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Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Update, World War 3, Printer is Coming, Gold vs Bitcoin, & UAP Disclosure | Matthew Pines
01:44:17
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- [00:00]
Matt Pines
It seems like every time missiles start flying, people go, is this World War iii? 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 like, very important, Very important. In my mind, it's because it's not only is it like an ethos and a political movement, but it's, it's, it's a vortex for actual financial capital, which is to first order political capital. Right. And so 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 blackrocks and presidents and, you know, like staffers for central banks. Like we're having Fed, you know, Fed staffers come to our bitcoin policy summit. Like this, is this like, like black hole. That's, that's like. So that's, that's accreting here. 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 parody 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, 10 years, like, what's the most important thing? 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. Like, bitcoin will give them a good life, but this thing will change the future of human civilization.
- [01:41]
Walker America
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the bitcoin podcast. Bitcoin continues to create new blocks every 10 minutes. And the value of one bitcoin is still one bitcoin. If you are listening to this right now, remember you are still early. Find me on noster@primal.net Walker and this podcast@primal.net Titcoin on X, YouTube and Rumble. Just search at Walker America and Find this podcast on X and Instagram @tcoin podcast. Head to the show notes for sponsor links. Head to substack.com walker America to get episodes emailed to you. And head to bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Without further ado, let's get into this bitcoin talk.
- [02:39]
Unknown
Matthew Pines, welcome back to the show. It's been eight months since you came on here, but I did get to. Did get to bump into you in Vegas, which was nice. Are you fully recovered from. From the.
- [02:50]
Matt Pines
That about. Although I went straight from that to another trip and then from that I went to Disney with the family.
- [03:01]
Unknown
Oh, nice.
- [03:02]
Matt Pines
Just got back two days ago and Disney's not exactly relaxing.
- [03:05]
Unknown
That's. That's not. I haven't. I've never. I've never been there with kids, but I can imagine that is. That is difficult.
- [03:13]
Matt Pines
Yeah, you're walking about 10 miles a day in the heat. The kids had fun, but, you know, then coming back and then hitting the ground running. We've got two weeks now till the Bitcoin Policy Summit, so, you know, I'll sleep next month. We'll see.
- [03:27]
Unknown
Well, yeah, and want to give a shout out to that because I'm very excited to come to the Policy Summit, that is, I'm going to go ahead and give it a hard plug here. June 25th, 26th, Washington, D.C. btcpolicysummit.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 do 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 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. 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.
- [04:20]
Matt Pines
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely a suit. A suit occasion. You know, maybe you can get away without a tie, but, you know, we're trying to. We're trying to dress it up. That's kind of been the bit since the beginning is, you know, speak the language of DC and the form and format of dc 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. And Bitcoin is here to stay and will be around. And so you should take it seriously and not 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, okay, 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, the environment, energy systems, et cetera. And now we're in the third, 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. And so we're expecting again to double the size of the participants. We're having an absolutely packed agenda. It's designed essentially as to generate as much high signal discussions and presentations as possible per unit time. So everyone is basically given 5, 10 minutes for lightning talks and presentations. 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, 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 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, per the analysis being done by the Treasury Secretary 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 Department of Treasury to the Department of State has to think about, well, what does this mean for my particular area, right? And they have very specific sort of technocratic mandates. So we're going to have folks from the executive branch, folks, 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 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 D.C. across the administrative state. And bitcoin is now, I think, fully legitimized as a subject. 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 does 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. Like these are all complicated issues. And so we're going to have, you know, senior policymakers, elected representatives, government officials, folks, folks from civil society, human rights activists, executives, technologists, our policy experts, everyone on stage just kind of like bang, bang, bang. And then we're going to have a fun party the night before. 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. Yeah. So I think it's going to be a really, 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 while it's still available. We're coming up on what our target kind of 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 snag it while you can.
- [09:15]
Unknown
Just speaking of shifting that Overton window, you guys certainly seem to have blown it wide open. And obviously, and 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. I mean, like, that's pretty incredible to see. And yes, there have been politicians who have been campaigning, 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. 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, like, national stage.
- [10:20]
Matt Pines
Yes. You know, I had the privilege of speaking with the vice president the day before in a private meeting. And, you know, I think the. He gave a speech the next day, and it was kind of two speeches in one. If you were tracking it, 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 kind of banal stuff about blockchain for health care. And it was clearly, like, 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. And I don't think it was going over so well. And he's a smart guy, and I think he realized the room wasn't responding well to his remarks. And then he decided at the end of his 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 larger strategic context. And that was kind of reflective of the conversation we were having. Think 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, the monetary system, and US Geopolitical interests, and that shifting the frame from a narrow kind of inside the beltway industry. I'm going to give a speech to an industry lobby. I'm going to say things that 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 one of the more significant drivers of opportunity and risk for the US Government in the next few years. And it's all taking place in the context of 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 stablecoins and gold and the monetary system and geopolitics. It's like all. And our internal political kind of surveillance that we have across these different issues like AI is in his view maybe were sort of liberal coded and bitcoin and crypto is more. 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 knot, to help frame bitcoin as aligned positively with US strategic interests and values. And that's basically been BPI's work for the last few years. It's been like one of our main kind of hobby horses is to try to keep kind of pounding that message and to have the vice president kind of recognize that we, while I was sitting there then commenting on it in real time was a bit of an out of body experience. But yeah, maybe in retrospect it was inevitable, but it is encouraging to see that come from a senior policymaker's mouth and not be prepared remarks, but actually be something that he's internalized and is verbalizing and is clearly trying to digest it in real time almost. Yeah.
