American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - The Alien Apocalypse: Society After UFO Disclosure (ft. Matthew Pines)

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

Go to https://buyraycon.com/jessemichels to get up to 20% Off sitewide! Brought to you by Raycon. Join Jesse Michels on today's episode of American Alchemy as he sits down with Matthew Pines, Executive Director of the Bitcoin Policy Institute, to explore how Bitcoin’s meteoric rise mirrors the evolution of UAP disclosure—from fringe taboo to strategic, state-level concern. In this episode, Pines describes the geopolitical and technological forces reshaping global finance, drawing striking parallels between decentralized digital money and the emerging reality of non-human intelligence. Matthew Pines' X Account ➤ https://x.com/matthew_pines -------------------------- ***JOIN OUR WHOP (Exclusive Episodes & Group Calls) ➤ https://whop.com/jessemichels ***Become a Member of American Alchemy: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuG2KzrIMe3qoNcuDVpwnXw/join -------------------------- Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 00:58 Bitcoin's Evolution in Society 02:34 Bridging UAP and Bitcoin Communities 06:09 Political Dynamics and Disclosure 08:44 Exploring the Nature of Reality 10:20 The Intersection of AI, Bitcoin, and UAPs 12:07 The Last Bubbles: Money and Reality 15:36 The Philosophical Nature of Money 17:34 Bitcoin as a Hedge Against Instability 19:51 Institutional Adoption of Bitcoin 26:19 Bitcoin's Trajectory and Future 29:11 Unraveling the UAP Mystery 31:27 The Nature of Disclosure 42:21 The Soul's High Adventure 48:11 Ancient Knowledge Meets Modern Understanding 52:42 The Government and Psionic Capabilities 57:30 The Puzzle of Non-Human Craft 1:06:57 Disinformation and the UAP Phenomenon 1:14:13 Insights from Harold Malmgren 1:16:40 Legacy of UAPs 1:23:26 Trump and UAP Connections 1:36:36 The Role of Institutions 2:08:22 Bitcoin as a Global Asset 2:23:27 Future of Bitcoin and UAPs -------------------------- Key Revelations: UAP Disclosure & Bitcoin: The UAP phenomena and Bitcoin evolved from fringe, taboo topics to strategic issues now under high-level government scrutiny, with early skepticism giving way to mainstream acceptance. Non-State Innovation as a Catalyst for Change:Bitcoin’s decentralized, open-source network—which pioneered digital scarcity—as a model for how disruptive ideas, once marginalized, can compel a reevaluation of national and global institutional frameworks, much like emerging UAP revelations are challenging traditional military paradigms. Political Convergence on Disruptive Issues: Policymakers such as Senator Gillibrand have influenced both crypto legislation and UAP disclosure efforts, underscoring a rare intersection where national security debates now address phenomena from unconventional physics to covert extraterrestrial contacts. Dual-Use Risks in Advanced Physics & Psionics: Breakthroughs in extended electrodynamics, exotic propulsion, and psionic capabilities—demonstrated by secret experiments and scalar wave research—pose serious weaponization risks if misappropriated, threatening to upend global security. Human Consciousness as a Technological Interface: Our innate psionic abilities, like remote viewing and telepathy, might interact with non-human intelligence, suggesting that human consciousness plays an active role in both the manifestation of UAPs and the operation of advanced, reverse-engineered tech. -------------------------- SPOTIFY ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim. Well, I hope you like my little songbook direct at sourcehiltails.com. Fringe opinions on Bitcoin and UAPs four or five years ago are now like increasingly like Normie. The reality of non-human intelligence was like fully out there. Now it's like coming in and now you got psionics. It's like, oof, well, okay, that's the, that's the new thing out there. But that's probably also coming in. Consciousness and light beings and meditative practices. It's like we're rediscovering a lot of like ancient sort of knowledge, right? It's just being reinterpreted through our modern frame. What sort of disclosure are we going to get? And also like,

what is the curve that you think is, like, behind these data points? Is it the non-human intelligences, alien civilizations, and some advanced spacecraft coming here to monitor us curve? Is it time travelers? Is it cryptotorrestrials? Is it interdimensional? It does feel like this sort of Pandora's box. You have hope.

But then there's, like, a whole lot of, like, you know, bad stuff that comes with it. Not all knowledge is just, oh, this is a rainbow. Oh, this is like forever knowledge. There's no guarantee that the box of knowledge humanity is dipping its hand into is going to be like good knowledge. Bitcoin and UAPs and AI, like these are fully at the center of what's going to drive major strategic dynamics over the next few years. I'm here with Matthew Pines, who is the executive director at Bitcoin Policy Institute. I think if I were to handcraft a podcast guest, you would be it. You just are always such a

deep wellspring of knowledge across many, many domains. And so I'm very, very excited to have you. here as things get very weird in 2025. Yes, sir. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So, I mean, there are million ways to, or places to start. Maybe, you know, the one thing I was sort of kicking myself for not talking to you about after our last podcast was Bitcoin. And now you're at the Bitcoin Policy Institute. So where do you think we go from here? There are chatters of a strategic reserve. You know, obviously Trump has, you know, made promises on this front.

He was in Nashville at the Bitcoin conference earlier this, or last year, rather. And yeah, where do we go from here? I guess I'll step back and maybe to bridge maybe most of your audience, right, from the UAP community to the Bitcoin side of things. It's some like ironic and maybe not so ironic similarities between the evolution of Bitcoin as like a sociological phenomenon and how it's sort of, you know, played a role in our in our, in our, sort of, in the zeitgeist is a symptom of maybe what are these other dynamics taking place, right, in our, in our society. And then the similar sort of

evolution of UAPs. Like, they were both on sort of the sort of fringes of what's considered acceptable, considered taboo in their respective domains. Like if you're a financial advisor, you know, five, six years ago, it was just anathema to even talk about Bitcoin as a serious investment opportunity, right? And the folks that were attracted to it would tend to be sort heterodox thinkers, folks that didn't necessarily trust in institutional authority, had a much higher risk tolerance, or had a much higher degree of confidence in a particular vision of the future, right? And so the Bitcoin culture that got started, has this sort of, you know, sort of phenomenologies almost of like a cult religion, right? It's got this sort of

founding figure that sort of gifts this protocol to the true believers who have sort of formed this astrological vision around it, right? Sort of hyper-bitcoinization. They were sort of an outgroup. They were kind of, you know, not the normal sort of folks that went through a traditional sort of meritocratic professional track. For whatever reason in their background, they were attracted to this idea of sort of an open monetary network. And so they sort of went in and it formed this sort of unique culture. And it has Bitcoin podcasts. It has Bitcoin conferences and influencers.

And as, you know, as social media has developed, Bitcoin has become this, you know, this own community. Right. And then as Bitcoin became more and more of an adopted asset as a network grew, it obviously grew in total market value. And then it became much more of a political force. And then politicians started to get engaged and it started to be like a regulatory conversation that was triggered around Bitcoin and the broader digital asset space. And so the sort of the Bitcoin like concept sort of went from total fringe, heterodox,

somewhat taboo topic. And it's sort of been on this trajectory towards, you know, inside the overtive. window. And now you have, essentially, president of United States, saying he wants America to be, you know, the crypto capital world, right? So that is a kind of remarkable evolution for something to go through in a relatively short period of time. And I think there's some interesting parallels to that kind of trajectory for Bitcoin and the UAP topic, right? I think whatever underlying reasons for that similarity we can explore, but just as a first level set of observations, you know, similar sort of fringe, somewhat taboo subject, people are attracted to it via some

idiosyncratic mix of their personal experience and their, you know, professional or psychological sort of, you know, focuses. And it has its own insular sort of canonical lore and influencers and podcasts and conferences. And it has also undergone this evolution, right, from since 2017, where it was completely somewhat fringe and kind of this outgrouped culture. And then had gone through this period of, you know, gradual semi-official legitimization, right? So starting with the New York Times articles and then progressive engagement, you know, correlated to direct sort of legislative engagement and acknowledgement as well. And it just so happens, like one of the course sort of senators involved in on the pro-crypto legislation, Senator Gillibrand has also the same senator who's been involved in some of the initial sort of UAP legislation. The Gillibrand Llamis bill on the crypto side and the Jillbin Rubio amendments on the other side. And they happen around the same sort of time period. And now we're at this particular moment in time where I heading into, you know, the first few weeks of the Trump administration where both Bitcoin has a policy issue is pretty highly salient in a topic of, of contention and focus at the

senior most levels of the administration. At the same time, UAPs are also like increasingly of such subject of White House level, cabinet level, like discourse and, and speculation. Right? The speculation in the Bitcoin community is like how serious and how pro-Bitcoin is the White House really going to be? Who's really going to, you know, what sort of executive orders are going to be passed? What sorts of. pro-Bitcoin policies are going to be put forward. The same sorts of questions are happening on the UAP side. How serious is the administration about disclosure?

What sort of pro-UAP, you know, cabinet secretaries are going to be confirmed and how forceful are they going to be in executing on that pro-UAP policy position? Very similar, right? We've got potentially pro-Bitcoin cabinet secretaries and the question is, like, how pro-Bitcoin are they really going to be? And in many ways, often they're very the same people, right? Like, you have Tulsi Gabbard at DNI. He was apparently pretty pro-Bitcoin.

And also, now, I think our testimony was talking about sort of UAPs explicitly in her own. Do you think she'll get confirmed? I don't know. I'm not an expert in handicapping the Senate. I don't know. 50-50. I mean, it'll probably be decided by the time this is like aired. So whatever prediction I make will look.

I think she's like slightly above 50% in polymarket or whatever. Yeah. And I think I haven't seen most. of her full testimony or what the reactions were. So I can't necessarily judge because it depends on how the senators, you know, perceived her testimony and what the media reaction is. But yeah, but just stepping back. So I just find a remarkable sort of fact about our political economy and our sort of the

sociological process underway that these two sort of outgroup somewhat fringe topics, UAPs and Bitcoin, also just my personal preoccupation for the past five, six years, like thinking intellectually about these things in a very serious way. But, you know, and for me, professionally, these things started out on, like, the side. Just things I was interested in. I just happened to be really sort of obsessed with these two topics. Like, not for any particular reason or like why they were related to each other. Just that's just sort of how my intellectual interests sort of evolved.

And then they both kind of been embarking in this process, you know, the last four or five years, kind of coming into the Overton window. And now becoming subject of very serious sort of policy, you know, sort of, deliberation and decision now at the highest level of the U.S. government. And so that's just like the way I would start. It's just like these are, you seem like these are disconnected phenomena. There must be some underlying reason. I don't know we could dig into speculation about why these two things are all happening

at once. At the same time, you also have AI, I think also undergoing the similar evolution to look at, right? The blog post about, you know, artificial superintelligence, the sort of less wrong, hyper-rationalist, effective altruist movement, was, they were kind of fringe. in-group, you know, internet conversations. Totally. They had their own canonical debates and war and, you know, little internecine, you know, factions, et cetera.

Same thing with Bitcoin. You had sort of factions split off about the, you know, the core vision about what Bitcoin is. You have factions in the UAP community, right? All these sorts of things develop these same dynamics. And then the AI question has gone from those blog posts to now, like, again, strategic level conversation. You know, stock market swings 10% in a day

because one Chinese lab, you know, releases an AI model, right? This is where we are now. And I think Bitcoin and UAPs and AI, like, these are now fully at the center of what's going to drive major strategic dynamics over the next few years. So it's one of those things where if you want to try to read the future, and I, you know, have been obsessed with trying to understand what's really going to, what's really going on and what's likely to happen in the future. Yep. And you kind of have to pay attention to these things coming in from the tails. These like little bubbles of phenomenon, whether it's, this idea of AI, this prospect of Bitcoin monetizing, the prospect that UAPs are not a total

fiction. It's like the what if AI turns out to be a real thing at scale. What if Bitcoin monetizes significantly? What if UAPs are real? Like each of those things individually has massive strategic implications. And they all happen to be leaning towards the yes of that what if at the same time. And that's what I think is a strategic change that a lot of people that are maybe embedded in a set of mental models that they anchored five, 10, 15 years ago are just not well positioned to keep track of and then to anticipate the changes that might be coming in the next few years. Yeah, it's almost like if the total energy of the system equals potential energy plus kinetic energy, all of those things have huge potential energy buildups. And it's just, yeah,

it's unclear how exactly it pans out or, you know, not to mix in out physics analogies, but how the wave function collapses or whatever. But there's sort of, you know, a lot of possibilities with these things. And it's almost like, you know, the history of the last 50 or so years has been the history of successive bubbles. And like, like in the 70s, you could say, like real growth really started to slow. 80s and 90s was kind of like, you know, financial deregulation bubble, you know, early 2000s, you had the real estate bubble, you know, globalization bubble or whatever with NAFTA, you know, maybe in between those two. And then in 2008 was this big watershed moment. And then 2009, Bitcoin, you know, read Satoshi's

white paper and it's this like, they're sort of gambling with our, with our, you know, our sovereignty. You know, Satoshi seems like this very kind of, you know, anti-wall street, anti, you know, big finance. and you had Occupy Wall Street at that time as well. And so this is a weird way to put it, but it's almost like the last bubble is always the money bubble. And so like Bitcoin is an arbitrage against the money bubble. And maybe the real last bubble is like the reality bubble. And like UFOs are somehow like, you know, like that's bursting.

And that's why UFOs are just, you know, this. They're not, you know, some deeper ontology. but they're like the first thing to like peek its head out, you know, once the reality bubble starts to sort of dissolve. Yeah. It's fascinating. I guess my first sort of hot take reaction of that is thinking about, again, money is just a concept and it's an embedded concept that's reified in human institutions at a certain scale. Right? We have money like things at all scales of human institutions, like social organizations. Like if you don't have human institutions, you don't have money, you just have, you know, people living, you know, hand to mouth and scraping out subsistence existence. as soon as you get to some basic level of human social organization, you get something like moneyness as an institutional concept that gets instantiated and reified in different, you know, technologies, right? The technologies that can that can instantiate that concept of money, whether it's seashells or yapstones or gold or gold certificates, you know,

ledger balances at international institutions, like, you know, everything from special drawing rights at the IMF to then Bitcoin, which is a sort of, again, like an instantiation of this, you know, age-old human concept of moneyness, but taking advantage of. of the ambient technologies that are now available to a digital society. And so this is just the process of evolution of human societies adapting different, you know, basic sociological sort of primitives, but now the possibility space of what they can do expands as their technological capabilities change. So now you can realistically maintain something like a consensus distributed ledger around the world,

right? It wasn't possible until you had the basic technologies of the Internet and public-private key, you know, cryptography. And so this is, these were the basic primitives that Satoshi put together and he published

into the sort of the, you know, 2009 as an open source. And that's a bit, we should drive this home because whenever I speak to kind of boomer financial people or whatever,

they act like that's not a big deal. Like what is it the Byzantine general problem or whatever? Like the double spending thing, that's not a big deal. It's a huge deal. Like the idea that you can create

digital scarcity. And then, you know, there are all sorts of possible derivatives from the digital scarcity, but just the digital scarcity itself, which Bitcoin is the kind of archetypal example of is sort of really important because software doesn't usually operate like that. And so that's like really interesting. It's like it was the first real computer science breakthrough that became a meme, right? And so people have hard time trying to reconcile both the memetic aspects of Bitcoin and the hard technical scientific breakthrough that it embodied. Well, they also have trouble swallowing the fact that like our other financial institutions are at all memetic themselves and that you upend the old mimesis with some new mimesis.

Well, this is where we get, often you get into these interesting debates that turn into philosophical questions of like, like what are human institutions? What are these human concepts? Like how real is the state as a concept? How real is the promise of a state to pay back its debts a thing, which is essentially what money is in our system? And it's like these are sociotechnical systems. Not to you get to like jargony. But like, Like, in a sense, all money is an interface between human belief and the physical world, right? Which is what intermediates the actions that human beings take as a result of their beliefs. And so that's just what humans are.

It's what we do. There's been philosophical debates about how much reality you assign to like these different concepts, like money. Is it a thing? Is it just a social fiction? If it's all just a matter of mutual belief, I think we all just decide to believe something different. Yeah. But again, it's an interface between human belief and reality. You can't just believe anything, right?

Reality imposes, you know, exogenous. constraints on what that belief can do in the world. Doesn't it all just kind of come down to, you know, who has a monopoly on sacred violence? Who can perform sacred violence? And the government is that at the limit. And so, you know, it's like, at all ultimate is like sort of taxation is like a version of that. If you don't pay your taxes, you end up in jail or something.

