while, but I kind of finally had time to put, you know, pen to paper, as it were. And it's called the Stolgard Incident. And it's a near, near future sci fi. So cyberpunk, techno thriller, biopunk type of story. Those are the subgenres it would be considered as. So it's not a space opera. And it kind of, you know, extrapolates a lot of things we talked about here. You know, kind of a feature where AI is more prevalent, where robotics are more prevalent, where kind of disinformation is more prevalent with AI generated content, it gets harder to differentiate outside of your kind of near orbit, like what is real or what is not real. So if aliens land in the White House, it's easy to be like, no, that's fake. I don't believe that. And it's like video is not what it used to be in terms of giving us credible things of what's happening if we didn't see them ourselves. And so it's in this kind of more detached digital world where it still in some ways looks like us. I tend to fade the most extreme changes. The world looks a lot different than it did in the 70s, but it still looks a lot like the 70s. People still often have the same problems. And even though the whole Internet is obviously a new thing, people, the houses and cars and a lot of other factors, actually, they only change slowly. So I use that kind of as I kind of look forward over the next 50 plus years. And so a lot of things are different, a lot of things are the same. And it kind of explores, let's see, terrorism in a world where it's hard to know what even happened because things could be fake. It explores an area that we're not getting into a lot now. Like, now the focus is on AI, but one of the focuses is on gene editing and kind of the whole rabbit hole, you know, that can be opened up, ethics wise and otherwise from that avenue. So it's dark, it's violent, but it's also very human.
- [69:36]
B
I think it is both dark and violent, but human. I can attest to that. It was, it was a really enjoyable read and I think for people like myself. I've talked with you about this before, but I got very much into the path of. I used to read a ton of fiction, whether it be sci fi, fantasy, whatever it was for most of my life, kind of stopped doing that, especially, you know, leading up to starting to go down the bitcoin rabbit hole and then going basically down, like I need to read everything I can about, you know, money and economics and all these things. And then it was Devin Erickson's book, which we talked about a little bit just off Air Theft of Fire, that kind of reignited that love for sci fi where I remembered, oh, wait, you can learn so much from fiction. You don't have to read nonfiction to learn something like fiction is often the best teacher. And so I'm wondering, how did you think about this in terms of like setting the stage for the future or, you know, is there without giving too much away, is there something you want people to come out of this experience of reading the Stolgaard instant with? Is there a feeling or an idea, an emotion that you hope that people will have after they read the book?
- [70:43]
A
Yeah, it's a good question. And I think for the first part, on kind of the importance of reading or kind of the cycles we can go through in terms of being interested in reading, one of the advantages that a book still has is that anything that gets made into a show or movie, they tend to be kind of things that they expect to do well in the mainstream. Right? So it's kind of inherently like mid curve in a way that's kind of over. It's obviously there's very sophisticated movies, but it's like there's a certain expectation, there's a lot of people involved in it, and they need to make a decent amount of money for it to make sense. And the advantage of a book is that you can make something that is a little bit more niche or a little bit more complex, you could say. Often a book compared to the adaptation that gets turned into a two hour movie, it often has to reduce the complexity of that work and especially the inner feelings of the characters, for example. That's something that a book is uniquely good at. And so I think that's still, even in the digital world. I still think books are super valuable in all of their forms. So physical books, ebooks, audiobooks, I think those are all kind of still very valuable things. I think one of the main themes in the book is that as everything changes, individual choices still matter. So kind of one of the big questions in the book is, you know, in a world of bureaucracy and AI and virtual reality and you know, technology in general, like, does an individual matter? Do human decisions matter? And kind of one of the themes is that human relationships are one of the things that you can kind of grab onto when everything else feels uncertain or too big or so far removed from yourself. So there's kind of a, kind of a virtuous aspect that comes through, I think. And I think a lot of the world just kind of tends trends toward nihilism. Lately people are like, okay, so we've had all these financial crises, our money's broken, AI is going to take all of our jobs, our leaders lie to us and go to war. And half them, apparently, the pedophiles and, I don't know, vampires, whatever's going on there. So it's like we live in a world where it can be quantified. The percentage of people that used to say, I trust Congress, or if you're international, I trust Parliament, whatever, I trust the entities in charge. I trust corporations, I trust the media. That has all deteriorated for decades. Our institutions have deteriorated. Things that our grandfathers and great grandfathers built in a prior cycle are just kind of unfit for the modern time. They've kind of had institutional rot. They've been captured by bad incentives. It's kind of the later stages of them. And so. And you know, then people turn to just like gambling, you know, in its myriad forms and just kind of like ethical nihilism in a way, or Machiavellianism and kind of the. The book is in that kind of setting where it's not dystopian. It's not some like, horribly dystopian world. It's kind of just like a. A further out version of our world. There's. There's good and bad in that world and. And there are people trying to do the right thing and a lot of people doing the wrong thing. But it kind of says like, in that world, it's like people kind of pushing back against the tide of nihilism and saying, well, maybe one person caring can matter.