- [13:40]
Unknown
I mean it's refreshing I guess, when a politician doesn't just read off the teleprompter and you can very quickly tell when somebody, 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 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 we're at this point now where bitcoin is not. It's become a almost mainstream topic now. Like this is something that's not taboo, it's okay to talk about, 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 and memetically powerful group, arguably more memetically powerful than economically powerful at this point. But that, you know, I don't want to split hairs on that. So I'm, 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. The last summit that you did, if I'm, 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 for to collect this information from agencies. Is there anything you can share? 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?
- [15:29]
Walker America
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- [16:23]
Matt Pines
Yeah. So the executive order was signed in early March and then we did our Bitcoin for America summit essentially like the week or two after that. And was fortuitous timing. Of course. We designed that summit to try to draw particular attention to Bitcoin in particular and the strategic importance of it. And then the executive order all kind of amplified that message in the context of most of the crypto policy priorities in D.C. being focused stablecoins and then market structure and this strategic 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 flesh that out as an actual policy proposal to draft executive orders. And then we saw some of that reflected in some of the documents that came out and the statements that have since come out of folks like Bo Hinds. The timing we're at right now is executive order 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 consolidated report that I think Treasury Department is mostly writing. 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 strategic bitcoin reserve. And so what I'm looking for in that report is, is how they get back to the request that was made of the Commerce and the Treasury Departments for budget neutral means of acquiring additional bitcoin without essentially adding to the taxpayer's burden. 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 come up with these different ideas. And they have had a number of meetings, 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. And there's questions of interpretation about the precise legal authority to use certain funds for purchasing bitcoin as well as the overall execution of setting up strategic bitcoin reserve within the Treasury Department. Where does it sit? Whose office manages this, who staffs this, what memos have to be signed, which custodians do they use? There's lots of 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 consumed all of the senior policymakers Attention, Commerce Department, Treasury Department in the rack of priorities. It's like global trade war five volume fire in the bond market. 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 a month or so. That'll be a good indicator of how seriously they're taking these proposals, how much they're willing to talk about publicly. Right. Because I think there's also a question on 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, et cetera, et cetera. And so coming up with the actual final tabulation probably took a while and probably had to go around and actually shake the tree. So now that they have at least a good sense of what the number is, now the question is, what do you talk about it? Right? Like, 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. And then if it's somewhere around what we think it is, okay. But then you might want to settle on with the. 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 cards 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? So I, like, 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 22 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 out a new heading for the ship of the state, and it's a big cruise ship or a big aircraft carrier, and the captain is called out, 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, to be turned into an actual turn of the wheel. 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. Is about to make this turn right now. It's not irreversible, right? Just like if you're on a massive aircraft carrier and it's like, blade that order, right? 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, like, keep that momentum going and keep the consistency in terms of redirecting the course of the entire ship of state, right? There's just a political class, the president, these political appointees, and then there's this entire administrative bureaucracy, right, that could try to slow, could stall, could undermine, or could amplify and accelerate the President's instruction with their various tools. And so then what BPI is trying to do with, especially the summit coming up, is try to work at that level, invite all of those people, 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. 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, and doubling down in this direction of travel. And then it's like, okay, well, what does this actually look like? And do you need help? Right? Do you need ideas? Right? Do you need, like, you know, some assistance here? So, yeah. So, 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 going to 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 Hinds, deputy on the President's Working Group on Digital Assets. 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, you know, he's not necessarily a political guy. Right. He's a kind of a technologist, a security guy, you know, kind of a career person. And he's decided that, you know, or somebody has decided to put him in this interesting position, straddling, you know, core economic statecraft, national security work inside the Department of Defense and White House level, more political kind of policy making around digital assets. And those are, those are things that I hypothetically have said are very integrated and connected things. And now that is sort of instantiated with a 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. Not saying everyone is on board, but the deputy Director of the CIA doesn't give public remarks all that often, let alone at a relatively new think tank for bitcoin. It's not like a normal thing that you would expect. If you just asked me a few months ago whether we would get the deputy director of the CIA to just do a pretty open ended fireside, it's not like a five minute prepared remarks, 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 bitcoin reserve is important and the future of money and, you know, all this stuff. I'm curious to hear what he has to say.