I mean, you can go to like, yeah, the sort of the Max Weber kind of deconstruction view of the state or, I mean, that's getting deep into political. philosophy. I don't think it's interesting to have like a particular strong view of like, you know, the build up this tower of institutions that that anchor these webs of mutual fictions that we call, you know, these collective beliefs. The state, the constitution, the social contract. These are all higher level kind of shared fictions. Yeah. That we all agree and there's a sense of mutual consensus belief that we will all continue to keep believing them, right? States break down when that, that embedded assumption that everyone will continue to basically, believe the same thing tomorrow about those shared fictions breaks down. When you don't actually trust, that's what trust essentially is at scale, right? Can Bitcoin serve as a head? Because I think about the last five years in this idea of like modern monetary theory, like as long as your debt is denominated in your own currency, you can sort of like print it away. And like once we start to talk in those terms, it feels like that's sort of the beginning of the end or something. Yeah.

Like, that doesn't feel good. And so is Bitcoin like, is it, you know, this fully decentralized thing or, you know, presumably Trump wouldn't get behind it if it was? And is it actually like a hedge, you know, as far as like ensuring, you know, a solvency from, you know, United States perspective on a go forward basis? Well, again, those are trillion dollar kind of sort of questions. I don't have a, you know, high confident answer to how it's really going to shake out. But I think it's important to think about Bitcoin as an emerging institution, right, that is a novel type of institution that we haven't really seen before, right? It's a global, decentralized, open, meaning there's no gatekeeper to access, you know, your ability to transact or hold it. It doesn't require a third party to sort of validate your transactions to secure your rights in the network.

you can essentially do that with essentially math and open source software. So this is a kind of novel technology that can form as a predicate for an emerging institution that started off fully peer-to-peer, again kind of crypto anarchist, internet forms, dark web markets, you know, forward-thinking investors, etc. And is now engaging at the level of nation states. And so we're seeing this, you know, quite dramatic and for me just fascinating interplay between these existing state institutional structures and super state institutional structures, say like the ECB or the Bank of International Settlements and the sort of international norms between central banks as well as major pools of international capital, which are, you know, these are institutions themselves, right? And they formed as a result of decades of sort of evolution, right, within a certain global context, especially in the post-war era, especially in say the post-1990s, kind of neoliberal sort of capitalist sort of U.S. sort of dominated global system. And then in comes Bitcoin. as this kind of thing from left field that is now, you know, again, it's sort of emerging

interferced order just as an asset that like those existing institutions can buy, right? So BlackRock has their ETF and they're now pitching it to their, to their clients and saying to sovereign wealth funds, it's prudent for any institution to hold between two and five percent, right? So they just view it as it's an asset. You can hold it. It provides diversification benefits because it's volatility. It's, you know, correlation is, is, adds overall kind of, say, um, uh,

like improves the sharp ratio of the median portfolio. So they're thinking that from a purely investment asset. It's like it's a novel asset. It's now gone through this hyper speculative phase. It's now in its institutionalization phase. And therefore it's a safe thing to sort of prudently diversify into as part of a portfolio sort of allocation decision. But that belies like what's really happening underneath the surface,

which is, okay, you have this weird. It's not just an asset. It's this network. And it's a network that no one really controls. Right. That's the secret, right? There really isn't some. You can't just go to the Bitcoin CEO and get them in a room and say, like, do something different.

Right. It's like, there's nobody to bring in. There's no throat to choke, right? You can get the head of Coinbase. You can get the head of BlackRock. You can get the head of, you know, any company. And you can bring them into a room and be like, we want you to do something different. There's literally nobody to go to.

Is the one sort of devil's advocate argument there is like the identity of Satoshi? But even there, it's like, he can't. do anything to change the network. I mean, he has a certain cult of personality. So you think it's a he. I mean, I think people recognize it in his correspondence as most likely male. I think it's pretty accepted. Do you have any theories? Oh, man. The whole Suuas Satoshi question to me is kind of banal, but I don't. I mean, I find it fascinating. I mean, it is fascinating. Again, as a historical question, I think though it's real, you know, I think he's dead, to be honest, whoever it is. That's best for people who are pro-Bitcoin to say. I mean, you can go back

to like the early history of Bitcoin. Like, Bitcoin didn't come out of nowhere, right? In fact, no, Satoshi even cites, you know, like David Chalm and Wei Dai. Nick Zabbo. And so, you know, he was taking different pieces that had already been put in place and trying to stitch together this, you know, solved this new unique problem, right? The double-spin problem. and took the proof of work sort of concept as well. And so added in difficulty adjustment. So it was just kind of melange of things that no one had to put together in just the right way. And yeah, I mean, the most relevant, there's like two main things that would be relevant if Satoshi was still alive and could like intervene sort of DASX-Makana, right, into the present-day context.

It's like one is just his actual holdings are enormous. Enormous. Or a million day coins. So just his decision to move coins or spend coins would have a massive market. market impact. And then the question is if he would try to insert himself in Bitcoin development conversations, he would obviously immediately become, you know, like first among equals, right? If not the dominant force in terms of debating on any future changes to the protocol. And that would be, that would turn Bitcoin's development ecosystem potentially more like

how Ethereum has evolved. We still have Vitalik, who's the charismatic, singular founder, personality, who's very active and makes his opinions known. And the rest of the community defers to his opinions. In fact, there was this recent shakeup, right, with the Ethereum Foundation and a kind of, you know, acrimony between developers and debates about this very complicated development roadmap that they've laid out. And that's, that would introduce new risk, right? Like, the basic risk profile of Bitcoin as an open source, uh, sort of software project, essentially, that operates on this sort of rough consensus mechanism is it's very hard to change. It's very resistant to change. It takes enormous amounts of time and broad consensus. to make even relatively trivial changes to the protocol because it's functioning essentially as digital gold, right? It just doesn't change. And so that's, that's, you know, this debate that actually is really interesting within Bitcoin

is this sort of ostentication debate, right? There are some folks that think Bitcoin should really just never change, like at all. Literally no tweaks. Like anything you change is at risk. And then some people who think, well, there are some long-term things about the nature of the protocol, these little additional features

that would really unlock a whole bunch of additional capability for, say, time lock, sort of, you know, sort of very constrained smart contracts, right? Herium is kind of a more turn-complete language. And so there's some issues with that, but it gives a much more open expressivity to what you can do on the blockchain, whereas Bitcoin is very much a very discreet. If it's trying to be a gold analog, I don't know if you need to do much more than, you know, what you've already done. I mean, there are a few design.

I mean, the design was pretty, pretty perfect. But, like, there are some flaws you could point at, like, the, you know, I don't think he anticipated A6 chips, for example. Or, like, you know, like, extreme concentration in the chain itself, you know. I mean, it's held up well. I mean, from when he was mining on a laptop to when now you have, like, you know, massively capable, special purpose, you know, integrated circus that have been designed just to run the algorithm. And the difficulty adjustment is the true genius, right? Because it doesn't matter how much energy you throw at it in two weeks, it's going to automatically adjust. to take into account any breakthrough in the hashing technology.

And so that is, but the interesting thing about Satoshi is that if he was still around and he decided to say, hey, guys, like, I was just chilling out, but now I'm back and I've got all these great ideas about how to improve Bitcoin, right? That's been the story of Bitcoin for a while now, especially in those first few years where it was like, oh, Bitcoin's great, but like, you know, it's too slow. The block size is too small. I want to add these additional features and I'm going to fork it, yada, yada, yada. There's always like Roger Vare. all these additional, the block size wars were all about this. Bitcoin cash is the true Bitcoin.

And so that was part of the whole risk of Bitcoin in the barely early stages, is you know, like, which Bitcoin would win, right? And it's been this, you know, process of historical accretion. Yeah. Over, and consensus over time, a kind of this sort of, like a physics process of kind of sort of condensation where it's like you have something that's really hot, right? And it's floating between many different states. And it's cooling down, right?

It's like a phase transition. And then it starts to lock in. right? And we haven't, I would say we haven't fully locked in. There's like still pockets of, you know, where the, like the crystal lattice is still somewhat fungible, right? Maybe there's like, you know, small little bips that could be added here to add additional features. But it's clearly in this process of kind of cooling down, right? It's like the big bang, right? The big bang early on. Hyper, you know, you know, plasmas and maybe even like the forces themselves are like all unified in this big soup. And the boundary constraints of the universe were pretty wide. And as it cools down, like, you know, know, gravity splits off and then electrow weak force. And then it's like, you get, you the phase transitions down. And then, you know, becomes transparent to light, you know, 300,000 years. And then boom, they've got basically most of the degrees of freedom are now kind of locked in for the universe. And then the rest of the story the universe can play out. So I feel like Bitcoin is, it's like there was a big bang of the big of Bitcoin's like a launch. And then there was this

process of kind of cooling and condensation that took place. And, you know, it was uncertain at that point, exactly, you know, whether the block-sized wars would turn out in one direction or the other, whether Satoshi would really be gone with, you know, any given year, the probability would go down, but it was like pretty high early on. Like, is he going to unmask himself? Is he actually going to just say, hey, it's got you on the CIA guys or something. And every other goes by, it's like this process of cooling and accretion. And that has, as that happens, it sort of, it takes the risk off the table. And then, you know, as that occurs, if you take the risk off, then its value goes up. As it values, as its value,

goes up, its volatility generally will come down because it doesn't take a whole lot, it takes marginally less new capital to change the price. The volatility comes down. The risk tolerance of the next marginal buyer, right, is now triggered. And so then the value goes back up. And that's basically in the process we've been going through to the point where you've got BlackRock now, essentially, you know, shilling it to their clients, right, and so on the world of funds. So this is this fascinating process. But unless you're really paying attention to it closely along that path, all that you really see it is like when it hits the media a narrative and its characteristics sort of hype cycles. So you see it, you know, going through

these 2013 bubble, 2017 bubble, right? 2021, 22 bubble, right? And maybe now we're in another bubble cycle, right? These are these characteristics sort of four-year cycles that we've seen Bitcoin go through. And so the person who's just observing that kind of passively through whatever media filters, there's like an activation function that it's now Bitcoin pops up on their feed or whatever. It's like, oh, it's a, it's in the, it's another bubble thing, right? And it just keeps coming back in order of magnitude bigger. It's like, you know, some people early on saw this as like a trend and they picked up on it and they've been handsomely rewarded for seeing this trend. Others catch on later. But like it's clear there's a structural dynamic playing taking place here, which I think is now like impossible and really sort of a matter of strategic malpractice if you ignore it. Like there are presidents and national leaders and sheikhs and kings having active discussions now about what should they do about Bitcoin. Like how should they approach. Bitcoin. Like that is that is just a fact of our geopolitical and a monetary state of affairs.

And so you could just be like, oh, that's absurd. This is another bubble. Okay. But it's like, sort of like the UAP question. Some people see the little, see the trends, you know, pick up on these data points sort of off the curve. And they're, they're naturally inclined to pay attention to that. And they're, they suspect something is happening. That's not just total noise or a complete, you know, fiction. And so they pay attention to it. And then they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, new data points come in and that start to stitch together what seems to be a trend. Yep. And you try to interpret what's really, what does that really mean? Is this a trend going towards disclosure? Is it Bitcoin trend going towards, you know, nation state adoption? But it's,

you know, when you're early on and you only have a few data points, it's like an absurd extrapolation to confidently predict an outcome. But more and more data points are essentially aligning onto that trend line. And that's going back to the very start of the conversation. That's the thing that I've been intellectually very fascinated about is just paying attention to those initial data points sort of off the curve, you know, speculating on what trend that might represent and then paying ever more and more attention as more data points start to come in that confirm the trend. And it seems like in terms of Bitcoin going on this sort of global adoption, now becoming a geopolitical asset trend, and then UAP turning into like this is a real thing. And like now we may be

facing a much more salient public discourse on the reality of UAPs and non-human intelligence. Yeah. Those are just things. Do you ever notice that the best gifts in life are the ones that you don't just receive, but the ones that fit seamlessly in your day and make them better? Whether you're enjoying the latest American alchemy content on the move or just tuning out the world for a moment, Raycon's everyday earbuds are the perfect pair. I've been using mine non-stop, whether I'm editing, making calls, out for a walk, they've become my go-to.

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Where do you think that goes? Today, I am releasing an episode with Jake Barber, who's this first-hand UFO crash retrieval. Witness is probably not even doing him justice. He's an operator. But the one that he describes is, well, he describes two. One is an egg-shaped UFO, and the other is an eight-gone, like kind of like not quite an octagon, but like eight sides on the surface. And it's sort of, you know, this black metallic thing. what do you think of his testimony?

I thought that was remarkable. Again, we've been kind of on this ratchet where like every few months something new clicks, right? And it takes the overall conversation. Again, people that are paying attention to every little data point here on this curve. I think there are some people that were, you know, again, this is where the debates come in.

Like, what sort of disclosure are we going to get? And also, like, what is the curve that you think is like behind these data points? points. Is it the non-human intelligences, alien civilizations, and some advanced spacecraft coming here to, you know, monitor us curve? Is it time travelers? Is it cryptotorestrials? Is it interdimensional's do you have a leading theory? I mean, I know you have your like, you know, uh, wolfram physics stuff, but like, do you have like a theory ontologically? It's because this is really interesting, like, what is disclosure? I think for a lot of people, it's like, we just need high resolution

footage. And then you see the footage, you know, like, I don't know. I don't know. what I'm looking at. And so it's this thing where it's like, you don't really want the thing you're asking for. You want like a broader worldview. You want to like understand the ontology behind the thing. And I think there are a couple other details associated with the Jake story that are worthy of mentioning. One is he locked up. So he retrieved this acon craft and it like via his helicopter and it was hanged by a rope. And he locked onto it with his consciousness. And it like gave him this interesting feel, this like divine feminine sort of feel and it made him emotional. And then And the other thing that he says is that they use psionic assets in the government to basically, you know, and we should probably change the wording here.

Maybe, you know, whoever's doing this should change the wording, but summon these UFOs into people's sort of field of consciousness. And then presumably these things at some point land and material might be used or something. The whole thing is so strange. Yeah. And this is where, ironically, like, the Bitcoin thing is like tributly easy. model by comparison because like the stipulated phenomenon that you're trying to model and understand is just the adoption of this asset like essentially a collective belief that this is a real thing that other people will continue to believe it's a real thing and that you know different layers of

people in institutions, sovereign world funds, institution pools of capital, governments, national leaders, etc. will just continue to basically believe that same thing over the future, like into the future. So it's not like a you don't have to construct a whole bunch of crazy sort of second and third order are sort of underlying hypotheses from what's going on. It's sort of just out there in your face and you're just making a prediction about that continuation of that trend.

With the UAP thing, it's vastly more complicated and vastly more fraught. Because just to that point, and back to my point about, like, what sorts of, like, when you're trying to interpret these different data points,

if you're, you know, assuming you don't know the truth, which is almost everybody here, maybe even everybody, like, you don't really know what's going on. All you see is what people are saying, right? And you have assigned degrees of credence

to these different statements that are coming from a, apparently credible people, and I think he's extremely credible. I think he's got the professional bona fides. He is who he says he is. I think he's being entirely truthful in describing his experiences as sort of essentially a delivery man in his crash retrieval program.