- [74:21]
B
Yeah. And again, I enjoyed the heck out of reading it. We can also probably disclose on the audiobook side is now an appropriate time to do that. So Carl and I are very honored to be narrating your audiobook for the Stolgard incident. It is in the works right now. We're super stoked about it. I'm glad that it's not just me doing it or just. Or just any. A, single, you know, male narrator, because there are a lot. There's a huge cast of characters also, like, it's a. It's a massive cast of characters. There's a lot of complexity to it. I very much enjoy. Also, again, I don't want to give too much away here, but I enjoy the way that you. The things hop around. Let's just say I know some people may not enjoy that particular style. I've always found that's one of the best ways to tell a story, you know, is to sort of give these different perspectives from sort of different times. But again, don't want to get too much into that. Just wanted to say I really love that about the book because it makes Everything come together really well. There are some twists and turns in there. When can people actually get their hands on the physical copy of this?
- [75:22]
A
So we expect publication by the second half of March. The exact date is not known yet. We're still doing kind of production tests, but it looks like late March it'll be available. And the cool thing about audiobooks is, I mean, that's a rapidly growing market and this goes back to technology and productivity. So it used to be that when people bought audiobooks, it'd be on literally a bunch of CDs or a bunch of. Well, before then it was a bunch of cassettes. So audiobooks were very expensive. And so, for example, libraries would buy them and people would rent them out because it'd be only fairly wealthy people could just regularly buy and own multiple audiobooks. And then as you know, as we all got smartphones and as we, you know, it just, it just made the distribution of audiobooks way more efficient. And so rather they used to be kind of like an afterthought that you only, only like super popular books could have. And now it's becoming more standard. But then as it becomes a larger percentage, I think there's. It's good that there's more quality being focused on them. There are some that are doing like full cast productions which have their own pros and cons. And one of the things I really like about what we're putting together is that with both you and Carla involved, we've got a bigger range of voices than is normally available and it's kind of full like dual narration. So basically in any given chapter, and not just one of you reading one chapter and one of you reading another chapter, it's like actual. Both you are involved in basically every chapter, which I think is. It adds something special.
- [76:59]
B
We're having a lot of fun with it, too. Very honored to be a part of this. And again, it's just a darn good book. And one of the things I like, Glenn, you talked about this idea of, okay, people often maybe overestimate how different things will look in the future. And that's kind of a recurring theme.
- [77:15]
A
Right.
- [77:15]
B
It's like things change. Yes, things change drastically, but how much does the core of what we recognize stay the same? Like you'd recognize, you know, you're in America in the 70s. You're going to recognize it still as America if you went back in time. Right. You know, the idea being you go forward a little bit in America, like you're still going to recognize it as America. And I Think that's a difficult thing Sometimes we want to assume that things are going to change more, either for the better or the worse than they actually do. But one of the things I loved was just your incorporation again, won't give too much away at a high level of just things like cryptography, of, you know, encryption services, of, you know, cryptographically signing things becoming more commonplace. Little things like that that I think add this realism where if you're on the cutting edge of those things today, you see where they're going, and that makes a ton of sense. But for people that maybe aren't, it might give them a little bit more pause to think and actually evaluate what is currently available to them right now. Was that sort of a. In any way a goal with it, or was it just to kind of, hey, let's, let's put these things in there because it makes sense. And that's where I actually think the future is heading.