- [25:33]
Unknown
Have you had conversations with him before? Do you know what his position is at all? Or are you going in somewhat in the dark as far as that goes?
- [25:41]
Matt Pines
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, with Pompliano, which actually I saw the interview and I was like, this is interesting. And I retweeted it and the director of Public affairs for the CIA immediately like 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're like, we should ask. And we sent the email and they were like, okay, we'll ask for details, timing, 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 quickly we were like, yeah, they're good to go and just basic logistics questions and security and whatnot. But we haven't had any, like, don't ask this or this is the canned answer. But no, I'm curious to hear what he has to say live. It'll be. I'll be learning with the audience. We'll see.
- [26:41]
Unknown
Just a day in the life of Matt Pines. Normal stuff. It's ye. I love it does that. This is slightly off topic. You think the CIA just has a huge slush fund of bitcoin that they use for operational purposes?
- [26:55]
Matt Pines
Well, again, it's like, I think they definitely have used it. Like, that's. I know that for a fact, right. Like that's probably not controversial. Like they were engaging in all sorts. Like you use all sorts of tools, right, when you're trying to pay assets. 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, well, the CIA is going to get some bitcoin to give it to you. If you know that this is a thing people might ask where you're going to have some in reserve 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. They might have acquired a significant amount of bitcoin pretty early on and it might have been worth a few million tens of millions of dollars for operational purposes, but that might be worth now billions of dollars. Right? So this is interesting question, right? With this inventory of bitcoin, the government is like, there might be just like somewhat random low level operational accounts somewhere in the agency for off the book stuff that they've had. And maybe it was like, maybe the accounting was like, this is worth a few million dollars. And then somebody wakes up one day 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, oh, what do we do with that? So I think there is. I think there's. That. There's also, I think a possibility that is more crypto generally that has been seized by elements of the 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 going to pull that all the way back and send and file? I don't know. Like, historically the government, you know, has, has seen better uses 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. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if it's, if it's in that range.
- [29:18]
Unknown
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.
- [29:33]
Matt Pines
No, I mean, they already know.
- [29:36]
Unknown
They're already in my phone anyway. They're in my phone anyway.
- [29:39]
Matt Pines
You know, you're, you're. I don't. Maybe this is, this is a deep cover op that you're running here.
- [29:45]
Walker America
Oh boy, here we go.
- [29:47]
Unknown
Just a, just a law abiding bitcoin podcaster over here. Nothing to see.
- [29:51]
Matt Pines
Do you even have a birth certificate, Walker?
- [29:53]
Unknown
Oh, here we go.
- [29:54]
Matt Pines
You know, what's your, what's your real name here?
- [29:57]
Unknown
You know, my real name is Walker America. Of course. This is, says it right on my birth certificate. It's, 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.
- [30:30]
Walker America
Right.
- [30:31]
Unknown
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, an 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 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 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? What's top of mind for you as you're seeing this news breaking last night?
- [31:37]
Walker America
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- [33:37]
Unknown
Your first time setting up a hardware.
- [33:38]
Walker America
Wallet, or you are a well seasoned psychopath. It is Bitcoin only and fully open source. No need to trust me. You can head to their GitHub and verify that for yourself. When you go to Bitbucks Fox Swiss Walker and use the promo code Walker, not only do you get 5% off, but you also help support this podcast. So thank you.
- [33:59]
Matt Pines
Yeah, it seems like every time missiles start flying people go Is this World War 3? My read of situations. We've kind of been in World War 3 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 and a tightly integrated global system that's dominated 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 true large scale kinetic wars with other great powers because those could destroy the whole planet and could certainly lead to massive loss of wealth for the elites in those political systems. So what we've seen is essentially kind of proxy wars, wars in space, assassinations, sabotage campaigns, cyber attacks, and kind of this arc of instability across the Eurasian periphery, which sort of structures this global conflict that's playing out between you could say the Eurasian sort of autocratic powers. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and then kind of the legacy sort of Western international sort of security regime underpinned by the US as the global hegemon, but kind of the great Oceania, right? Kind of most of your 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 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 to kind of do 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 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, in space, and other more deniable things. And then you have the Iran, Israel kind of flashpoint that has had lots of other sort of regional manifestations. Sorry, you have India, Pakistan, you have kind of latent conflict that's the subject of a lot of speculation. When or if between China and Taiwan, then you have North Korea, 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 Three in the sense that there are regional conflicts that have their own sort of local character and their own history to those sort of adversarial relationships. But now they're linked into this global frame and that every conflict is bringing in other regional and global powers. It's the reason why Russia Ukraine isn't just a Russia Ukraine thing. It's essentially whole Western security apparatus. And then Russia getting support from both Iran, North Korea and China. This is kind of the globalization of these local conflicts. And so when you say World War iii, it's sort of the implication is going back to other world wars that started local, like Austria, Hungary. Right. Serbian assassinations that pulled in more and more belligerence until you had basically the entire world thrown down. And 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, where it's like all of a sudden one thing pops off and then everyone is going to war. We have Article 5 of NATO that's obviously Ukraine isn't party to, so that's kind of kept it mitigated. Israel, we have sort of mutual defense, but it's mostly armed supplies. And then depending on how things go, 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, I think the most recent indications are one, it was immensely successful, maybe more successful than Israel even anticipated. They wiped out, like, large swaths of the military and scientific establishment. They apparently had significant strikes on some of the nuclear enrichment facilities. Natanz and Fordow, 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, strategic surprise, and builds on previous Israeli operations of similar strategic stealth. Going after the Hezbollah leadership, the Pedro attack, there's various assassinations that they've conducted, 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. 