And you got, but then you've got to but that doesn't answer really the object level question of what's going on. Yeah. Right? It just gives you a data point that you need to stitch together into a comprehensive model that you need to put together with all these other sort of highly fraught and inherently uncertain pieces of information. And so this is where,

this is what it gets extremely difficult for almost everybody to construct such a model because you have these two main questions here, which are the most foundational questions of human existence, which is like, are we alone and like, what is consciousness, right? Like separately, enormous, like, unknown questions that are like almost at the core of who it is to be human, like what it is to be human, who we are, like, what is our history, what is the nature of intelligence in the universe? Are we unique? Are we special? Is there a great filter? All these sorts of questions. To answer that question, you have to, you know, put together a lot of disciplines of existing science and speculative sort of, you know,

frontiers of physics to understand, well, what's the structure of reality, right? Is there a multiverse? Is there just this unfolding of time? You know, what are the boundary constraints of physical reality that any intelligence is going to have to be, you know, is going to be constrained by? And then the specific kind of contingent processes that give rise to intelligent life. How common are those, given the population of stars, etc., etc.? How can we ever get high conviction in any given model? Like, you know, your idea that there's like branchial space that these UFOs might be able to hop across or whatever, and we're in, you know, sort of this more constrained rule real real space. Like how is that at all? I mean, that's the process of science, right? Yeah, yeah. But how does it become falsifiable? Like even, you know, and by the way,

I think Jake's testimony is completely beyond reproach as well as far as, like, the detail. tales and I find him to be an earnest good good person. But like it was a question of like, you know, what are these things? Like when they're coming down, what are these things? And is falsifying or corroborating this even seeing an object? Like is that even, you know, that like what is that then? Yeah. You know, like you're probably going to have no idea what it is. It's going to be emitting some radiological stuff and then you might get a little hurt and you might have, you know, put it in a lab and it might exhibit some weird properties. And then at that point, what do you do? What does that mean? I mean, I studied physics and philosophy as an undergrad. Because I was fascinated,

I'm not obsessed by this sort of the boundary layer between science and philosophy, right, which is essentially philosophy is what we really don't have systematized theories of knowledge for, right? So the philosophy is sort of scouting out in the forest, just trying to find the path, right? And then you find the path and the scientists come and sort of clear the path, right? And so the frontier scientists are the first ones into that like overbuilt highly, you know, you've thorns everywhere, right? But at least the philosophers have sort of said, yeah, I think there's a path here. This is basically the conceptual, almost map of definitions that we're going to analyze these more foundational concepts, like almost create new concepts, right? Philosophy is often organizing human thought and systems of

concepts to just help even ground hypotheses that then scientists can generate and have to go out into the world and refine as like real systems of knowledge, right? So this is a process of, you know, exploration into this dark, dark unknown that humanity has found itself in. And so this is a this basic, you know, a challenge of reality is what it is. And we are just, you know, flesh puppets with some, with some, with some, you know, higher cognitive capacities and this, like, being itself, what it's like to, you know, feel in sort of phenomenal first person subjective awareness that sort of lights up the machine inside. And it's like, okay, well, we're clearly, like, on our first pencil's basis, we've got to do a lot of work to try to understand reality, right?

It's not going to just be handed to us. We have to do a huge, amount of like conceptual development and scientific exploration to try to map on to reality, right? Whatever models we have in our head to try to create a map to reality is going to take an enormous amount of work. And the challenge, like the confrontation that UAPs present to us is they, they force us to try to basically almost short circuit what would otherwise have been if they didn't, if they weren't here, probably a much longer process of like human conceptual refinement and

scientific investigation to understand what's nature of reality. like what are the physical rules that constrain existence? And what is it like to be a human subject? Or what's like to be a conscious subject at all? And that's, you know, that's what the Barber's story kind of really uncomfortably forces people to put together, right? Because it's not just this alien or UAP or NHI question of like advanced technology from another civilization.

But it's that. And apparently this aspect of human consciousness that can directly engage almost project and interface merge with that higher intelligence slash technology, right? And so those are very separate domains of sort of scientific and philosophical, um, uh, modeling and, and, and, and sort of inquiry, which is like fundamental physics, nature of intelligence of the universe, the boundary constraints, right, that we think any advanced civilization is going to have to work within that's going to constrain the types of technology and propulsion systems and many materials they're going to be able to construct. And then there's, well, like, what is

consciousness in reality, right? Is there, is it a universal field and we're just fragments or shards? Is there some sort of more, you know, sort of panpsychist interpretation that you would give? And what's the sort of psychophysical relationship between consciousness and the physical world that could be, you know, intermediated with advanced forms of technology, right? And then there's this question of like, well, like, is it just computational functionalism is true? If you just in an instantia a certain pattern, is that all you get, is you just consciousness? Or is it, consciousness is actually the substrate of reality. It's sort of what stands underneath physics.

Again, these are words that I'm spewing, right? But like the words we think mean something about reality. But I think the history of philosophy and science is that the words we are using at any given point in time are only like barely like trying to map on to reality. This is it goes back to Kant. It's like we have a certain phenomenal description of reality that's kind of first person's subjective field. It has constraints. It has to, you know, conform with some rules of rationality.

for Kant that these are the rules that any rational mind would have to obey. And the universe will then reflect itself in a regular, organized way to that person, to that, you know, subjectivity. But that doesn't actually imply that, like, reality, what he called Naumina, is actually that, right? That feels so important for understanding what science is. And like, you mentioned Jonathan Gerard, this Princeton researcher that works with Wolframers, kind of taking up the mantle there, and has all sorts of interesting.

ideas that might actually end up applying to UAP. Who knows? That's some of your contribution. And I heard him on an interview with Kurt Jiamungle. Shout out to Kurt Jiamungle, great interviewer. And he was talking about Newton and Liebniz and like how vector calculus kind of reigns supreme as defining the way in which we've conceptualized the world for, you know, call it the last 400 years, 350 years, whatever.

And that on a go forward basis, maybe. a more computational understanding of the world will be how we kind of model the universe. And I would just say that I think he's right, but I would also say that like all of these things are like maps and they're not the territory. And so like, you know, yeah, you have these sort of heuristics

for how you understand the world. And then maybe there is something more fundamental about consciousness itself. And like it's going to sound so cliche and trite, but like the UAP stuff points to this, like going within. reconciling with, you know, the ugliest parts of yourself, your subconscious, you know, Carl Jung would say, until you reconcile with your subconscious, you call it fate. And like,

you have these mystery rituals for, you know, thousands of years where like the top thinkers, like, like, Play-D out. Like all, you know, all these guys, like went, did these mystery rituals. And it seems like it was to gain access to knowledge of their primordial soul, noesis. And so it's like, you know, we can have these mental models. and like we can, you know, draw stuff up on chalkboards and then you can, like, you know, falsify it in a lab or whatever. But, like, maybe there's something extremely fundamental about, like, going within.

And, like, I don't know, like, the Monroe, like the gateway stuff. Like, there are different paths. But, like, it's sort of, yeah, there's something actually really important about, like, you know, confronting oneself in this sort of Joseph Campbell-style hero's journey. How do I slay? How do you slay them? that dragon in me. What's the journey I have to make? You have to make. Each of it has to make.

You talk about something called the soul's high adventure. My general formula for my student is folly or bliss. I mean, find where it is and don't be afraid. The lesson of most faith traditions in general and even modern day, say new agey, contemplative, transible meditation, etc. They've all tried to grapple with the nature of what it is to be a human subject, right? And the language, the vocabulary, the conceptual frameworks have evolved. It was, you know, a certain structure down up in terms of like the human soul, you know, kind of this is the embodied sort of light of God or whatever. And then the material world is this sort of, you know, empty, again, kind of just stage of sort of lifeless objects, right? And then there's this, a lot of people have this sort of

folk duality metaphysics, where what's in my head or kind of consciousness is sort of this unique substance that is somehow more primitive and then there's the physical world, which is just sort of lifeless stuff. I think it's a primitive metaphysics. I think there's a, you know, to go to like a garard slash whitehead sort of, or syncretic view is you have this dynamic computational process that's unfolding in his way. It's a multi-computational process that's unfolding. And you can describe that in a formal way, a hyper-precise way to make predictions about, you know, extensions and physics, and that's what physics and science is about.

But you have to get into a metaphysical interpretation of that, you know, model, right? And to account for phenomena that aren't going to be amenable to the same sort of mathematicized formalization that's a hypergraph rewriting system allows you to do. And so there's a aspect of reality that is what is it like to be a person, like a thing. We all have a first person

subjectivity that seems very real to us. And there's certain people like Daniel Dennett and sort of Patricia Churchill and that sort of school philosopher of mine that just deny the reality of first person's subjectivity that qualia aren't aren't real right it's all just it's all just words we say we don't actually have anything that's like to be us or there's no such thing as redness um i think that's dangerous yeah but that is a very strong philosophical view that is and it has it's been very successful because of a technological paradigm it seemed to yeah you know seem to support it over time which is you know this idea of

just programming right this idea of just writing down abstract instructions on a computer can unlock amounts of complicated behavior. And like, you know, what looks to be now in these AI systems, like approaching human level, you know, output, right? Or sort of mimicry in some sense. And so that has, from a certain naive perspective, well, if we can construct, you know, purely computational systems, you know, just, you know, big weights of numbers, right, sort of doing matrix multiplication, and they can spit out, you know, yeah, this is the turning test. They can spit out outputs that are fundamentally indistinguishable from human output. Well, then maybe, maybe we should just believe that that's all that we are, right? And, you know, but of course, at the end of a day,

to get this philosophy of mind argument, you have to go back to, like, if I punch you, it's going to hurt, right? Right. Like, that's not something I can write down in any sort of system of formal equations. There's just an irreducible feature of existence that only is accessible to a first person, you know, subject that is real. And, you know, that's the first branch of the tree, that philosophers of mind divergent. And then there's different branches that people have taken over time. but I think this is where I mean for me again I come from this somewhat analytic philosophical

tradition and but at the same time there's been a I think a weakness in that tradition it's been very austere and it's obsessed with hyperformalism and sort of making these very restrained and couched arguments and then the rest of society just wants to understand and gets like

to a first level understanding of what's what's really happening in the world so you have these other you have these different traditions right that are you know go under like sort of new age philosophy that goes back to, you know, kind of Hegel and Shelling and kind of the German Romanticists, you know, have sort of been reinterpreted over, over many decades. And I kind of give birth to this sort of modern sort of metaphysics. It's very popular in the UAP community, right, which is consciousness and light beings and meditative practices. And it's like we're

rediscovering a lot of like ancient sort of knowledge, right? It's just being reinterpreted through our modern frames. It's all ancient. And belief systems. Yeah. But even then, it's like, those ancient belief systems were just, those are just the new age philosophies of the day. Sure. Right. Like I, again, I, maybe I'm just, this is my training or just position. I like to have, I want to try to take that as a guide to then try to systematize and formalize as much as I can. Well, what does that say about reality, right? We're just using words when we say, you know, consciousness or light energy or look inside, right? Those are, but that's very true. Like, you need to stitch it together in a cohesive, um, worldview that is on the one hand, scientifically rigorous and formal. And, And on the one hand, you know, philosophically speculative and exploratory. But you need to always have to, like, try to pull those threads together. Well, it's always funny when people say, you know, aliens are just angels and demons. And then I ask them, what's an angel and what's a demon?

That descriptor is in no way helpful, you know, more helpful incrementally compared to an alien or whatever. And so, like, you're equally completely clueless in both cases. And you're just sort of like, it's almost more of like a political polemic that you're trying to say, you know, it all just goes back. back to a tradition, but you're right, in many ways, the tradition is just as impenetrable as this new agey veneer that, you know, we, we have or whatever. And I think fundamentally we need to create new concepts, new worldviews that are based in a scientific practice, but are not restricted by the prevailing, what I would call sort of metaphysical assumptions, right?

So I think that's right. And then I also think, you know, the concept of Lindy, you know, like, you know, something's expected or something's current age is a, you know, predictor of its, you know, future age. And so, like, it's every generation's, you know, job to sort of kill off bad ideas, you know, the ideas that are, like, not that good, don't survive that long. And so, like, on some level, I do understand kind of hearkening back to older traditions and saying it is all just like this stuff, like you're not discovering something new, because it actually does give you a, at least fuller metafenomenological, like, you know, social map of like our understanding of this stuff, how we've interacted with

it. And it doesn't, you're not throwing out any progress that's made in the past as a result of, you know, whatever interactions we've had with UAPs or, you know, these things or consciousness or whatever. So I do think, you know, it's like Alcibiades was like, was killed for like, you know, talking about the mysteries at Elysses or whatever. And traditionally, I think some of these things that we're touching on now in the UAP context. text, if you, if you attempt them in some sort of like willy-nilly way, like things go very bad for you. And so like, you know, I think, I think it's actually kind of important to know that and to

not just like wholesale, you know, democratized. Like Stephen Greer, who is a total mixed bag. I think in many ways is being vindicated now, actually for his really good investigative work. But he's of the mind that you can just like sort of try to call these things in. And it's like, I don't know about that. I don't think that's a good idea. But what do you think? Well, this is why I think a greater crime than the like alleged legacy program, technology, secret science, secret physics crime is this, what you could somewhat interpret as a spiritual crime.

I would view it as more, you know, essentially a philosophical crime and people would be like, that's a trivial. But for me, a philosophical crime is the highest crime. It's like, what is the highest pursuit of humanity is to understand reality? Mm-hmm. And to do that, you need to have as much access to whatever clues reality will provide to you to then stitch together in an ever-evolving and uncertain basis, like a picture of the world, right? What is really happening? Like, what are the core phenomenon that I need to account for, right, in a coherent picture of existence? And if there's an entire set of phenomenon that the U.S. government or other entities have just been, you know, intentionally withholding, that would provide, you know, ammunition for or ingredients to construct a much more

integrative and holistic view of reality than we're all impoverished, fundamentally, and almost spiritually, metaphysically, in my sort of more neutral language. When you go beyond great, you find greater. Like the 27 Kia Telluride Turbo Hybrid, with 564-mile range, 329 horsepower and multi-terrain mode because there are always greater mountains to climb and greater challenges to face the first ever Kia Telluride Turbo Hybrid

Built for the Greater Learn more at kia.com And that is, that's more for me of like an abrogation of an insult than like withholding classified physics Like that's a problem But that's like a, it's a problem underneath this larger problem Oh, yeah. It's because then I think what's what you need to move, you know, overall human civilization

forward is you need to have everyone operating on as close to a basis of truth as possible. Yep. Like systematic, you know, error compounds over time and leads to pathologies and usually catastrophic failures. And like, proper institutions are always, always about trying to get as close to reality as possible, right? Like, ultimately, if you want to have an effective, you know, organization, a company, a product, a belief system, it should be like, you should be trying to get it close to reality. But is not the biggest sigh up of all the idea that the government has a greater metaphysical or ontological understanding of reality at all versus these locally useful techniques where they can

like, you know, derive certain benefits from interactions or whatever? Like, I think those are two very different things. Yeah, I know 100%. I don't think the government has like a secret sort of scroll of knowledge, right? That's like, we are the truthkeepers and we're holding the truth back from people. It's more like they're withholding basic facts, right? Tons of data.

Apparently something like human capacities for conscious engagements with advanced technology is a thing that's like a real phenomenon in the world. Do they have like a fundamentally, you know, grounded ontologically, you know, close to the metal, you know,

theory of physics and metaphysics that accounts for all that, I'm highly skeptical, right? I am too. I think they're just like, they got, they figure out some tricks and some protocols. They realize that there's certain individuals that have an, you know, inherent predisposition for this. They maybe have figured out genetic, you know, lines that are just naturally disposed for this. They figure out maybe some cocktails of drugs to give to people in a training regimen when they're young and then they get them into these programs and they, you know, I basically adapted almost on a like trial and error basis. Let's dive a little into that, because that does also seem to be coming out now. And it's not, it's, it's really strange. And it's not something

you can like really paint over, it's hard to put lipstick on that pig. That's a, it's a weird thing that the fact that the government has been systematically finding high sigh ability, you know, mind over matter capable children across the country for decades. And basically doing parapsychological experiments with them where it's like, collapse a signway. or, you know, look at this material. Do you react to the material? And then, like, yeah, inducing certain stress states so they can, you know, be more functional

as far as these out-of-body experiences and trying to garner esoteric information from them. What do you make of all of that? And do you think, I mean, how prevalent was that? How, you know, how big of a thing is that? If you put a few things together and you're trying to construct, like, a scenario here, it is interesting, right?

So imagine for the sake of argument that the psionics capability is real, right? Well, then you got to have to ask some basic questions like, well, what's the effective range, right, for a given psionic asset to perform a certain operation, whether it's to summon down, take control of, pilot, engage, communicate, you know, whatever. Like, it's, you know, it's, again, your assumptions there could be everything from they can, you can read across the universe or they have to be within line of sight, within like, a. a kilometer or somewhere in between, right? So if you assume, for the sake of argument, that there's some, there's some constraint, right? There's some physical distance where the operational effectiveness of the psionic acid is, is constrained. Then, okay, you have a global, say, you know, operation. You need to have a global footprint of those assets to perform activities.