- [78:17]
A
It's a little bit of both. I wanted Bitcoin to show up, and I wanted Nostr to show up, and I had Noster show up. Instead of calling it Nostr, it's like, because that's a. We don't really refer to like, smtp, but Noster, like technology shows up, which is that there's people that have continuous identities that are key based rather than account based. Um, and I also wanted to somewhat explore the idea of kind of edge level verification, which is, in a world like we just talked about, if you could just make AI videos that are like super convincing all the time and you want to know if something happened, if the, if like the camera that like, you know, took that video, you know, cryptographically signs it, and then there's a, you know, way to verify the supply chain or an organization you trust that says, okay, these are our cameras and these are signed by, you know, it's not like 100% foolproof, but there are layers of evidence you can put in that kind of verify that, you know, at least from the path from. From there to here, it could not have been tampered with. It explores that a little bit. And for the most part, with the technology in the book, I would try to be realistic where possible. There are a couple fantastical things I put in because they're cool and. But there are other things that I was, you know, I was like, okay, what is a reasonable extrapolation of this? What are the. What bottlenecks hit first? Because, you know, I, I have an engineering background. I want to try to make things that things that can be realistic. I want to make realistic. You know, I'm not committing to like hard science per se, but it's like I want to make things realistic where possible. And then there are things it's like, what ifs? So like, for example, historically it's been. VR has been very slow to catch on because it's actually, it's quite complex. You know, putting all the processing power into something that's like lightweight and wearable is way harder than just having it on your desk, for example. And then also anything that's like affecting your senses, there's all these limitations. And it's like, I don't know when we're going to crack that complexity, but I like the idea of exploring how VR would impact people. So it's like, okay, we assume that some technologies catch on and we have a environment where VR is more prevalent and what does that do to a society? So, yeah, some technologies I try to be pretty like concise with and say, okay, this is actually what I think will happen. And other ones it's like, well, what if this happened? And is it reasonable? And can we, can we make it a reasonable part of this world?
- [80:44]
B
It's a good blend of that. I mean, and elements of it are very much like, I would say hard sci fi in a lot of ways. You know, there's different like, classifications for how people say, like, no, this is officially hard sci fi, this isn't. But ultimately, like, it's a great story. I encourage people to go out there and to get a copy of it. You self published, correct?
- [81:04]
A
Yes. And basically when you kind of already have a media arm and you already have like a company entity, the benefits from traditional publishing are just weaker with broken money. I got offers to traditionally publish it, but I wanted it. I mean, I wanted to be a 500 page book, so I wanted complete control over it. So we actually just self published that one. And this one I explored potentially doing traditional publishing. When you have a fairly large audience, you generally have a better chance of obviously making that come to happen. But I wanted total control over the project. So, yeah, it's published by, I would say, I would describe it as the resources put into it are on par or higher than your typical traditionally published book in terms of the number and quality of editors, the quality of the COVID artist that worked on it, and the amount of time that goes into it from all the parties involved. I mean, the quality, for example, the audio production. This has all been taken as though it is kind of as high as anyone does for A book while it yeah, technically being self published or published by my business entity.
- [82:25]
B
And I think it's also, it's sort of a different paradigm. Like you obviously have a massive following online. Just like you, you as a, as a person, business entities aside, you can very much move the needle. Like a huge part of why a lot of people end up doing publishing, like aside from obviously getting it published, is just hey, we want help promoting this thing. But like you can send out a tweet or a post on Nostr and you'll drive massive amounts of traffic to it. And I think that just that sort of it really puts the changes, the power dynamics a little bit where you're able to have more freedom like that. This, you know, this wouldn't have necessarily been possible or feasible, you know, even a couple, you know, decade or two decades ago. And certainly it's a, it's a. It gives you an edge I think because you've got that audience and especially I think coming from obviously you have broken money. It was a huge success in many languages. You're a very well known person. And now people get to see sort of this other side like this sci fi Lin, which, which I just love. Can I ask when you, you posted about it on Noster, like forget exactly when had you already started writing at that point when you basically said hey should I, should I take the next year write a. Write a sci fi book? Had you already begun writing or were you still just in the ideation phase?