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, 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 Bibi to go and start murking 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 dark, darkly comical in the sense that like Trump was like, you know, almost bragging about the guys that were like, being hard asses on the other side of the negotiating table. 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, 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, and I think the biggest reason why is that Iran 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 that had a massive network of in country facilitators. And the fact that they were able to target so many of these senior military and, you know, important people at the same time means that they, you know, like, they can track these people pretty, pretty well from the outside, but like to get like where they sleep in their bedrooms, right, like across, across, like 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. And you know, if, if Israel is there to kind of wipe out your political opponents for you, all you have to do is help them out with where they sleep and boom, most of your opposition is dead inside that country. It's kind of a win Win for you. So we'll see. I think in general, I try to fade geopolitical risk. It's always a sell the news or buy the news event. There's obviously failure modes here where very bad things could happen. The worst case scenario would be like an attempt by Iran to try to close the Surdar Hormuz or to conduct large scale terrorist attacks in the west. 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. And we'll see. Right. It's been only a day or so, so. Right. 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, then they'll turn to their asymmetric options, which are, you know, essentially their terror cells that they've established overseas a lot in South America, a lot even in North America and Western Europe to attack sort of softer targets and to try to impose pain in retaliation. And what that then triggers as a Western counter response, depending on how deadly they are, could be the thing that tips over Western public opinion to engage much more militarily in 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, 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, no more foreign wars in the Middle east, no more getting dragged down into these interminable conflicts where it's often the poor that bleed out in the desert to fight for the elite. 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 US strike support. And so I think that's what they're trying to angle for. And this has been a bit of A rambling assessment. 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. And eventually 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 US Munitions or strike support with targeting these deeply buried facilities, like at Fordo, which is like 200ft in the rock with the centrifuges. So I think Bibi's line here is to Trump now, hey, look, we got their pants down, they're vulnerable. If you just ante up just a bit, send a few more strikes in to help take out these facilities, we can turn this from a months long setback to a years long setback and dramatically improve your negotiating position. 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, we might as well just go all the way right now. Then the question is, if you knock out their nuclear program not for good, but very much substantially, then you get to this next point, which is then the 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 chief of staff, a lot of the intelligence systems. 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 gets people start to scratch. Right. And that would be like an, 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. 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 that's the thing to watch. Not World War 3, but just does the ratchet of successful Strikes increase the chance of US Engagement, because Trump wants to basically get the most leverage he can. And the last point, sorry, would be, think about Iran. The context of the China kind of trade war and negotiations there. 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. A lot of leverage over China. We're somewhat equally matched. 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 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. Right. If you have inflation, you have bond market instability, you have 5% plus 30 year. That Besson started getting 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 has the most recent meetings and phone calls to try to recalibrate, come to a deal. And a lot of it was like the rare earth stuff, the Chinese students stuff. But I think Trump wasn't like a master planner looking at all the 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 just how much leverage China has over us and also how much leverage maybe we have over them. But where are the actual points of leverage and. And pain are. And I think he's looking at Iran and realizing that Iran exports 2 billion, 2, 2 million barrels of oil a day, mostly to China. You know, and if China's choking off your rare earths, maybe you can, you know, help choke off some of their energy, some of their energy supply. Right. So it's like another. Another sort of asymmetric way to kind of, you know, get additional sort of bargaining power over your main rival, which is China here. So anyways, that's that. I'll stop talking.
- [49:36]
Unknown
No, I appreciate the analysis I did. Just because you mentioned Lindsey Graham, I just thought of this, the Holden blood Feast meme, which just gets me every time. But I digress. Every time I see that meme, though, it's like, oh, that's Lindsey Graham. So I think that's an interesting perspective. Basically, this idea that. Because you see a lot of sensationalism, because talking about World War 3 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 let's say doomerism tends to get more than, hey, this isn't so bad. Actually. This is pretty much just status quo as it's been. And we can all 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. Really step that up a little bit to get those swee. Those sweet eyeballs. But no, I, I appreciate that perspective because it is interesting. It's. It's basically we, we're not seeing the beginning of World War III here because for all, you know, intensive purposes, we've been in World War iii. 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, it's this a lot of the, you know, the same, the same cast of characters that's back at it again. And is this time different? I mean, we don't have a crystal ball, who knows. But it certainly, it 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, you know, new wars or, you know, quote wars sparking up all over the place. Boy. It seems to be that usually when there's more conflicts, there tends to be more liquidity injected globally in the US of course, but not just in the US Is this like, how do you think this plays out? I mean, 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 administration, you started to see global liquidity and US Liquidity as well, tick up a little bit recently. So I guess maybe a different way of putting that. Is World War Three good for Bitcoin? And I mean that in the least callous way possible.