Who knows? Maybe there's certain activities that you need to have in certain parts of the world to detect UAP. like NHA craft, but if it's true that there's some ability for humans to control this technology, well, then you also have to build into this scenario, this hypothetical, that we haven't been able to like fully reproduce like reproduction vehicles, right, that are, you know, all these crazy midi materials or whatever. But if we have our own, say, fully intact craft and we know how special psychic pilots can fly them, well, then you have to build a scenario where there are non-human craft being piloted by humans. And then you have to build in that scenario,

well, if American or contracted associated American groups can do that, well, then maybe adversary groups can do that. And so then if you're in this scenario where there are actual non-human craft, you know, who is maybe operational locations you're trying to monitor or, you know, you just need to have a presence around the world because you don't really know what what's going on, and or you have, you know, human groups that are, you know, piloting using psionic capabilities, a non-human craft that they've recovered, and then start to operationalize. And then it's like, so there's this crazy exotic scenario built in here, but then it's really not that different from a traditional military, ISR, global sort of, you know, competition, right,

where you try to get as close to your adversary's operations as possible to monitor what they're doing, with as much of a deniable presence as possible. So you would use your covert special stuff to do that. And you would get, you know, near your adversary, China, et cetera. And then if there's a disaster, you're like, oh, we're worried about these assets being burned or they're really valuable. So we need to get them out. So that's the evacuation procedure, right?

And then it turns out these Marines stumbled on the evacuation. And that's, okay, how do I create a scenario that explains a psionic asset team with a non-human craft in Indonesia that's witnessed by Michael Herrera, right? And a prematurely absurd thing. But if you load in things from Jacob Barber's story and a basic SOP about how any sort of operation would be constructed, right, that's based on those facts, okay, you can come up with a plausible explanation to that inherently implausible scenario. Well, it's funny. I said, I was like, you know, maybe it was this like human trafficking, psionic asset transfer operation. He was like, or maybe, you know, the program was like running out there and they were like trying to get out because the earthquake had hit.

So it's kind of like what you said. Like they were like, you know, evacuating and they sort of ran into Herrera's unit. I mean, again, just taking the facts at issue and trying to construct a plausible story that's consistent with these other pieces, right? If you don't put the other pieces together, it's very hard to tell a plausible story. Yep. But, yeah, but that's the part that's, I think, people are increasingly hinting at, right? You could go back to Grush and then Carl and L. Subros at Cold War to retrieve or reverse engineer this stuff.

Well, the Sayonix part is a part of that retrieval program, and reverse. engineering program, well, then there's going to be a sub-rosa Cold War for psionic assets around the world to retrieve and reverse engineer and control, you know, human intelligence. Like, that's just like a slight modification of the original brush. Yeah, totally. Well, do you have a base case on how far we've come when it comes to actually reverse engineering these things? I am, I'm open to the possibility that a lot of technology has been inspired.

That would be considered very advanced from the state of what's in the open domain. main, different parts of the tech tree, advanced materials, I think, you know, would probably be the most likely candidate. I also think the psionics thing is certainly probably the most, you know, most people wouldn't think about that at reverse engineering, but for me, it's like, it's clearly inspired technology, right? It's like there's a certain way of activating, engaging, training, enhancing certain human capacities to perform operational capabilities, you know, that are military intelligence, you know, related. Like, that's, that would, I don't think we would have gotten that potentially without these things, if that's true, which seems

increasingly likely to be the case. Anti-gravity, the whole Thompson-Tonson-Tonson, you know, Brown stuff is, it's a tougher thing for me to stretch to at the moment. Like, could we have sort of inspired prototypes, like the, like the Paise stuff that we have a drawing board ideas on, probably? do we have the engineering acumen and materials to operationalize or even develop prototypes for that, like, you know, on our own tech tree without, you know, grafting something on from a non-human craft? I'm skeptical of that because I think, you know, even if we have a theoretical foundation for, say, vacuum polarization or this sort of, you know, extended electrododynamics, you've got this coupling with high, like, extremely high, methodic field sort of frequency variations and you're doing some crazy topological insulators, right,

with the sort of missile man stuff. Like there's like, I think we have hints of where we can explore, you know, potential next moves on propulsion materials. But I just think we're, you have to build a whole stack of technologies and stacks of physics

and engineering knowledge that I just don't think we're anywhere close. So even if we think we have like the physics, the theoretical physics worked out. I just don't think we're close to having like the engineering like, materials stack built up yet to realize that. But this is where I think there's an interesting middle ground scenario, which seems to be lent more credence by what the Skywatcher folks like Jordan

in particular was saying. If you take a story, which, you know, I have no evidence one way the other, but I think he's a credible person. But he says explicitly it's like the psionic activity isn't, it's like a mind meld with that's conscious craft. And effectively there's like control modules that you essentially take over. And it's like this sort of, you know, this orb that's a conscious sort of AI, you know, super craft thing that's just, it's just waiting to be kind of like, you know, not hijacked, but kind of like, you know, if you're ready, you can sort of, you know, take me for a spin, right? Let's do a little mind meld and then I'll show you how to like zip around with your consciousness here. And if that's, you know, again, hard pill to swallow from a certain

scientific and metaphysical perspective, but if you just take it at face value, well, that would then make more likely a scenario where, you know, we can control non-human craft, but without having the ability to make them, right? Which almost wouldn't explain why the retrieval program is so important, right? Because we actually have really no hope of truly reverse engineering our own, you know, superluminal, anti-gravity, whatever, right? But, you know, the real constraint is whoever gets the most of them has the most of these things, right? And so it's like, you know, the production rate of F-35s versus Chinese hypersonic missiles is like a, you know, it's like who's got the most, the range. It's always about parity, right? And if nobody really has the ability to manufacture them, then the only strategic, you know, measure is who's able to get the most, train the most daconic assets, and then operationalize as many of these craft as possible. Well, then that would put an intense strategic pressure on these great powers to do that. Right. And it would also, I think, create an immense competitive. pressure within these same institutions and their associated contractor ecosystems.

Because it's like, this is also would explain the whole weird parts of the Barber's story where it implies there's like contractor teams and mercenary, you know, you know, we're like retrieval units all kind of competing over this stuff. Yeah. And that sense like, you know, Lockheed and Northrop or SAC or whoever that you presume is involved in this stuff, neither of them has a real competitive advantage on creating like new units right like f-35s versus whatever the only differentiator between them is like who's got the most you know who's got the most stuff who's got the most assets and you know both sonic assets as well as craft and that's just that's a competitive you know dynamic that uh you could see these institutions you know well that all of this

is predicated on this sort of philip j corso narrative that like you can derive any sort of material benefit. And when I say material, I mean, literally, like, materials benefit that can work its way into any sort of existing technology stack. And so I guess that narrative specifically, which actually seems to be getting sort of more and more corroborate. Again, Jason Sands going on Rogan, and, you know, this could be circular reporting. Who knows? But like, he was talking about radars, you know, high, high powered radars at Roswell and White Sands, actually disrupting flight paths of the crafts. Rogan actually expressed skepticism,

but it actually sort of makes sense from like a physics standpoint that radar might disrupt some exotic craft like this. And, you know, this stuff comes down and then, you know, it gets collected. It gets taken to Roscoe Hill Encoder. He's the first director of the CIA.

And then Philip J. Corso, who is the, you know, chief of the Army's foreign technology exploitation desk. He is given the material and that material is systematically doled out to the private sector, namely Bell Labs. And so he says everything from Kevlar lasers to the transistor, you know, or maybe it's not just the transistor. Maybe it's like some sort of thing

essential to integrated circuits and fiber optics. Like all these things are derivative of these materials from Roswell. Do you believe that? I mean, it's hard. Like I haven't done the deep analysis of that, but like, as far as my shallow understanding is there's no major, like, gaps if you tried to, like, retell the history of that tech tree development from transistors to fiber optics. Like, it's, there's no, like, mysterious, you know, oh, like, all of a sudden we now have this new thing that, like, nobody has an idea where it came from. There was, like, patterns of individuals working in discrete research units with, like, a tech antecedent that then was modified with a certain technical, you know,

breakthrough that then was merged, and you get this, you know, what seems like a characteristic tech development tree. And isn't there a patent on transistors from, like, Munich in the 1930s or something? Yeah, I mean, there was, I mean, a lot of people since the beginning of electricity and the knowledge of basic circuitry and

related equations was like, okay, and there's just an engineering question. Yeah. Like, can you do this in a cost-effective way and, you know, to get the right materials and then start building some of these devices? It wasn't like oh, we don't know how to make an integrated circuit. And fibro optics is like, oh, this is crazy advanced. It's like, okay, you just need like sufficiently transparent crystal glass

and you just need to, like, you know, protect it and then have a way to generate, you know, photon source that's correlated to some analog circuit and you can just generate signal. Like, like, these weren't, like, magical things. Yeah. They had a characteristic antecedent. Yeah. And there's no mystery embedded it. And I think part of that whole Corso thing, I think, is, you know,

I don't know if it's intentional, but it seems like disinformation. It seems like passage material. Do you think it was? I don't know. I mean, but it would make sense if it's like you're worried that this idea of there being non-human intelligence, you know, technology unknown origin material out there. You want to try to like throw shaft at the Russians or whoever who at that point, and it seems like they know that we know that they know kind of sort of thing that this is going on. And so you're not trying to convince the Russians this isn't real. You're just trying to operate. if you skate to the Russians, maybe puff up your chest about what you figured out, right,

about this stuff. Like, oh, yeah, we figured all this stuff. Well, it's funny. He was also Corso on the psychological strategy board under Eisenhower. So it was like all military psychological operations were like going, it was Gordon Gray, and it was this other guy, Charles Douglas Jackson, and, you know, Philip Corso. And a lot of the early alien lore comes from that nexus of people, which I find interesting. And I'm sure a lot of it was, I mean, there's even a, I believe, a memo from Walter B. Smith, who I believe took over the CIA in 52, 53. And he's saying, you know, how do we, you know, use the UFO phenomena? And I always find this interesting because he doesn't say, let's make up the UFO phenomena. He says, you know, he's the whole memo is predicated on the, you know, the tacit acceptance of this. Actually, he's like writing about it in the sort of banal way. Like, of course there's a UFO phenomenon. Let's figure out how to kind of operate.

rationalize it against the Soviets. And so, yeah, do you think that that's been done in the past? Yes. I mean, I think the best cover stories are based on a germ of truth. Yeah. That you distort and you mix in with a bunch of, you know, untruths. And that's, that's what makes it a good operation. It's what makes it effective and enduring counterintelligence operation. Do you think Bob Lazzar is an example of that or like what's your what's your belief on Bob Blasar so Bob Lazzar for the audience claimed to have worked at S4 which was a you know a special compartment of area 51 and he was recruited there because he I guess slapped like a ramjet on the back of a Honda or something and then he met Edward Teller serendipitously and he gets recruited to this program

and he claims that he was working on you know a craft that looked like Billy Myers he was a Swiss ufologist. He would describe the sports model, so the saucer-shaped craft, and he describes certain frameworks, like gravity A and gravity B, as far as working on the craft. And it's with remarkable level of detail and lucidity

that he's described all this stuff, and he came out in Rogan and sort of talked about it. But there's some weird things in his history and past, and I've actually become increasingly of the mind that the prima facie story is real, but then I don't know. Yeah, what do you think? Do you think it was passage material or, yeah?

Yeah, I think it's the same sort of thing, which is there's probably a germ of truth of what he's saying. But I think it's very, very hard, maybe impossible to really carve out. Is it 10% of that? Yeah. Like, I don't think it's 0%. Yes. Like, I think now that I've had to sort of update my prize very significantly to the reality

of these programs or the reality of non-human intelligence and these really technologies, then it seems somewhat irrational to be like, oh, well, the first guy to say that, is just wrong. Yeah, right. Right? You kind of have to be rational and sort of reset your, your assessment, right? And take all the kind of cruft and the personalities and the different narratives that have been shaped over decades and just kind of like, go to first principles, be like, well, without

anything else, it does raise the probability that he was selling the truth, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It turns out these programs are real. Sure. Like, then, you know, it raises the chance that he was involved in some capacity. But it doesn't at all endorse or force you to raise your credences in all the other things he said, right? which clearly have aspects of embellishments and kind of changing, changing, changing sort of details over time.

But so you can get to this nuanced picture, which is, you know, parts of his story are probably credible and then parts are very not, right? And I think it's more of a historical story at this point. Like, I don't think it's much more in the way of disclosure information you're going to get out of that episode. Do you have a belief on what's true and what's not or sort of anybody's guess or? On him or just in general? On him, I mean. Oh. I mean, I think it's likely that he was involved in some parts of the program, these, like, things.

And maybe he was, and I think it's plausible, he saw Kraft. Uh-huh. But, I mean, you look at all these other stories. It's so compartmented and the people that are brought in are brought in with a very particular reason. And it seems clear that they're only told what they need to know. And then a lot of what they're told is likely disinformation that's not really related to their function. Right. Like you would not tell just every piece of the puzzle all the, like what the puzzle is, right?

You would tell them how to draw the, you know, what the borders are. And then the rest of the puzzle, you'd probably come up with a total cockamamie story for it, right? Because they don't need to know, right? But you need to tell them something. So you say it's from Alessessonori, you say it's gravity A, gravity B. You tell them all this stuff. It's like, okay, like, but he's got a very narrow thing. He's like more of a technician.

He's just got to lift certain things and go to certain places and just, you know, there's certain physical things that have to get done. but he's not the grand genius that's going to figure out the basic physics here. He's just being told a story. Again, that's just like a hot take. I think what's interesting is in the Jacob Barber story. It's like, yeah, like he knows what he saw,

he knows what he experienced, but he's his delivery guy. Yep. So he can kind of tell you with a high degree of fidelity, with a high degree of fidelity, like what was under the cone of light from his helicopter. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, he can't tell you what was happening

under the bunkers. He can't tell you what was happening these research institutes and this, you know, sprawling, disconnected, compartmentalized archipelago. Yeah. Right. And so there's an elephant here. And each, you know, these individual, you know, cases comes out, it's like, oh, this is

the toenail. This is the tail. This is the, this is the tusk? And you're like, I think there's an elephant here, but how big is it, right? Is it one elephant? Is there actually five and they're touching different elephants? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

This is the part that's very hard to discern. You've just got this, like, soda straw of apparently radical experience mixed in with potentially disinformation. Yeah. Like, who knows, with. the Corso stuff. And this is the detective story. This is why it's, you know, human beings.

We love these sorts of pattern matching, especially certain cognitive phenotypes where we'd love to just obsess. Like some people like doing puzzles, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so you're just like, oh, is this one puzzle? But it's like, it turns out somebody was screwing with you and just mixed in a bunch of other puzzle pieces in there. It's like, well, you're going to have trouble.

Yeah. And that's what they think this is, right? Like somebody just mixed a bunch of puzzle pieces from different puzzles together. Yeah. And, you know, some people will just be like, oh, it's all, there's no one puzzle here. This is all just noise. Yep. Right? And then there's some people who are just like, oh, wait a second, I think. Yeah. This is, this is the one puzzle I need to figure out. I just need to throw these other pieces

away. Yeah. Right. And that's a lot, well, that's a lot of work. And you never really, there's no guarantee you success because you don't know what the ratio is. Like, you can be there all day. Speaking of puzzle pieces, you're one of the few people who spent in-person time with this guy, Harold Malmgren. And Harold was a top presidential advisor for four presidents for, you know, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and Ford, and did various other amazing things, just in a kind of, you know, prosaic governmental context. But he's also just been dropping bombs on the internet saying all sorts of really interesting stuff around, you know, his investigations of, well, he says that he, he meets Lawrence P. Geis, who's, you know, Jeff Bezos's maternal grandfather by adoption, who runs, you know,

the Atomic Energy Commission's Albuquerque branch. And, you know, he's, sort of briefed on, you know, UFOs and that there was a UFO that came out of this, you know, Blue Guild triple prime tests from the Marshall Islands tests. And so, you know, you've spent some time with him. Did you learn anything interesting by just being around him? And did you find it, yeah, did you find it credible? Oh, yes. I mean, that I can start with for sure, for like 100%. Like, yeah, he is like a living legend. He's probably done more for America than like anyone I've ever met, right, just in terms of just the duration of service as well as just the, um, the level of impact, right? Like holding Curtis Slet me back from potentially nuking during the Cuban also crisis.