- [83:37]
A
I had started dabbling in writing but wasn't sure if I was going to stick with it. The story itself, I mean the seeds of it go back 15 years or more. Wow. And the, the kind of the final story itself goes back probably about a decade or more. And so I had most of the story written even like the opening of the first chapter and parts of the climax like as a, as a writing just kind of experiment. I wrote chunks of those maybe eight years ago. Just like literally a couple pages here and there. Right. So technically you know, first pen to paper was, was like a decade ago. But I mean we're talking like 1% of the book, right? So it's like like sections of the opening and ending just to kind of. Because for me the biggest bottleneck was getting good at fiction prose because I already had kind of an idea for story and characters and things like that. But actually taking all my non fiction prose and converting it to fiction prose and I will never give up the EM dash despite the AIs coming for it. But building My fiction prose took time. Especially, you know, if you, if you try to do everything, you're not really good at anything, right? So it's like I had. There are many times I thought about writing this, and I always just figured I wouldn't be able to do it until I'm like, done with my finance career, right? But in 2024, I had more time on average. My husband was actually. He had to spend longer than we often go back and forth between the US And Egypt. He had to spend extra time in Egypt due to like a big, like, house construction project. And I had to come back for multiple reasons. So it's like I'm living like a monk for a period of time. And I'm like, you know, I looked actually into. I was like, should I get like, should I lose myself into like a video game or something? And I was like, I'm not really feeling it. I'm like, well, you know what? Maybe it is time to write the book. So I started dabbling in it and I just kind of posted on Noster, like, hey, would you guys, you know, want me to. Should I actually prioritize this? And so the first draft was written in about two months. But that was. That had like, I wouldn't be able to do that again because I had the benefit of this. I had 80% of the story in my head for like a decade. But then the. Actually, the hard part was then all of 2025 really was revising it. Multiple beta readers, multiple editors, my own just kind of combing through it over and over again. Kind of like tackling the parts that I. When I wrote them. I'm like, that's good enough. And I'm like, no, no, I want to. How do I, like, really? This is still like a friction point that I want to make sure is better. I still have this hang up and really kind of carving it into at least the best story I can make. You know, we'll see how people receive it. But it's, you know, I was like, I don't want to put it out until it's the best thing that I feel like I can do at this time.
- [86:24]
B
Speaking of video games, I've said this to you before, but I think it would make a sweet video game or, you know, later perhaps either animated or real people series. And I think it has that kind of potential. I think it's a really. It's a really unique story. I haven't read anything quite like it. And yeah, I think you figured out the fiction prose too clearly. Because it reads very well. But yeah, I'm excited for folks to get their hands on it. At the end of the day, I want to be conscious of your time here because we've run a little over and I may be having connection issues. I don't know if it's me or if it's you, but let me see here. Yep. I may. Do you still have me?
- [87:03]
A
Yep, I'm here. I still. Okay.
- [87:05]
B
I think this is on my side right now. Maybe I'll. I'll just say, Lynn, that by way of wrapping up so I get you out of here just a little bit late. Where do you want to send folks to either pre order, find out more about the book, et cetera, or just where they can find your other work?
- [87:20]
A
People can if they go to linalden.com I have a free newsletter at or around when the book comes out. I'll have a newsletter also just kind of announcing it. People will be able to find it. I'll definitely announce it on NOSTR and X when it's available. So as long as people follow me at one of those two places, they'll still be making noise about it once it's available.
- [87:39]
B
Love it. And I love too that you gave your first kind of teaser of this book, actually posting the COVID and everything. You did that on nostr. So I thought that was excellent. And it's a great reminder that if folks want to hear about cool stuff first, NOSTR is a great place to do that, at least from the subset of people who are using NOSTR actively right now.
- [87:57]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
- [87:59]
B
All right. Well, Lynn, thank you so much. It is great picking your brain as always, excited for people to read the book and then shortly after listen to the audiobook as well. Really excited for it. And thank you for sharing your time. This was a pleasure as always.
- [88:11]
A
Thanks for having me. Always happy to be here.
- [88:14]
B
And thank you to everybody who joined in the Nostr live stream. I appreciate all of you and all of your zaps. Thank you guys.