- [52:16]
Matt Pines
Yes. I mean, so obviously there's event trades you could put on around your speculation over this particular flashpoint. That's maybe not my forte in terms of whether you're going to have a collar spread on Brent Crude or the VIX or whatever. I'm not running a hedge fund there, but structurally 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, the general shift in the balance from 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 strategic advantage or leverage over an adversary. And so capital markets become weaponized, supply chains become weaponized. 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's changing. And that is now changing how governments react, right, in terms of their fiscal progress, right? Like when you're back is against the wall, like 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. You want to have more resilience in supply chains, more domestic industry, more buffers, right? So you want to accumulate, you want more reserves of gold, of foreign exchange of commodities. You want to have as much of your national champions privileged over adversaries. So you're just going to spend a lot more money on industrial policy, on reshoring. These things also are somewhat controversial domestically. So you need to make sure that the domestic population doesn't face austerity. Normally you would see fiscal contraction after you have a period of fiscal largesse, as we saw after the stimulus wave and 2020. We never saw that. In fact, we've had continuous fiscal deficits. I think it's because the political leadership knows explicitly the population will not take austerity. Well, we're already having riots with low employment and pretty good inflation numbers and pretty good GDP prints economically. Obviously there's a high segmentation between the haves and the have nots in the US and around the Western world. But just objectively speaking, real incomes are pretty climbing. But if you turned, if real incomes went down, if inflation went up, if unemployment went up, that powder keg of our civil society could be quite dangerous. And so I think political leadership just knows we have to keep spending money. I think Lyn Alden says nothing stops his stream for just 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. 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. Everything is basically more money printing. And we're doing all this in an environment where the global collateral is a sovereign debt market underpinned by the US treasury security, which we are 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 securities, which is basically inflationary. And so, yeah, it's like that meme of bitcoin tracking to the M2 money supply. 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. This is 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, Bitcoin's price, 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, never go up.
- [57:09]
Unknown
I mean, I appreciate that. It is amazing how well Lyn Alden's Nothing stops this train memetic thesis is holding up. Really kudos to Lyn because. And I love seeing this get picked up by just more and more people too. 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 Lynn's this rock star and it's like, I'm just happy to see her crushing it. But, yeah, so I'm, you know, it's going to be very interesting to see how things continue to play out. I think it's, you know, almost everybody seems to believe we are in the midst of this fourth turning Right. 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, as at the current point, like, where we have, I don't know if you're familiar with Polybius's anocyclosis. This is like, you know, a couple thousand years old, but we're reaching like the oglocracy stage of, you know, end of democracy towards mob rule. And like, you could also say that 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 on the, let's say on the AI front, on the autonomous and asymmetric warfare front with drones. Like, we've now really seen the demonstration of that power between some warring nations, Ukraine and Russia. You also have a monetary revolution happening that was happening kind of quietly for, for some years, you know, just the nerds playing with their, 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, 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 brake 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 what it is.