Like, it's a big deal. Big deal, you know, not somebody, he's not a guy who's going to like humble brag about that, right? He just did it when he was like 27 and it's just part of his, you know, he's like, he's a quiet kind of civil servant sort of technocrat, um, by nature. So he's never one to kind of pat himself on the shoulder or kind of, you know, be a braggadocio about his achievements. And it was never title obsessed. It was never, he probably could have been multiple different cabinet secretary type roles. And he was never, you know, about the ego. So I think that's just, yeah, I think there are people like that.

I'm not sure there's that many people like that. But like those are unique special people. It's a rare breed. Yeah. It's a rare breed. And it's also why I think he was trusted by so many different, you know, presidents and senior leaders over, you know, many, many years. And it's why when he says things, it's from a position.

of like being in a, a, an enduring role, enduring roles where he's given a huge amount of trust by multiple presidents. And he's an enormous cachet, enormous reputation. Like, he spent his life serving the national security state, you know, from the early sort of Cold War anti-ballistic missile sort of defense planning, all the way to like international trade, negotiating, you know, trade treaties, being the sort of the back channel with the Soviets and the Chinese and just, you know, playing at the geopolitical level at the highest at the highest level.

And so he's got an amazing reputation. He was a national consultant. Like this guy could have just, you know, could sail off into the sunset, never say a word about UAPs. And, you know, his name would be in the history books. He's written books. He's, you know, his legacy would be secured.

And the fact that he's, you know, very insistent on bringing his thoughts to the public and his historical interactions with these, you know, important figures in the early Cold War on the subject of UAPs explicitly and non-human intelligence and UFOs is a remarkable thing. Like, this guy has nothing to gain about talking about this stuff. And he could be enjoying, you know, retirement and just chilling out, right? The fact that he is very focused on trying to bring some of his knowledge and his experiences to the public,

I think should draw attention, right? Should have people perk up and take notice. Yeah, and he has these, you know, arrest. interesting anecdotes about talking with, yeah, Lawrence P. Geis, who told him, like, of their efforts to retrieve UFOs out at, you know, in, you know, around Los Alamos. And similar with Richard Bissell, who told him of their efforts to retrieve and figure out other world technologies. And Richard Bissell was number two at the CIA and helped form Area 51 and was kind of like, I think CIA liaison to skunk works because they were doing a lot. lot of work together. So yeah. And then, you know, Harold has been a trusted confidant to multiple presidents. You helped, you know, and I think there's an interesting part of that Cold War history, especially under Kennedy, which, you know, who knows, we'll see what we'll get

more information on those, on those Kennedy related records. Yeah. Which, interesting sidebar. I found it noteworthy and people should go back to the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump, where Joe Rogan is talking him about the Kennedy assassination records and propped him to commit to whatever disclosures of those records, etc. And then Trump leads the transition of the conversation from like Rogan talking about JFK records and how many people are interested in them. And then Rogan goes, many people are also interested in the people coming from space.

And he looks up at the ceiling. And then Rogan, who's like, huh, goes, like, you know about that? And Trump, with Assamberlore, goes, I know a lot about that, a ton. And then Brogan tries to prompt him. And, you know, Trump kind of, I think, realizes he kind of said too much. And then he sort of pivots to talking about how Area 51 is a tourist destination and the most beautiful pilots come to him and talk about seeing anomalous things. Pilots with crew cuts. Yeah, crew cuts, most beautiful, most handsome pilots, the greatest pilots, the greatest tourist, you know, secret research projects in the desert.

What do you think Trump knows? Well, that was a fast. So I think he said, many people are interested in the people coming from space and he looked up. And then he sort of, I think he tried to walk this back. I've never been a believer. You know, he sort of tried to dial it back. But that was an odd turn of phrase for a president to use. And immediately after, like without any, like, you know, apparent prompting by Rogan, like, in his brain, there's a bunch of neurons that have JFK, you know, associations.

And apparently those neurons are, like, really close to his UFO neurons. and they just fired. And they sort of, you know, in his pre-association, the UFO subject is just close, you know, in his cognitive matrix to JFK. So that, if you're trying to like, what does Trump know? Well, that's telling me, like, what sorts of concepts and memories are embedded

in his prefrontal cortex and his amygdala and whatever is hippocampus, actually. And it seems like through his verbal utterances that JFK and UFOs, or specifically people coming from space, are connected in his mental relationships. Can you fathom as to what that relationship might be in Trump's mind? Well, that is a really interesting question.

And this is where I know those folks like Jeff Cruikshank have done a little bit, have done like the forensic historical kind of deep dive look through the Kennedy archives, like the library, kind of, you know, records, the declassified JFK records, which are, you know, obviously historical veritical material. And then you have these much more contested materials like the MJ12 documents. which, you know, are enormous and, you know, highly disputed, but you can find these interesting correlations between, say, calendar, you know, entries and diary entries and there's some interesting overlaps there. Jeff is obviously much more tuned to those details, but they overlap with this sort of period of time where there's a lot of just immense, and we talked about this in the first interview of just like that period is there was a certain power structure in place in the U.S. Right? There was extremely, like, you know, go back to the Fukuyama institutional a lot.

sort of like these guys were climbing to the peak of that kind of institutional creation, energy, power, the Dulles brothers, you know, kind of this whole system, right, that kind of won the World War II and then created this post-war architecture. And then allegedly had access to these advanced materials, like that was their, that was the core of this kind of potential strategic advantage they wanted to, they wanted to amplify. And they were, they were a small group, right? They weren't like, and they thought of themselves as like the guardians of, of American, you know, strategic interests. Like, democracy was kind of a second order concern for that, right? There were higher order of strategic considerations for ensuring that America dominated the global system.

That was what was in their interest, in their institutional interest, that was their focus. And to the extent that if Kennedy was threatening that, that would be a challenge to that power structure. And, you know, that's the allegation is that that power structure, you know, retaliated. And that's, yeah, we'll see if we get information on that, but like, there seems to have been the sort of increasing arrows pointing in that direction. And so you're just implying that that power structure in the world in which the UFO thing is real and there's a lineage of, you know, government relationship with that UFO, you know, phenomena. It would probably be that power structure that would kind of hold the keys, so to speak. It's like there weren't that many presidents that you could say were, like, independent of the system.

And here comes Kennedy, who's this kind of, you know, darling media guy. He's, you know, pretty boy. Who, the power structure, right, if you want, use a general term to refer to a whole constellation of different actors and institutions at the time that, you know, wielded influence and dominated American politics in our economy and the global system. You know, thought that essentially his daddy got him the presidency. There was a deal made, the mafia, sort of, you know, the machine in Chicago, etc. and that, you know, if there was a basic implicit understanding that the president was there to serve a certain set of interests.

And then if you deviate from those interests, well, essentially you're portraying the deal, right? And if you go too far, say, to do a detente or denuclearization or even cooperation on space and these alleged potential UFO technologies, well, that would cut straight to the core of that apparent deal, essentially. Oh, you reneged. deals off. You don't get to be president anymore. That seems like conspiracy theory, but that seems like more and more of the evidence seems to be pointing in that direction. It's plausible if you look at the historical record

that that seems, you know, and that might be part of what, you know, the reason why, like, Trump had this embedded in his brain is like JFK and UFOs are linked is that, yeah, that might be part of it. That there are records, apparently, that would link those two things. Yeah.

So let's touch on the Jeff Krukshank is this Australian intelligence officer, and he's reviewed the footage from these Johnston Atoll, so Marshall Islands tests, specifically of these, I think, ICBM, it was actually defensive interceptors,

and they had x-rays in the nose cones, and, you know, one went off. I think it was around, it was October of 1962, I think it was around the Cuban Missile Crisis, Yeah, November, yeah. Maybe it was November. Yeah, I think it was directly after it.

And it was at midnight and the thing goes off. And out of the plume, you see this material like tumble out. And there's a video of this that you can see today. And then there's also video of that, you know, material tumbling out being superimposed with a white triangle, sanitized. And so he's done this deep dive where he shows that Harold Malmgram actually ends up, you know, in Los Alamos getting debriefed. by Lawrence Geese, who's the, you know, Atomic Energy Commission's Albuquerque director. And then a month later, you have JFK come out himself. And so that's not really that normal for JFK to come just check on this, like, you know,

it is Los Alamos, but it's like, why would you, why would you go out and visit? And so, you know, maybe, you know, if Malmgren's saying that he's learning about UFOs from Lawrence Geese, presumably, you know, the guy he's advising, the president of the United States, is coming, you know, that timing is not a coincidence. And JFK is probably learning about the UFO question as well. And then the other piece of evidence is you have, you know, Howard Hunt is. Yeah, he's the sort of CIA, you know, wet works guy. Yeah, what works guy, agent provocateur. And like, all but admitted he was like involved in the JFK assassination and a whole host of other things. But like, you know, wouldn't implicate Dulles because he was, you know, so quote unquote

loyal or whatever. And his lawyer, I think is a guy named D. Douglas Caddy. And Douglas Caddy in an interview says that, you know, he would persistently question Howard Hunt, like, why did they actually take out JFK? Why they take out JFK? And at the end of that questioning, Howard Hunt says it was the alien presence. And so what do you think? I mean, well, and yeah, I think even Harold has tweeted, you know, you always got to have notifications on for Harold. You know, he just drops these things. He just like, here you go. And yeah, I think he explicitly referenced how he had gotten reports from the triple prime test, which yeah, essentially, I believe it was the gold encased. They took a lot of gold out of Fort Knox, and they just basically

put it around this nuke to do the, I think it's Brumshulung, or basically generates a sort of x-ray burst, which, you know, creates, amplifies the ability essentially fry the incoming ballistic missile. And apparently got reports of this object that had fallen out and was retrieved by the Navy. And then Harold... requested more information and was denied that. And then goes out to Albuquerque to get ground truth. And then a month later, roughly, I think, JFK goes on his first visit to that same lab, essentially.

It looks like he was doing the advanced, you know, wait, we're not getting the full story here in Washington. Like, Harold, you're my guy on the ground, like figure out what's really going on here, right? And at the time, there was a lot of inter-service rivalries, I think, between these different, you know, branches in the military, which, you know, I think Curtis LeMay had his own vision for like nuclear everything. He had like crazy plans for some doomsday weapons and just he wanted to go whole hog, right? And he had, you know, and he had his whole power base and the Navy, you know, wanted to have their own power base.

And so they would have an incentive to kind of hold this as their Trump card. So I think there's a lot of institutional rivalry. And of course, the atomic energy commission division military applications, Geis was there to kind of be the main belly button on all things nuclear and the military, but like more fundamental research. So they would ultimately be the, and I think Rush is a little bit. to this too. Like, they would be the ultimate custodians for any sort of R&D effort, right? But there's probably a complicated bargaining position between these different

services and the Atomic Energy Commission. But yeah, I think this is, part, points to a part of American history where these, you know, very, very, you know, conspiracy, fodder material is all tied together in a tight knot. And here we are, you know, coming up

70 years, 80 years later, and it's like, still like a pressing matter. Yeah. Like what happened. And who knows? Like, Trump has signed this executive order to get a plan written in the next like week or so about, you know, to disclose more JFK records. Tulsi Gabbard on her testimony.

So she's going to be focused on that as well as the anomalous health incident stuff. Again, with any topic you can try to address it from the question of what should have, what should be, what should have been your prior for that type of thing? And then what is now your posterior for that sort of thing given a historical and, you know, testimony of evidence? It's always better to start with a prior. And it's funny, like, if I, like, you know, introspect on my priors for this broader topic, I actually think my naive prior for the reality of, say, sci abilities should have been.

I don't think I actually did this, you know, baseline assessment before I was forced to now, like, create a posterior belief. But it's like, I think my prior for the reality of sci phenomenon should be higher, given my metaphysical sort of commitments to something like protopan psychism as an integrated metaphysics

underlying a certain theory of physics, then the prior for the reality of non-human intelligence coming from another star system. Because to motivate that prior, I have to account for a whole bunch of interrelated hypotheses in my model about

the processes of intelligence and the history of 13.7 billion years of the universe and the number of star systems that are nearby, potentially panspermia in a local ring around the galaxy. of maybe 10,000 stars that were all together in a stellar nursery, and we had asteroid bombardments,

and so there's maybe like, you know, a one in a thousand chance that, like, there's an advanced sibling system to us that was, like, you know, born around the same time that gave us, you know, primitive genetic material, but, you know, was correlated then to our proximate neighborhood in the universe and we also have a reason to engage with us. And our cosmological models themselves are just patchwork upon patchwork.

Like, there's like a scaling problem of your physical model, of reality. And so, like, if you get, it's like a, you know, a rocket that's like two degrees off course. You end up, like, you know, 99 degrees off course very soon. And I think that's basically like our understanding of like Cartesian space, you know, and like, you know, space overall and the planets and stuff. It's, it's pretty shaky and it's very recent. Yeah. I guess my larger point was, I think if you just ask the average person on the street, what's more likely, aliens are visiting us or psychics are real. I think people would go, well, they're both crazy, but I think aliens are probably going to be more likely to be real.

But I think that's purely just an availability bias. No, the psychic thing is there's so much more evidence like you're saying. Yeah. It's just an availability bias because of what sorts of media narratives. We've seen a lot more alien movies and some psychic movies. That's right. And so people just think, oh, well, you know, the only ambient facts I have to form that prior if you ask me that question is, it seems like aliens are a thing that people talk about

and it's in movies all the time. And yeah, like, the universe is big. But, like, I've never read anybody's mind. I've never had my mind read that I can think of or I never removed an object with my head. That seems, you know. And then the funny thing is, I think if they were to truly audit themselves, they'd be like, there was that one time. I kind of read somebody's mind, but.

Well, and in a certain sense, if you're, most people's folk metaphysics is physicalism, right? Which is essentially, you know, a branch of that would be the computational functionalism of, you know, Dennett and Churchill, which is just almost at a metaphysical level eliminates with the reality of consciousness, therefore the basic idea that then there can be other degrees of freedom in reality associated with just pure conscious, you know, consciousness as a phenomenon are, it's just ruled out, like, by assumption, right? In your model of metaphysics, that's just not a thing, right? And so anyone claiming that to be a thing is just like, it's not an empirical question of, I need to look out into the world to see is this a thing that's

true. It's just, it's ruled out by my metaphysical assumptions, right? Therefore, it must be absurd to even claim such a thing. So you need to, that question forces you then to inspect your metaphysical commitments about the nature of consciousness, whereas the question of aliens is it's, you know, people that are physicalists, computational functionalism, you know, adherence. It's way easier to then motivate, oh, well, yeah, like we exist. Like, we create rockets. Somebody else could exist and create rockets. There's no metaphysical question at issue there. There's just a question of time and complexity and propulsion systems and, you know, the probabilities associated with star systems that could, you know, incubate life interacting with each other on time scale is relevant to our civilization. So that's a somewhat of a scientifically grounded question. And this is why the UAP question, the Jake Barber's story, is very confronting to a lot of people because it forces you to really intellectually and very seriously engage at this metaphysical layer

that even most people in a lot of the, like the semi-serious professional commentariat on UAPs that take the story of anomalous UAP objects very seriously, you know, button themselves up as being, you know, sober journalists or rational people who inspect the evidence and look at, you know, government reports. and, you know, they go, oh, well, there's lots of evidence that we have anomalies, but it could be hypotheses X, Y, and Z. But the size stuff, oh, that's off the table. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like, well, that's not really a rational approach, right?

Because a rational person starts with their metaphysical assumptions and then builds up from there. I was into the size stuff before I got into UFOs. I mean, winding roads. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's your other point about, you know, how do we have certainty on any of this? We really don't, right? we're always trying to hold together a lot of what amounts are very noisy and hard to anchor together pieces of information.

It's why the OAPE subject is like human science and culture and sort of our pictures of the world have evolved, at least to first word, on an incremental basis over our history. Like, we've just been going through this, like, maybe there's been a hidden hand, seeding some things or downloading people or whoever is maybe there's a second order process that's sort of guiding human social and, you know, our scientific. organizations over time. But I mean, you could just look at history and it's not obvious. There's like a, you know, like there's lots of inspirational moments and big geniuses. But like there was a tower of knowledge that took a lot of time and effort to create. And it was like difficult experiments,

some smart person noticing something and then being like, huh, like Galileo with the telescope or, you know, Newton and figuring out, okay, we can use calculus to look at these, you know, these sort of planetary sort of observations. And, you know, basic tricks of, oh, we, formalized knowledge with math, and then we construct experimental apparatuses. This is the Enlightenment project, and that's what we've built civilization on. And the thing about the UAP question, it's like, if it turns out that all of a sudden, since maybe the 30s, the 40s, you know, allegedly we got some material magenta crash into the post-war era is when we got subsumed to these larger, systematic, industrial and academic bureaucracies, and there were

hypercharges our civilization got, you know, more and more technology. It's like, oh, okay, you've got this potential accelerant, right? But it's like a nonlinear thing. If you've got access to craft and beings potentially, that's just like a nonlinear, like we don't have the systems, like our systems of knowledge

have not been built to, like, to deal with that, right? It's like this lump, right? And we've been trying to maybe absorb it or chip away out, but it's probably just this rock sitting in the middle of the snake. You know what I worry about a little bit

is the idea that, In the 40s and 50s, the U.S. government's and these aerospace prob contractors started to fuck around with this stuff. And they couldn't get it to work. And it's been this sort of like really hard, cumbersome process, you know, from now, from then until now. And we were never supposed to have it in the first place. And whatever beings exist on the other side of this. You know, I don't know if you saw this, Jason Sands, one of these whistleblowers who was, I guess, part of the counterintemps. was, you know, perimeter security for the program, and he sort of saw this like blue alien being

at Nellis Testing Range in Nevada, and he was part of James Fox as the program. He just went on Joe Rogan. And I think maybe the most important part of that interview, he says they want their stuff back and they're going to kill everybody involved in the program if they don't get it. And that's pretty freaky. And so, again, I have no mental model or understanding of any of this stuff. But like, what if we weren't supposed to have it in the first place and what? if, you know, they're going to come back for it. Again, it's one of these hypotheticals. It's hard to know, like, what to deal with it.

But I do find interesting. It's like people, like the legacy, like, you say that, like, we use the term the legacy program and it's now become like this term of art. But we're sort of referring to as like a particular pathology and a modern state institutional structure, right? That it maybe became pathological as a result of coming into possession of some of these materials

and then the sort of, you know, some threads of knowledge that were sort of teased out of it, right? That maybe the psionics knowledge or maybe inspirations in metamaterials or novel propulsion systems and potential weapons that could be created. And that, like, hyperpathologized a portion of our military intelligence system that, essentially delaminate. We talked about this in the thing in our first interview, and it's sort of delaminated. And it's like the ring of power, Golem, right? It starts off, it's happy, you know, well-adjusted creature. And then as a result of having access to this, you know, totem, this sort of, you know,

this metaphysical object almost of super advanced capabilities. It completely distorts them into this Gallum institution, right? So it's like the rings of power, that's what they do, right? And it's an interesting counterfactual of like... And passing the test is never taking up the ring. and thinking that you are above the corruption of it, it is just not holding the ring, not putting the ring on.

That is the test. Well, this is, well, again, this is where I'm, again, I always weigh these antonomies of like, like, you could go that direction, but if you take that logic, then it's like all of technology is almost like the Kaczynski thesis. It's like technology is inherently corrupting for civilization. Man in a modern technological civilization is a contorted,

distorted, pathologized, exploited, hyper-socialized. Yeah, version of, it's a, like, we've all become gollums. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Regardless of alien technology from a certain philosophical standpoint. And therefore, to de-golomize humanity, we need to return to a much more agrarian, you know, primitive state of nature. Some people can make an argument for that, but like, you're going to give up a lot

along the way, right? Yeah, I don't believe that. So for me, it's a spectrum. It's not like a binary. And, like, for example, a hypothetical is think about some of the more very different institutions that humans have created over the world, over world history, say, you know, Socrates,

Plato's, Agora, or you know, high councils of scholarship in the, in the scholastic era in medieval Europe, you know, enlightened, you know, or sort of, you know, circles of, of, of, you know, sort of Buddha's, sort of inheritors,

people that were committed to spiritual transformation, intellectual scholarship, you know, they weren't connected to war fighting institutions and state bureaucracies or, you know, the sort of financial institutions associated with some sort of elite network. They, their institution was focused on knowledge,

wisdom, you know, higher, higher purposes. If you had, if you had systems of, of sort of secrecy and reverse engineering that, like,

were guided by those people, would you get the same sort of, you know, blue beings being like, I'm not dealing with those murderers and barbarians on the other side of the hill, right? Right. Right.

In Air 51 that, that, that, that, enlightened interrelationship between, hey, this is a really interesting technology. We love to use this to it. Further our civilization, bring humanity, you know, to a much higher plane of being and fulfillment and flourishing instead of creating, you know, building platforms for nukes, right? I believe that. I think, I think, seek and you shall find and fuck around and you'll find

out. And sort of, you know, if you cut to the core of the parapsychological stuff, like, you can instantiated in its most primitive form in this random event generator experiment. And it's just basically the random event generator is like how much can you affect a random quantum mechanical process, right? And the more heart-centered and aligned you are, like, the more you can. And I don't think you can fake that. So you can create a program around like trying to get people quote-unquote more heart-centered, but your like meta, you know, objective is to like weaponize all this shit and to like be a billionaire or whatever. It's just not going to work. Like it's going to fail on you in the And so, like, you can lie to a bunch of people about it.

And, like, you know, it's just, you know, it'll be the myth of Faust or Prometheus. And, like, you'll blow up. And so, like, I do really believe what you just said, which is, like, if you really want the good stuff to happen, you actually do have to look within and change yourself. If you're buying into this sort of model, the parapsychological model, where your ability to render reality, you know, is commensurate with some sort of, you know, again, this is really loose, but like internal coherence or growth or whatever. And you can't really like operationalize that locally, but for some like, like, you know, kind of dystopian objective.

Let's just like not going to work. So let me throw a hypothetical at you, right? Yeah. This is the, let's say like, I'll create like an SAT analogy here is like exercise and diet is to ozempic as, you know, alien, say, psionic inspired practices. is to like Buddhist eschaticism, right? It's like, is this a shortcut? Is this a cheat?

Yeah, or the point is there are no shortcut. Like in this model, there are no shortcut. So, yeah, you're shutting down your pancreas of, you know, like. Yeah, like the OZempic, it gets you what you thought was an outcome, but there are side effects that accrue that essentially undermine the value of that outcome that you thought you're aiming for. That's right. Yeah, yeah.

No, I think that is a good analogy with higher cost on the UAP side than, you know, whatever organ's malfunctioned due to Ozzympic. But yeah. But then it's like maybe, again, this is where I stress. And again, this is almost like the Skywatcher thing is like this is the inherent tension is like there's a certain folks like you that have been paying close attention to this, have gone down again, this variety of rabbit holes and come to this realization that it is that is. you need to sort of have this self-reflective orientation, that there's no one weird trick or shortcut to enlightenment or whatever. But the average person doesn't even know that that's the other thing that they should like care about, right?

And do you need to have essentially what amounts to profit motivated or financed efforts to sort of broaden awareness of that thing in and of itself, right? That stimulates and catalyzes a much wider slothy humanity to. on that journey. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's almost like, what is disclosure? Is disclosure just this sort of, yes, non-human intelligence is real, like deal with it? Or is it a, hey, there are now verical clues about the structure of reality and the nature of human consciousness that, you know, everyone needs to be aware of in order to pursue their existence in the world in a way that ideally brings more flourishing and fulfillment, right?

But it unlocks. This is the tension between technology and pure spiritualism, right? I don't see this as like a binary or is like a tradeoff. Like there are, there are technologies clearly upleveled humanity to the point where you and I can have a conversation. Like this. That we wouldn't have been having or be able to get access to knowledge and inner and social relationships. And, you know, is again, kind of personal satisfaction that would otherwise have not been possible without the predicates of modern technology.

And so, again, I'm fundamentally maybe I'm a fence sitter. It's like there's always a, there's always a gray zone of you can go, like, the ring of power can always corrupt. It's like, the question is, is it really a ring of power? Or is it, like, reality ultimately is just what it is. And humans are trying to understand it. And that process of understanding doesn't, is not guaranteed a good outcome for humanity. Like we can put our hand in the box in the, whatever is it, is it boastrum, right? It's like there may be knowledge, dangerous knowledge.

Yeah, right? Like, not all knowledge is just, oh, this is a sunshine. This is a rainbow. Oh, this is like forever knowledge. It's like, this is world destroying knowledge, right? Like, there's no guarantee that the box of knowledge humanity is dipping its hand into is going to be like good knowledge. Does that mean you stop dipping your hand in the box? I don't know.

No, no. Well, so I think that technology is you can't go back. You can't do the Kaczynski thing. I think it's a forcing function and it's a sort of a generic template and there's a forcing function in that like your like ability to like manifest results in reality

as you know a result of the technology is like like the latency is like you know much lower and so and like the multiplicative effect is much higher right like you scale these things and so I would just say you know like the you know it's like the Peter Thiel went on Joe Rogan And he was like, you know, these things have to be angels or demons. It's not that they might be demons or angels.

They must be demons or angels if you have faster than light travel. And both of those seem pretty crazy to me. So I would just say if your intention is not like, you know, updating or, you know, growing or, you know, being molded in this sort of positive way. And there's not this like introspective feedback loop commensurate with advice. advancements in technology or like putting your hand in the box, then you're fucked. But I don't think, you know, keeping your hand, you know, out of the box at all times is like, that's like the right answer. So that's the way I'd put it. But. And I don't know who's, I don't think there is a master plan for this. But I almost think the psionics thing, well, it's maybe more indigestible for the media and consumer is critical to try to steer whatever chaotic disclosure path we're on, you know, towards the maybe more beneficial outcomes. Because if it. that aspect of this whole story was like continually suppressed and always just pushed off to the side. It was just always, you know, only centered on, you know, metamaterials, anti-gravity, vacuum polarization, Einstein, Carton, torsion terms, like how do we engineer space time? How do we develop, you know,

that's effectively, you know, that's only one half of the story. And it's the half that's the more likely to go wrong in the way that you're, you know, worried about, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're more likely to try to develop faster weapons. missiles and, you know, let's go colonize. Let's try to take an asteroid. Oh, wait, you, that means now somebody could create any gravity device that can move an asteroid and blow up the whole Earth. Like, that's a problem. That's black box. That's a black ball technology. But on the other hand, the consciousness side, I think, I don't know. Like, because people haven't necessarily treated it as seriously as it needs to be, I don't know if as much analysis has gone into like, okay, you dip your hand into the consciousness jar. Like, what black balls are in the

consciousness jar, right? If there's secret physics jar, dip your hand into the secret physics jar, you know, oh, wait, we get to have maybe positive energy sources that, you know, we don't have to burn fossil fuels. We don't have to exploit the environment. But oh, but now we, you know, anyone can just like, you know, zip around and take an asteroid and throw it at the earth. It's like, that's probably bad, but maybe we can have better defensive systems. But now you've got this whole new game theory of kind of the capability space that you have to reparmitize. Conscious is, though, because we haven't, it's like no, like, you know, at least with aerospace technology, and space war and space economy. We've got models. We've got, you know, the game theoretic dynamics, the state and non-state, you know, kind of capacities to try to operationalize,

and it would be highly disruptive, but it's like we can even, we can sort of start to create frameworks. The consciousness thing, you know, because we've put into this wooey jar of ineffable, somewhat, you know, very, you know, like it doesn't seem like a systematized thing, right? And when you have systematized capabilities,

it turns into technology. That's what technology is. Yeah, yeah. So if it turns out that, like, the program or other people have figured out that there's a certain part of the brain, that if you tickle in the right way or you give the right drugs or whatever, that now, like, remote viewing is now ten-ext. Yep. Right? Or clairvoyance is now activated in a much largest of the population or these, you know, these nonverbal autistics that the whole Kai Dickens, you know, sort of lepathy tapes has looked into that. I know you've interviewed her.

It's like, okay, imagine that, imagine you were able to essentially, you know, take that capability, but activate it in, not a non-verbal, but like just, you know, somebody else in slightly more with a slightly more neurotypical sort of cognitive setup. And what does that do for our social norms, right? If you're,

if you can read each other's minds, like, like, I mean, that would probably be, ironically, the one failure mode for Bitcoin is if it turns out remote viewing is like hyper accurate, then like the security protocols for private keys needs to change. You've got a complete bi-directional

transparency, you know, people would be able to remote view the Q codes. Like it would be, yeah, there'd be all sorts of, you know, countermeasures and there'd be, yeah, second and third order changes to a lot of things. If our basic assumptions around what humans can do, see and know or communicate is very different than what we... I just, I think we're in the Stone Age on the stuff. I always go back to this one line from the Kai Dickens telepathy tapes, where one of the kids are forgetting exactly which one says, uh, mom, you don't get my powers if you lie. And like there's something so profound and important about that.

And like it's like this, you know, it's so easy for us to kind of, you know, import our own, you know, oh, let's just isolate, you know, the technique and turn it into a science and make it repeatable, turn it into math somehow. And then there's something actually about like the deeper ontology when you like hear what they're saying.

They're talking about God in this like extremely intimate way. And by the way, you were earlier than any, on the telepathy tapes. But yeah, like, that seems more important than, you know, this sort of, like, need to just turn it into this, like, locally repeatable science as far as actually even making the thing worked. But then even me saying that, like, I'm not helping anybody by saying that. Like, you literally just have to, like, fix yourself before you, like, get into this stuff.

And a whole other thing that's, you have to, like, bridge yourself into these different scenarios. But, like, if something like the Jason Sands scenario was true and there's essentially, like, part of our technological exploration of these phenomena, whether it's the, you know, more technical aspects or the, you know, the psychotechnical aspects, that that's essentially like a semi-regulated human activity, regulated by non-human intelligence per, at least to my perspective, like unknown norms, right? I'm sort of behavior.

Like, what's a permissible experiment that we can run with that technology? Like, are there, it's like, in a certain sense, you could interpret that cautiously optimistically that there is some sort of regulatory framework that that's unknown to least to me that is keeping guardrails on our exploration like we dip our hand in we start to pick up the black box and some

NHA hand goes nope right or we start to try to weaponize consciousness in a bad way and they're like no you get turned off right like I think there's even been accounts in the I think they can do that I think it's the three body problem they can just shut us down whenever they want so in a certain sense it's like okay well how many

tries how many runs at that fence right? Do we get, right, as like a learning, you know, mode is like, okay, they're going to, they're going to test the fence. That's whatever, that's natural. Every human civilization test the fence. But an intelligent civilization that keeps testing the fence that looks like they might try to break through the fence. Yep. Well, they need to be put down. Right. That's, that's, that's the implicit threat. But, you know, also like opportunity is like, oh, if we recognize the fence is there. Yeah. And we like, stop trying to test the fence line. It's an inherent challenge to our sovereignty and our place in the hierarchy of being, but it then removes the existential

risk. And it means that, okay, as long as you recognize we're in this fence, that we can sort of continue to develop ourselves technologically and maybe, you know, psychically, uh, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a garden essentially, right? And then when we reach a certain level of, you know, maturity where we're let out. Well, that is, I think the garden or the fence is like materialist reductionism. And like you see like with saints, for example, as, they sort of like lose their own like materialist reductionist world view not that like many of these people existed pre materialist reductionism but like as they start to ascend into like higher kind of of you know again i'm using really vague words but like interactions with the celestial or whatever

they it sort of freaks them out and they like they have to like look within they have to reform themselves and it's a sort of like two steps forward one step back process and so i do wonder on some level, like, you know, I've, for example, been so pro disclosure up until now. And it does feel like this sort of Pandora's Box. And Pandora's Box in the sense that, like, you know, you have hope. But then there's like a whole lot of like, you know, bad stuff that comes with it. I mean, I think this is where we're, you know, we need new institutions, which are funnably just more accreted, more formal structures of norms and human sort of collective beliefs, right? Like, this is a phenomenon that we need to construct an entire new institutional framework around, right? Not just a, you know, not just a,

you know, an LLC, right? You need, like, you need actually novel institutions to confront this novel phenomenon. I think the institutions that we created or kind of that we, you know, we sort of wrapped around this information, you know, were essentially our military and scientific institutions wedded to the state apparatus in the post-war environment. And those are certain institutions set up by certain people with a certain mission and mandate and psychological organizations. And orientation to the state and their class and their military and scientific and intelligence prerogatives. And so that, you know, that institution was what was what was now sort of absorbed to this technology or this, this phenomenon and had to understand it, try to apply it,

et cetera. But if you were like starting from scratch, like, that would not be the ideal institutions you would want to give like that mandate of like how to level humanity up, right, by minimizing risk and maximizing opportunity for collective success. and flourishing, right, given whatever constraints that might exist. And that means, like, you truly do need, like, blank sheet of paper, new institutions. Yeah. Right, from the bottom up, right? New institutions to study it, to finance it, to organize around it, to diffuse it, to create new norms around it. Like, that's a massive human project that we have even, because nobody who has a collective acceptance of disclosure is a thing coming, but like the big project of post-disclosure

is going to be, you know, creating new institutions or adapting or likely existing institutions, or some combination of the two, to carry forward that project, right? So you think we should build a Bitcoin exotic physics and spiritual development foundation? Is that what you're trying to say? You know, this is the game. Take all your side quests and turn them into the main quest.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, I've been on the geopolitical and cyber, you know, intelligence sort of, you know, main quest, and then Bitcoin has now become the main quest. And then UAPs were the side quest, you know, like the next logical moves just to make them all the same thing, right? Right? Yeah. Now, I don't know how to do that, obviously, but I think it's going back to the very beginning of the conversation is an interesting

phenomenon that, like, Bitcoin is a societical system and has elements. It's a core technical breakthrough. It's a piece of software that people are running, you know, but it is also, it's a mean, right? It's a set of collective beliefs. Yeah. And the interesting thing to make up Bitcoin, the reason why maybe it's like have this like hyperacceleration in terms of its adoption and then kind of this reflectivity is that that in the moment. Metic sociotechnical system has an endogenous asset that essentially gives the believers of that, of that, of that socio-technical system's potential, more power in the world to spread that, to spread the gospel essentially, right? And so there's a flywheel embedded into sort of this mimetic machine. With the UAP subject, there really isn't that flywheel, right?