- [59:40]
Matt Pines
Yeah. That's where I actually think the monetary aspect of this is less radical than the social geopolitical aspects of this. Because 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 holding gold would feel much richer, but the relative, it would just be a marginal rebalancing of capital pools, like a few percentage points and tens of hundreds of trillions 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 a pretty transformational thing. But I think because we're so focused on it, 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 breakdown, global war and famine and absolute state collapse. I don't think we're in for that. When people say fourth turning Ray Dalio's thesis, they're pointing to kind of long term debt cycles, political cycles, generational cycles. And they 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, 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 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 and we read them out of history books, but people living through them, unless you were really unlucky or in a particularly vulnerable spot, you kind of made it through. It wasn't like end of the world, right? I think that's. Sometimes people don't lay out those scenarios, right, like fourth turning instability, global war. 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, much of our food supply, right, becomes imperiled, which means our population probably shrinks, which means like our standard of living dramatically shrinks. 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 the legitimate institutions in society are being shaken up, which is, I think the single most important feature of these sorts of fourth turning generational cycles is that you have a characteristic process of institutional creation that you could say go back to the 1930s and 40s, the generation that fought World War II that came out of that conflict with this mandate to run the global system. They built new institutions like built the national security state, they built the federal government up, they built international institutions. And the first generation had a lot of momentum, sort of technical and technocratic capacity. 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 has a sense of purpose and creation. And you can kind of see that, right? And then they hand it off to the second generation, and they're kind of like, oh, they were trained by the first generation. They kind of understood kind of the ethos, the heuristics involved in managing a complicated new institutional apparatus and kind of adapting it to a changing environment. Then they hand off to a 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 the best and the brightest anymore, because best and the brightest go off into build new things, right? The third generation inside 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 boundaries. And then they reach a point of fragility. And when the environment basically gives them a crisis and they can't respond to it, and that's when the fourth generation, that's either in the institution that goes, oh, this thing is totally cooked, right? And they go, well, either we need to 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 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 saving, and they sort of strip out all the, say, WOKE nonsense. But there's a core ethos, there's a core substance that needs to be rebuilt upon. And there's others that are maybe more sort of radically inclined that are saying, oh, no, no, this needs to be start. We need to start fresh, right? The legacy institutions were designed for a fundamentally different era. They're fundamentally corrupted. They're fundamentally not fit for. 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, there are institutions we need to save and sort of rebuild. And there are also, I think, new institutions we need to create that the existing apparatus can't deliver, right? And so I think Bitcoin is this interesting interplay right, between the old and the New. Right. It certainly is a fundamentally new type of institution itself, but it's sort of going through and sort of almost co opting and maybe remaking 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 are we taking over the state? Right. And it's kind of, I think it's ambiguous at the moment. Right. It's not a clear answer to that question. Right. Because when you have that sort of interpenetration, right. It's never clear well who's going to, is it this going to take over this or is this going to take over this or is the new thing that gets created out of that, out of that sort of dynamic, 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 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 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. And so you have this memetic engine that is attracting people capital and is now kind of now swirling in and bringing in cyber wealth funds and BlackRocks and presidents and staffers for central banks. We're having Feds, you know, Fed staffers come to our bitcoin policy summit like this, is this like, like black hole that's, that's like, that's, that's accreting here. And yeah, I don't know, I don't try to project out too far because I think people, when we try to project out 3, 5, 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. I think when you're in these phase transitions, a lot of the things that you think are going to survive don't. And it's kind of not obvious what makes it through and what adapts. So I try not to make predictions. I think the basic lesson I have from bitcoin is you have to be kind of 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 sort of sine qua non of a self adaptive corrective system. 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, those sorts of centrally planned, 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 global environment. 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, it's kind of self healing. It's highly redundant and resilient. That's like a model to structure what I would call sociotechnical institutions 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 as all these things happen and geopolitical conflict accelerates. And you need something like Bitcoin, I think, as a new network kind of 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 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 to go, oh, we're going to restructure the, like, the political environment. We're going to build new institutions. Well, that's, that's, that's the history of all human institutions. That's literally what like the story of the foundations of, you know, all the major countries and political systems is. And, and that's just, I think the process we're seeing play out.
- [69:29]
Unknown
Just as you were saying that, you know, 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, you know, you know, I'm not trapped in here with you. Like you're trapped in here with me. Like, that's bitcoin right there basically being like, you know, like you think you're co opting it, but really you yourself are being co. Opted. 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, in this, let's say, bitcoin race, not as early as El Salvador, but in terms, El Salvador is, you know, 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. That you've touched on and explained in this kind of, you know, belt of. 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 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 in, like, eight months ago when you were last on 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 put your economic weight behind as a nation state if you're the United States or if you're one of these other countries, you know, for China and Russia, maybe it's gold. Because I think bitcoin is also somewhat ideologically incompatible with an authoritarian state. Like, it's not. They won't use it, but it's ideologically incompatible with how that state is organized. I think it's ideologically much more compatible with the United States.
- [71:29]
Walker America
So do you see.
- [71:31]
Unknown
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 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.
- [72:11]
Matt Pines
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, right? 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 we 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, 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? A mix of the old standby that's highly de risked and well known. And everyone's comfortable with it in those existing institutions. And you don't want to just break those institutions. You don't just 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. But I think they also see the strategic advantage that's quite asymmetric that we have for bitcoin relative to gold. 4 to 1 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 1 relative advantage between allowing gold to go to say 5 or 6 or $10,000 and allowing Bitcoin to go to a million or $2 million. 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. The dollar as a mean 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 like even this bullish scenario of Bitcoin at a million dollars is like maybe Bitcoin helps facilitate single digit percentage points of international trade. Maybe. Right. And that's still a world with Bitcoin at a million dollars plus. So I think people, you 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. So the folks that the US can still kind of keep inside its tech tariff and security zone, that kind of re securitizes and essentially says you want access to our advanced technology, our AI systems and our other spooky stuff, you want to be protected by our nuclear umbrella, you want the US military to secure global trade, 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. Like with Japan for example. There's a reason why Japan and the UK are actually buying more debt, right. Even though they're kind of not in the best shape themselves, is because we're sort of forcing them to. And we might set up like a joint sovereign wealth fund like 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 or doing a various 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 the global financial system. And I think the senior policymakers in the Trump administration are even saying that that's what they want. They want to impose a tax on essentially foreign holders of U.S. bonds. 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. 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 the Australians and the Japanese and the South Koreans and the Taiwanese and some of the Middle Eastern partners and Western Europe are going to be kind of depending on how clever we are and how much force we have, we can kind of stuff these losses into their balance sheets, but that's kind of what they're going to do. They just need to bring debt to GDP from 120 to 70 or 80, so run the economy a little bit hot. I think a lot of it's also potentially how much pain they have to impose is how actually does AI play in here. Do we actually get the massive productivity breakthrough with robotics and AI? And I mean, at the end of the day, in the2030s, all this conversation is going to be moot anyways because a lot of things are going to happen that we've talked about in other episodes that are going to be. They're going to render this sort of fiscal projections out of 2040. Like, you guys are smoking, like, yeah, we're on a bunch of hockey sticks here. And the2030s are when all this conversation becomes a bit moot.