That's built in. You have podcasts. You have advertising revenue for people that are interested in this thing, but it's not like that big, right? But obviously, I think in general, I mean, the Bitcoin committee will like, you know, cast me as an apostate. But I think ultimately the UAP question is more important than the Bitcoin question. Oh, yeah. But I think, you know, the fuel to create the new institutions you need in a post-disclosure world, I think will actually come from Bitcoin. Makes sense.

Right. I think you have, and my buddy Zell, he gave me these numbers. He's like, if Bitcoin monetizes to the level of gold, right, you know, relatively on a global, you know, say market cap or sort of market value base. then you'll have roughly equal numbers of Bitcoin billionaires and say Fiat billionaires in the world. That's wild. Which is kind of a unique historical circumstance. Oh yeah.

Right? That you have this new class of very wealthy people that all basically believe very similar things and are also very heterodox thinkers, the relatively young. And they're, they've now had success in building a sort of a novel global non-state institution that's now given them a lot of political power, right? And they're probably interested in lots of things, right? They're probably curious about the world. And they're not wedded to, you know, particularly. And you probably want to have an impact with that wealth, right?

What do you do? You have a bunch of Bitcoin. Like, congrats, right? Go on your island. Like, chill. Or, like, maybe you should invest in the deepest secrets of the universe and, like, help unlock humanity's potential. That would be cool if the billionaires weren't just posturing around who has a bigger yacht

or whatever, you know, buying private islands. I mean, wouldn't it be, like, amazing just to endow, like, a, yeah, like a research syndicate and a institution that is, like, imagine if you have. had the philosopher kings of ancient Greece with with alien craft and billions of dollars. That would be awesome. So yeah, I think that would be really, really cool. Just like, I think that some of the, what I worry about, you know, as far as what might be happening now is like this like need to like operational. Like you have no, you have no priors on the history of success on the program of the program itself. You have very little priors. It's just this black box.

And you're like operationalizing these like little things kind of as an extension, like this sort of private, you know, public partnership de facto thing or whatever. And like, I worry about that if you don't have like a good mental map of like what's going on overall, just like I would worry about like the government doing things without any sort of mental map just because like your only mandate is like national security. And so I do think like having the, you know, modern Plato symposium is like a fantastic idea. And just people who are goodwilled or earnest just trying to figure having a

figure out a map and then aligning yourself with the good stuff and then you can like you can get a little more operational after that or something. I think there's definitely a you know a path dependency here

that could go wrong in many different ways like building new institutions that serve their original say like naive original mandate is a difficult process right we've seen this go wrong in many cases where you create something,

it's really well motivated, and then it gets distorted or bent over time or internally corrupted or distracted. And it's very hard, right? And I think that's just, there's no one weird trick to do that. But it's a project that it seems like, you know, I don't think we're ready to do that right now.

I think, but it is a project that I think you would need to focus on in a post-disclosure environment. Right? I think right now we're in this moment where we're not there. And so it's like, well, how do you catalyze disclosure without waiting for big down, government to give it to you. Well, you have to now do it on your own. And that's essentially what I think the Skywatcher team is trying to do is essentially we're trying to collect

with private resources and our skills and knowledge from our aspects of engagement with the program, you know, enough information to convince a marginally more subset of the population of the reality of this phenomenon. And disclosure is not like a, you know, like, oh, this is disclosure. It's a, it's a process that unfolds more and more people just leveling up their priors on more of these different hypotheses. And eventually you get to the point where, oh, there's a billionaire here. There's a billionaire here. There's a billioner here. There's a bunch of scientists. There's a bunch of academics. There's a bunch of policy people. And they all now collectively look at each other and that's kind of this, you know, preference falsification cascade. And they go,

oh, this is a serious thing. It's real. It needs to be seriously addressed at scale in a novel way that like our existing institutions can't really confront. Like, oh, you got think take like RAND, they can do some things. You've got some venture capital people. They can do some things. You've got academic institutions. You've got, you know, Gary Nolan at Stanford. Everyone's trying to take their own pieces of current institutions and trying to contribute to some, you know, initiative, Soul Foundation, etc. I think it's all necessary and admirable. But it's clearly just these raw individual heroic initiatives, right?

And clearly the ultimate question is so much larger than what, you know, individual heroic efforts are going to be able to accomplish, right? That's a necessary just first step. but like if you're really trying to put yourself in this post disclosure, whatever that is world, you know, it's going to catalyze a lot of change and a potential lot of, you know,

disruption to existing institutions. And I think it's important that you have the germs of new institutions that can kind of, you know, act as ballast, right? To kind of absorb that. And I think, you know, I'm not shilling Bitcoin here,

but it's like, Bitcoin is interesting because it has these features if it's a global non-state, you know, saseau technical system that has its own endogenous network, endogenous asset and, you know, third party free sort of, you know, network with a lot of, you know, people with a lot of capital embedded it. So it's like, it's like a substrate that you could potentially use

to catalyze, you know, nucleate different institutions, right? That are somewhat orthogonal to the existing institutional structures. Right. They have relationships too, right? They're not like completely on an island. But it's a degree of freedom that. didn't exist before. And there might be new, new possibilities between mixing and matching old and new together that could, you know, provide a basis to do something different that these institutions

is just hard, right? Like the classic Francis Fukuyama Kerr, you can read his book, Political Order, Political Decay, brilliant diagnosis of kind of human history and the sorts of different social institutions, governance systems we've created. And they historically all follow this similar pattern, right? Where there's, you know, founding, you know, partners, right, of the state or or even religious organizations. And they're imbued with energy. They're successful because they solved some aspect of a novel problem in the environment

that the existing institutions couldn't, right? So they now have the alpha, right? They're now creating something new and they've figured out, you know, a new niche to expand and explore. and they can build something, right, a new institution. And it gets momentum, it gets energy. They're creating something. They have a sense of purpose and vision and sort of founding.

It's like the founding fathers of America, etc. Like, those are idolized because there was, you know, that's like the, you know, they were creating this novel institution called, called America. And then there's some, you know, process by which those institutions start to increasingly formal, at the beginning they're very personalized, right? Say it's Satoshi, right? Everyone knows, like, that's a person.

Hal Finney, that's a person, right? You know, the founding fathers, those are people. Like, their individual decisions made a huge amount of difference, like the Federalist Papers and Declaration of Independence and these initial amendments to the Constitution. These were, like, again, like, going back to the Big Bay analogy, like, there was a lot of degrees of freedom, and those initial founders were, like, the first,

they had a lot of first mover advantage to kind of condense that space down and then create a structure that could create a possibility space for lots of other things to evolve. But in a political kind of evolution, like in Fukuyama's terms, you know, that starts to get settled. And then the next generations kind of refine, optimize, formalize, de-personalize institutions, right? Now it's like a bureaucracy with, you know, titles and roles that could hand down on a result, ideally of merit. It's not just like the brother or cousin or son that takes on that role. And that's a formal, modern institutional structure.

and that usually works for some time until like any institutional structure like software code you know you start from scratch and it usually does what it's supposed to do over time you have to you know edit add additional um you know modules or make you know a new program comes in and slap something different on and it starts to develop you know what's called booms law which is like rot software software tends to rot like on like a mathematical curve and i think the same thing is with human institutions which are systems of norms and rules basically embedded into a certain institutional framework And so you get to this point where the rules basically start to become overburdened, and they are increasingly rigid, and they can't adapt to what ultimately, you know, world is chaos, world has changed. And so human institutions that go through this pattern eventually start to lag reality, right? And then there's inefficiencies, there's costs that start to accrue over time. And you get to this critical point in any institution where the systems of rules become too rigid and they can't adapt to reality,

and the lag, the gap between essentially their design and the need for them to perform, given the external environment, becomes too great, and they're very brittle. And then you get a shock. You get a war, you get a famine, you get a cyber attack now. Like, who knows?

Something happens, and it breaks the institution. It's like a nonlinear change. And then everyone realizes, oh, this is not going to work anymore. Right? And then, you know, everyone along the line is sort of, okay, kick the can, kick the can, kick the can. It's worked well this far. you know, that curve will just keep going.

I don't want to have to make the hard choices on my watch, right? Like, just make it someone else's problem, you know, in the next election, etc. And that works, you know, up until it doesn't, right? And then you, then the institutions really break. And then there's a crisis. And then you have to make a call. You either eventually just like, it's like post-Soviet Russia where it's just the institutions are completely demoralized and just taken apart and, you know, privatized and the mafia's take over.

and you really degrade society back to a very like pre-state state, right? It's warlordism, essentially, factionalism. Or you recognize that crisis coming and you realize you need to kind of like bounce, right? You need to create new institutions, right? That can sort of take that crisis energy and direct it, you know, formalize it, and then create new founding, you know, teams to sort of, okay, now we can build something out of this crisis, right? And so if you think about, you know, the disclosure as being this kind of recognition that legacy program is rotten, basically, in more ways than one, maybe bureaucratically, institutionally,

maybe also morally rotten. And it may be in the process of breaking, basically, right? Everyone's defecting out of it, right? That's what seems to be happening. That's also what you see happening when other institutions break, right? People look around, they go, oh, well, like, this isn't going to, my future isn't here anymore. Like, I got to get out. Like, it's a, right, now it's the first, whoever was out first, basically wins, right? It's how, you know, police organizations take down mafia's, right? You start chip away at it until everyone realizes, oh, wait, like, my boss is going to turn out me, so I better be the first one to rat or whatever. So you get this nonlinear cascade collapse. And if that's what's happening here, okay, it's maybe good from one

perspective, like the rot institution is failing. But that can go really wrong if you don't have, you know, in mind new institutions that you want to, you know, start to nucleate that can sort of take that energy in a much more positive direction. So maybe that's, you know, that's sort of the motivating conceptual, or a conceptual framework to think about, how do you do that? How do you build institutions to, that can take into account

the whole pluralistic diversity of perspectives on what's really happening here. It's not like a new religion that's going to, because that could be the failure mode, right? You get factionalism, you get people that just, in the chaos, you know, pick on one thing and create a new religious institution, right?

That's what we'd like to do. We need certainty of belief. But that's how you create cults. That's how you create, you know, internal division, you essentially state decay or collapse even. And so how do you, you know, avoid that? Ideally, you want to maintain what we currently have built in terms of modern, pluralistic, you know, scientifically grounded, you know, social organizations that now have to sort of adapt and reconfigure to address, you know, maybe a new possibility space for technology

and humanity itself. And that's, that's a non-trivial thing to do. But I don't know, it seems like an important project. And you look around, like, who's got the money to fund that? that would be like crazy enough to try, right? I actually think it could probably be like a bunch of bitcoins that would be willing to do that. They'd be like, we kind of did that like with Bitcoin. Like this is the next bit. Right?

We're going to do that next. So that might be a bit of a larp right now. But I don't know. It's non-trival to me that in the next few years you could see something like that could create. I think it'd be kind of cool. Well, I'm curious to see where things go from here, Matt. And I feel like you're on the forefront of so much of it. And yeah, it's an exciting wild time.

I have a feeling 2025 is just going to be one of the weirdest years we've had maybe in a millennium. I mean, I think it's a safe prediction at any given year to say this will be the weirdest year. I think that just, we're just on that curve. Yeah. And just, you know, it's getting weirder and weird. Yeah. And so, like, it's more about the derivative of weirdness. Is that going to accelerate?

I think it might be a step, stepwise leap, but I don't know. Yeah. Well, that's, one little personal commentary is like, this is the. interesting thing is, you know, going wrapping all this together, like the Bitcoin, the AI, the alien, these things are, if you imagine, there's kind of this, there's this median distribution of opinion, what's considered kind of inside the Orvitin window and it's a distribution. And there's some, you know, ineffable sort of zone outside where if you're outside that zone, you're either conspiracy to a theorist, you're a fringe, kook, you're, you know,

just, you're out there, right? And then there are things that are like legitimate, but like, kind of, you know, still considered somewhat impolite. And that's like almost like Hedana syndrome sort of stuff, right? It's like just inside the over-to window, but disputed, but people say it's a kooky thing, but now it's increasingly a serious thing. And what's fascinating is, like, individuals, right? And maybe myself, right, I've sort of gravitated to sort of stay on that, like, whatever that liminal zone is. I think, I don't know psychologically, but I'm just attracted to that part of like things that are coming in off of that side of the distribution. And, but you always think about it

as like a wave because I think that that whole distribution of itself is moving. Right. And so ironically, if I like picked a certain point on that curve and just stayed there, like, my, my like fringe opinions on Bitcoin and UAPs four or five years ago are now like increasingly like normie. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it's like if I don't, if I don't like constantly try to look further out. Yeah. It's like, oh, the reality of nonhuman intelligence was like fully out there. Yeah, it was like coming in. And now you've got this new. And now you got psionics. I was like, oof, well, okay, that's the, that's the new thing out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But that's probably also coming in. So, like, this whole curve, I'm looking at it. And I'm just, I didn't know what the shape of that curve is. All I know is, like, where I am sort of on it. Yeah. Through, like, I get sort of subtle feedback on Twitter and professional and semi-professional networks of, like, where am I on this curve? It's, like, a clue to how fast the median, you know, shape is moving.

And it seems like that whole shape is moving, this direction, right? Yeah. Which is, you know, if you take any stats class, like, if you move the mean of, a of a distribution, like the tails explode, right? There's like an asymmetric, like, effect. Like, if you cut off the left side, right, the right side explodes. Right. And so there's just like a statistical analogy here, which is even if it's like a subtle movement in the mean perception of these things, like the effect on the margin, especially what that threshold is, is changing much faster. Yep. I think that's what you see now. That's what your podcast think represents.

I think that's like, that's the alpha of the Josie Michael's podcast. Well, it's funny to watch these like people who have credentials that well exceed mine. But they're like, they have to like call me like on signal or something. You know, and they have to just be like, you know, okay, maybe there's something here. And like, you know, send me some papers on it or whatever. They can't like kind of like fully like own it because it's like too fringy for them. And so it's like this. And then they do some like hedging thing publicly where they're like, we should look into this.

But there's 99% like nothing there. And then you just watch them like crumbling like over time. Like as they realized, everything's just way weirder than they think. And there is something nice about like not being in that, not having to play that game. Like not having to like optics or, you know, care about optics or like posture at all.

If any of these weirder frameworks are real, you can't have your talented STEM students just growing up not thinking they exist. Like that doesn't work. Again, in the world in which, like we're at par with our adversaries, which you'd have to assume that we kind of are, at least as far as the basic existence of the frameworks. But that's back to my point about like the median moves a little bit and like that the,

like the tails move a lot. Like that's an example of the tail moving a lot. And the thing is you're, you've done venture capital, you've done investing, you know, if you're doing intellectual, you know, investing in this sense, if you're only paying attention to the mean, you're missing the movement on the, on the tail. Yeah. And that is, that is where. the dramatic change is happening.