- [78:19]
Unknown
Yeah, well, and I want to be conscious of your time because there are certain topics that it would be inappropriate of me to dive into with little time left, 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?
- [78:37]
Matt Pines
Yeah, yeah, I'm good. I'm good for 15 minutes.
- [78:40]
Unknown
Okay. So, I mean, maybe we can. We could get into one of them a little bit because 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 bimetallism almost that we might see. So I thought 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 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 Vibe. Vibes Capital Management recently. And, and, yeah. What is. Are you detecting a vibe shift?
- [79:34]
Matt Pines
I mean, I think. I mean, if I'm going to be honest, and, you know, I love Stephen, but, you know, the Vibes, they've sold out. You know, they've, they've, they've. 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. Thus spake Zarathustra on my mountaintop reading the willows. And I don't post vibes. I make the vibes. I consciously steer the path of history just by just subtle winks and nods. You don't have to post about the Vibes to make the vibes. The Vibes are ineffable, right? Wittgenstein said, thereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. The ineffable, esoteric domain in which we all operate, if it can be named, the Dao that can be named is not the Dao. The Vibe that can be named is not the Vibe. So there's sort of an inherent contradiction in Vibe's capital management. What are you managing? It's sand in your fingers. So I just, I just go with the wind. And that's my Vibe.
- [80:50]
Unknown
That's going to be a great sound bite that I'll have to clip out for Steven. I appreciate that. 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 in 15 minutes that's not enough time to do this justice, but obviously you're mentioning things, projections into the 2000 and 30s being. Or 2000 and 40s being somewhat moot. And I assume that one of the things that you're referring there to is, let's say, heretofore clandestine knowledge coming to be widely, publicly available and what sorts of radical changes that may force on the world. Is that me beating around the bush there? Is that one of the things you're referring to there?
- [81:38]
Matt Pines
Yeah. We have. I don't know. I don't know how much time, but 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, smart on that may or may not be disruptive to certain metaphysical models of reality, certainly will be disruptive to our sense of, 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, 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, you know, it'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 gonna, you know, uplift all of us into some sort of transcendental nirvana, explore the future light cone, imprint humans, you know, moral aspirations on the face of the cosmos. That's kind of the, you know, megalomania in San Francisco. I think that's a bit delusional, but it's gesturing at a sense of the hyperbolic bifurcation that's in our near future. We are on exponential 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 US government is right now going through a series of agonizing internal tumult over how and to what degree to talk about it publicly. And it's not just a US 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, 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 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 kind of that touch it know about. And so, but, but there are, there's, 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, other parts of the social graph use to talk about the subject 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 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. And so we have this very difficult environment where if you're curious and you're open minded, which I think a lot of bitcoiners are about what's really going on in the world or they want to think for themselves, they want to get to ground truth, they want to actually assess for themselves the state of things. It's a very difficult subject to do that in because most of the things that you would go to are fraught with all sorts of grift or propaganda or manipulation, outright fiction or schizophrenia. So I don't begrudge anyone who approaches the subject with inherent skepticism and distance. I'll just say like you should try. Or it's like with bitcoin, it's like you'll kind of get the truth at the price you deserve. And it could be a few years down the line and it could come as a bit of a surprise, or you could adapt yourself epistemically to a sense of what's going on in the world. I don't have full ground truth. I make no pretense to understand what's really happening or what's the meta structure for this whole topic. 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, across the world. It's just like with Bitcoin 2, three years ago, like starting BPI, like with David and 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 increasing. I think it's going to land on the doorstep of these national leaders. And 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 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 like 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 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 reinforce 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. It's a bit of like on 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 and the egg problem because they can't actually 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 overtone window is 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, 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 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 2020, 2021. You're talking about bitcoin at Thanksgiving dinner, your aunt is looking at you like your 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 maybe I've specialized in writing 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. I have no predictions, but 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 increasingly so on the UAP side. And 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 over the next five, 10 years, what's the most important thing? It's actually not the bitcoin stuff. It's this UAP stuff. 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 singular or a skeptic, 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, like a meta conversation. It's a little bit too much. 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 unsee.
- [91:22]
Unknown
Well, no, I appreciate one of these days we do need to have a singularly focused conversation 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 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 dying off and retiring out? 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.
- [92:11]
Matt Pines
Yeah. And there's a lot of things that are happening at the same time. Like an important one is this sort of generational cycle shift, right. We talk 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 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 like, 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 who are like, this is not cool, guys. 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 Committee, 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. 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 and development apparatus across, you know, different parts of the country that specialize in different things, take different sides of this, like, disclosure question. So there's like this factional fight taking Place like, you know, how much do we want a new power that want to sort of co opt that system for their own purposes? Right. They don't want disclosure, they just want to get, 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, you know, Palantir and Anduril take over. Right. So that's one line, right. I wouldn't call the disclosure line. That's like just a new boss name is 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, 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 being taking place. It's a 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 President from a nine member panel of eminence grass national security officials, economists, members of civil society, foreign relations experts. 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. The U.S. senate is telling you this is what we're dealing with, what we're all dealing with here. And so this is I think a not being, it's like the lump in the throat of the US 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. If you've done illegal stuff, you want to get immunity agreements. There's a massive 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 and then, but you know, like I'm a senior strategic advisor at this organization called Skywatcher which is staffed by some individuals that have, have you know, personal experience with these, with these, with this subject and this, this phenomenon, you know, as you know, elements of the US government as kind of security apparatus. And you know, it's, it's based on the premise that the sky isn't classified. And you can go out and, you know, collect information on the subject independent of the government. So you can advocate for the government to disclose this information, political process activism, et cetera. 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 forward independent of government disclosure efforts. And so I think both are happening and they're potentially mutually reinforcing. But we're just starting that process, so remains to be seen how far it will go, how it might evolve. But once you hit, it's kind of a. It's like you're at this. It's like activation threshold. Like a neuron doesn't fire until there's a certain density of calcium ions in the. Like in the synaptic clef 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. This is probably not a real thing. I see a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. There's lots of psyops. It's probably a bunch of noise. 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. The preference falsification that everyone kind of has goes away. But it's hard to predict when you reach that point. But we are continually adding 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 gradually. Then suddenly it's like. And it's kind of. There's a matter of contingency here. 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 non linear, non deterministic process, highly contingent. Like certain things had to happen in the right way and they had to be amplified and not smothered. And then the world had to kind of evolve in that branch. Right? And we're kind of. I see where things are happening in that direction. I mean, 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, 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. It's like, all right, everyone of those officials wants to be briefed on this subject, but they don't want to own it. 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 don't. I have some sympathy for these officials because it's like, not clear what the upside is for them. 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. And a security responsibility or economic responsibility, like, it's a. Simon. A government responsibility. It's all encompassing. 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. We'll see. I mean, I don't know what the prospects for the UP Disclosure act are. The opposition that was there inside the House is gone, some of it, at least. But it'd be interesting to see how where the White House stands. Senator Rounds is a champion on this issue. He's shown a lot of courage. I applaud him. Folks should just Google centered around 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. But he's not going to stop talking about this stuff. And he's got a bill that he's going to push for it. So it's like with Bitcoiners, it's like, you know, folks that care to engage politically can. Same thing with UAPs. Like, if you care, you can engage, you can talk to your Congressman, and be like, I think you should support this bill. There's a, you know, there's other things going on. But, yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a subject, I think is. This is the most important subject that exists. And. But we've been conditioned with taboo and stigma so that we don't really, we don't really like to talk about it, but it's there.
- [101:43]
Unknown
Oh, yeah, we're definitely going to need some once, once the conference circuit dies down. We'll take some time, maybe. Because I do think it's, you know, maybe it's hard for some bitcoiners to hear that there is something more important out there than bitcoin. But, you know, rest assured, I think bitcoin is probably 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 interested to see what the White House does have to say on this, and if 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 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 Nostr, so shout out to you guys. But bdcpolicysummit.org, promo code walker, 21% off. No kickbacks for me. Just orange pilling 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.
- [102:53]
Matt Pines
Like a true questioner, a curious mind. Walker, I'll see you next time.
- [102:57]
Unknown
I do my best. See you, man.
- [102:59]
Matt Pines
Thank you.
- [103:07]
Walker America
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@primal.net walker and this podcast@primal.netcoin on X, YouTube and Rumble. Just search at Walker America America and find this podcast on X and Instagram at Tcoin Podcast. Head to the Show Notes to grab sponsor links. Head to substack.comwalkeramerica to get episodes emailed to you. And head to bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Bitcoin is scarce, but podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time listening to the Bitcoin podcast. Until next time, stay free.
- [104:06]
Matt Pines
Bitcoin is effectively a liquidity gauge in the global, global system, and everyone's basically got to print the way out of it. There's just no way, no way around it at this point. So, yeah, number go up.