You have to be looking there. And you have to say, okay, well, that is a pretty dramatic shift that pretends an even more dramatic evolution in the next year or two. Yeah, and it's like that, you know, like Timor Karan, do you know, that is just like Duke professor. He talks about like preference falsification.

And it's always this like very quick cascade. So, and it's not preference falsification, but it's like, you know, the mean shifting will be, you know, very fast. Like, it'll happen at the tail and then it'll, like, bulge up. And then it'll just, like, it'll accelerate much quick, like, sort of exponentially quickly. And then, and then all of a sudden the mean will be, like, an entirely different place, like, like, after that. And that's, that's, that's, that's, goes back to the whole, like, you need to have, that can be a disruptive process, right?

Because, like, a lot of the social institutions we have are framed around like the mean. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone believes, you know, this is the basic architecture. This is the assumptions around next week, next month, next year, 20 years, my retirement, my kids, et cetera, et cetera. Like, I just did estate planning this morning, right? It's like very practical trust, how to make sure my kids get what I get, you know. It's like, okay, I have to plan 20, 30 years. And that's like, okay, a certain psychological orientation to the future. But then you've got this other, these other developments here. And even I who pay very close attention to it, it's very hard to try to stitch those together. Oh, it's extremely right? It's like, how do I,

you know, I need, I need to do this. This is like what I need to do. Right. But like, I don't really know what 20, 30 years is going to look like. Put it all in big play. Right. That's an insane, like, it's just so much, it's like an event horizon. Do you think, which I can't really see? Do you think, like, you know, I think FDR bought, like, a huge percentage of, like, the gold supply and, like, put it in Fort Knox. And then

post-bred and Woods, this is a total oversimplification, but you could say that a lot of American foreign policy was just, like, governed by the need to have somewhat control or, like, friendly, you know, I, on like some percentage of like the world's crude oil or something. Yeah. Do you think that Bitcoin becomes that now, especially if you were to get these sort of like breakthroughs and energy?

Like say you get something weird on the UAP side, you get some break, you know, see you get, you know, over unity, you know, or you get free energy or something and, you know, fusion works, you know, at scale. Then then would Bitcoin become this like all of a sudden, you get this crazy game theory dynamic over Bitcoin where that becomes the new oil, which was the new gold or something. Well, yeah, and I think there's a few things.

One is, I don't think Bitcoin is UAP proof, but it might be UAP resistant in that sense. I don't think I'm sure you can say anything as Bitcoin. Is it UAP proof? It's like disclosure proof, maybe is a better way saying it. And like I think I have a semi-tongued cheek tweet like four or five years ago that's like, what's your UAP hedge hashtag Bitcoin? It was a response to this like FTA alpha article

is talking about like financial stability risks associated with UAPs disclosure, right? Uncertainty, technological paradigms being changed, stranded assets, sociological, religious, institutional disruptions, et cetera. Polkitt and caboodle, which is interesting, right, from an investor's perspective, which is you want to hold your money for the long term.

You know, most people have a balanced weighted assets of like sovereign debt, right? Unless you treasury bonds. Maybe some people have some gold, right? It's the old standby in case things get totally crazy. You've got, you know, diversified equity, to make sure there's any technology changes, right? New paradigms, whether it's big tech, you know,

you've got energy utility plays, you know, and then maybe you have your flyer 2.5, 2 to 5% Bitcoin kind of like thing. That's probably, you know, the new investment sort of, you know, sort of distribution. If you, you know, no one can predict what will really come out in terms of technology or the diffusion or the rate of change of these paradigms. But even if you just get one or two big changes, right? say you do get, not free energy, because I don't think that's physically possible in the universe.

I don't just think it's free energy, but you get extremely high energy return on energy-invested sorts of systems. Maybe you can draw energy out of the vacuum, but there's no such thing as free energy. You actually have to do some amount of work, but it's going to be like a high payoff relative to your, you know, whatever engineering devices you have to put together. And we're not, I'm sure if that's physically possible because you can do Casimir or just get, you know, to do this, but that's not a, that's a reversible process. You have to like, you can't develop an engine based off of that. at least not to my knowledge.

But then say you do get something like anti-gravity or some novel propulsion system that allows you to pull forward, say, the feasibility of asteroid mining at scale by 10 or 20 years. Like that's now on the horizon for just conventional propulsion. And we know that if you can do asteroid mining, you can probably get, like, you know, massive amounts of these right now,

very scarce resources don't become scarce anymore. And or if you get an ore extraction and refining technology, some sort of laser thing that can just, you know, blast out of the ore and isolate all the gold. Well, maybe you go from a process that right now generates 2% of new gold in the year and keeps gold as an old standby, scarce reserve asset.

If now you have new technology, it allows you to create 5 or 10 or 20% new gold every year, well, then gold's viability as a reserve asset that's scarce enough goes away. So new technology can fundamentally change the sort of monetary predicate of our global system. And sovereign debt is sort of what serves as the global reserve asset right now. And we're in, you know, if you read Ray Dalio's new book,

we're kind of in the sort of end game of that kind of sovereign debt crisis where we're now paying more on interest than we do than we do on our defense. And we're heading to the point where you get this reflexivity. We're now the Fed cuts rates on the short end and the long end goes up by in a couplet and maybe even more. It's a classic symptom of sort of late stage debt cycles. And, you know, it's very hard to get out of those without essentially monetizing the debt, financial oppression, capital controls. It's usually what you see, right? You have to inflate the debt away where you risk cascading defaults and great depression. So you've got to effectively cap rates, run the economy hot, try to devalue. But the more debt you have, the more

of a pain you have to impose, you've got to isolate sources of capital and impose losses on them. And so they're going to be fleeing to, and that's usually, you know, essentially that's the bond market that has to get effectively, you know, taken out back and shot. Like, and usually the governments don't forecast that. They don't give people clues. It just happens. That's how you make sure the sheep roll in the pen and then you you you you call the hurt so you're going to have to anesthesize the global bond market uh the global sovereign bond market in particular um it's not just the us it's basically the whole world at this point um and so there's going to be this movement to you know harder assets that are harder to do that too right so gold of bitcoin that's kind of become almost consensus now

among major institutional investors ray dahlio et cetera you know i think right now the the basic ratio is like a five or 10 to one gold to bitcoin allocation in terms of the level of trust you know in the institutional levels between gold and Bitcoin. But that seems to be the posture, right? In fact, there was a story in the FT that the London gold vaults are basically being emptied because a bunch of, you know,

it's all moved to New York essentially. Because they're worried about tariffs, but I think there's other things going on there too. So people are repositioning at scale. In fact, one quick anecdote on that, the Swiss Army sort of Singles Intelligence guy give a quote to a pretty niche satellite magazine several months ago about how they were noticing that certain synthetic aperture radar satellites flown by the U.S. and China were intensively monitoring their territory.

It's like, what do you use synthetic aperture satellites to do? They're especially ex-s super high resolution. Super high resolution. It's such you train mapping. So you can detect, you know, sub-millimeter deformations in, say, the shape of a mountainside, the, the settling of the building or trucks moving in and out. So if you were moving large amounts of gold, say, out of Swiss faults and moving that around the world, that would be a thing of acute intelligence collection interest to both

U.S. and China. Where's that gold going? You know, gold's hard to track otherwise, right? There's no blockchain for gold. And a lot of, you look at just the balance of disclosed transfers, has been a huge amount of imports to Saudi Arabia from Swiss in terms of the gold account. So anyways, that's a bit of a sidebar on the monetary side. But this is...

Wait, wait, you've got to close that loop. Yes. Well, no. So this is, this is, I think... They're trying to sell gold by Bitcoin? Well, that's a separate question. I have heard that in the Emirates, for example, explorations of, you know, trying to... There's a lot of...

Say there's a ton of gold and other scarce assets, you know, art and whatever that has just been tucked away in Swiss vaults. Swiss banking secrecy laws have been changing, especially after the Russian invasion. Asian and essentially, you know, large pools of what you call shadow wealth is no longer feeling safe in Switzerland. So they're trying to go back home, right? In Saudi Arabia and the Emirates or other wealth countries or in Asia and Singapore, Hong Kong, et cetera. And so there's been a reconfiguration of where, say, the hidden wealth of the world wants to go. And they're realizing out that actually, if you just want to hold gold in a Swiss fall for 100 years, it's been great.

Right. But at the moment you realize it could be seized or sanctioned is a new risk premium attached to it. And then you want to move it. Well, it's super expensive to move. Right. It's extremely expensive. And then actually, you're like, oh, if I can just sell the gold by Bitcoin, I can then teleport the Bitcoin and maybe buy back gold, essentially, there with a local importer. Maybe that fee, actually, that transaction cost is cheaper than actually physically transporting the gold. But then if you're doing that, you might be convinced to just keep five or 10 percent of that and Bitcoin along the way. Yeah. Right. Oh, maybe I don't sell it all back into gold, right? That's an extra conversion.

That's an extra transaction fee. Maybe I'll keep some of it in Bitcoin, right? So I think that is happening now. There's institutions of thinking being set up in the Middle East to facilitate that type of trade. Do you think you see game theory play out on the global scale with Bitcoin? So like, do you have, you know, smaller players like Buceli of El Salvador who, like, I think would buy Bitcoin tomorrow. And you hear rumors about stuff, you know, in Saudi Arabia as well. But I think they're kind of waiting for the U.S. to kind of take the lead on some of these things.

So, like, do we, if we create a strategic federal reserve or strategic, you know, Bitcoin reserve, does that sort of tee off this, like, you know, every other country needs to, like, kind of get in line and get coordinated on their Bitcoin policy and, like, start to, start to buy it? Yes. I think that is, that is happening, but in a very nascent and very, you know, everyone's looking around sort of stage. Nobody's bolted out, right, to be at first at the door stage. But everyone is definitely looking around. Right. I was in Abu Dhabi, I know, two months ago for a Bitcoin conference there. And it was more like a geopolitical summit than an industry conference, right?

There were delegations sent there from multiple, you know, nations, like, you know, GCC nations. And their explicit, like, mission from their national leadership, like reporting directly back to the king, the minister of finance, the central bank head was, what does this new administration really think about Bitcoin? How serious are they about shifting in a pro-b Bitcoin direction? and not just on the strategic Bitcoin Reserve idea, but just in general, like, doing this 180 that we're sort of seeing in motion.

And then what will that mean? Again, these governments, they're not traders. They're not trying to, like, time the trade. This is a strategic orientation they're trying to anticipate. Well, how serious do you think the American government is now, the new incoming administration when it comes to Bitcoin? They're very serious. I mean, Trump has said explicitly,

and he's, you know, about U.S. being crypto capital of the world. he's very serious about this pro-Bitcoin policy. We'll see what that manifests practically in terms of, say, executive orders. We have this working group that's going to study this issue of a stockpile of digital assets, most likely just Bitcoin. And also stablecoins, right? So though I think strategically there's a synergy between stablecoins, essentially dollar-pegged crypto-eurodollars that trade offshore on open blockchains, mostly, and are essentially like IOUs. in crypto world denominated in dollars, right? So they function just as like a dollar,

but on an open blockchain. And these will be mostly Ethereum-based, do you think? So, yeah, there's some, yeah, well, Ethereum-atron is a very popular. But there's a, now that was like very nascent. I think now there's a lot of focus on the regulatory side to pass laws that would allow, say, banks to issue stable coins and get in on the game.

And that would create this regulatory perimeter to essentially expand the dollar network. Stable coins also have this feature where if they're properly regulated, as they would be forced to under this law, would be fully reserved, right, with high quality liquid assets, specifically Treasury securities, most likely short term. But if they're banks, they could actually term that out.

So you'd have new buyers of, you know, basically it's a new balance sheet capacity to absorb new government debt. So you expand stable coins around the world, which are right now about 200 trillion, right? They're about 2.5% of the T-bill market. I think it's very plausible if they pass this legislation. within a few years, you could see that 10x.

And then just stable coins themselves are basically giving the U.S. government 25% of their role on a short end. What do you mean by that? Meaning about 25% of their annual financing could pass, like requirements for short-term bill issuance, would be absorbed by the stable coin issuers that have to reserve the expansion of the stable coin sort of issuance. You know, it's an IOU. They have to have an asset to back that up, right?

liability asset matching. And so you expand the dollar network. Again, you're sort of penetrating parts of the global south that don't have access to correspondent banks where remittances and Western Union are very expensive. And so this would just be like an accelerant for, I think, global development as well as the expansion of the dollar network helps the US government on the margin finance itself. So kind of win, win, win. And Bitcoin to first order is what drives the expansion of the global sort of stable point market. It's what you use to trade in and out of Bitcoin. So if the unit price of Bitcoin is, you know, much higher, you need much more stablecoins to just facilitate that trade, let alone the additional activities in the crypto ecosystem,

some of which are more speculative than others. And so, yeah, you can see the synergistic flywheel developed between Bitcoin and stable coins that starts to take on a geopolitical dimension. And then Bitcoin is, you know, seeing right now essentially as a speculative reserve asset, that's complementary to gold, but because it's much more volatile, right, it's prudently, you know, risk-weighted, right, as a much smaller proportion of your overall portfolio in, say, a sovereign wealth, you know, portfolio. But it is now like a non-zero thing, right? And so as it's a total value likely increases, its volatility likely decreases, therefore, it's risk-weighted, you know, allocation should rationally go up. So it's just like sort of positive feedback loop? Yeah. And so actually

the Bitcoin Policy Institute, the organization I'm proud to know, help lead, actually as a fellow named Matthew Ferranti, who's a economist, trained Ph.D. at Harvard under Ken Rogoff, who's an economist for the U.S. intelligence community. And he's written a white paper for us, which is the case for Bitcoin as a central bank reserve asset. So I would encourage folks to read. Is Satoshi either rolling in his grave or extremely pissed off at that process? This is the thing. Eventually, Bitcoin is now, is going to play the geopolitical and the sovereign level. And it does open up these larger questions. Okay, Bitcoin is non-state money, but when states start to hold it, what happens to Bitcoin?

Yeah, totally. Right. And then also you get this wealth transfer. So that's like this really interesting thing. But it is sort of anathema to like the initial, you know, spirit maybe. I mean, you can say that you read the early forums and how Finney was calling for a Bitcoin price of 10 million and thought that states would buy it. And it would just be like a global money, right? And the question is the argument was more, is there a central issuer that can control the supply or censor transactions?

Yeah. Right. The government owning Bitcoin does not change the supply of Bitcoin. It doesn't restrict anybody's ability to transact. Yeah, yeah. They're just a participant in the network like anybody else, and they're subject to its rule set as much as everybody else's, right? And so this is the thing.

There are more second order effects, though, that are important to assess. And as BPI, I think we'll be taking a very close look at these, which is more on the nuance associated with the development ecosystem, which is this rough consensus model. You've got Bitcoin developers. is you've got kind of this community of folks that are very invested in Bitcoin technical development. And there's always a lot of, you know, conversations that's an open source money project, right?

There's just code, right? And so it's like what sorts of BIPs, Bitcoin improvement proposals are going to be considered. And, you know, that conversation was happening at some levels and then there's big companies that get involved. And that potentially changes some of the inherent dynamics associated with that consensus model. Now you've got, say, Bitcoin miners are a big constituency.

There are certain things. that they would rather see versus other things. Whereas the individual user or developer or custodian, like they all have their own interests in Bitcoin, right? And those are going to be reflected in the kind of the dynamic political economy of Bitcoin. And now states, right, as they buy Bitcoin, they're going to have a view, right?

And there's no monopoly power, but now that's just a multi-level bargaining about, you know, the future of this open source money project, right? And the game theory of Bitcoin has always been, the incentives always align in a positive direction that works to Bitcoin's benefit. Right? Like the miners and the users and the algorithm are essentially they structure the game theory of the incentives around this protocol that makes it a stable system.

And so again, I have no crystal ball, but that's what you got to, you know, that's why it's not already 10 million, right? It's because there's some inherent uncertainty and risk. If everyone knew that it was going to become a global reserve asset seamlessly from here to 2040, then that would be priced it. Right. It's clearly the market has some uncertainty about that, right? And we're going to see on a path-dependent basis, like how it actually evolves. Well, it seems like a pretty constructive setup, both for Bitcoin and for UAP. And we'll see where things go from here.

And I really appreciate your time, Matt. It's always a pleasure and an honor and a lot of fun. And safe family, man. Yeah, of course. All right.