TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #554: UAP Disclosure Is Upon Us with Matt Pines

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

Marty sits down with Matt Pines to discuss how Trump may include bitcoin in his policy and the imminent advent of information on UAPs becoming public. 0:00 - Intro 1:34 - ECB and Minneapolis Fed papers 11:12 - Evolution of supranational institutions 18:16 - How US power is different 25:24 - Unchained & Coinkite 27:18 - Trump and his allies 46:20 - Zaprite & SOTE 47:53 - Measured approach to state bitcoin adoption 1:03:49 - We need lateral thinking civil servants 1:16:42 - American infrastructure in the AI arms race 1:26:07 - Positivity and getting shit done 1:32:24 - Defense VCs 1:38:39 - Conflict with China conventions of cyberwarfare 1:49:41 - UAP disclosure 2:15:57 - Layered psyops 2:27:05 - Cults and ideological institutions 2:37:10 - Access and accountability 2:45:17 - Disclosure from other nations 2:53:45 - UAP technology 3:01:12 - The risk posed by widespread doubt 3:05:48 - Conspiracies are common 3:11:53 - Wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained https://unchained.com/concierge/ Coinkite https://coinkite.com/ Zaprite https://zaprite.com/tftc Salt of the Earth https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

non-human intelligence is real it has been interacting with humanity this interaction is ongoing and all our defense and intelligence and industrial system has been aware of that for a long time matthew pines a national security expert reveals what the government knows about ufos just weeks before the november 13th congressional hearings and we have recovered vehicles craft and then we're working to figure out how they work harold malmgren one of the more well-respected national security folks and he's just come out and just said it hard in the paint this is real we've been figuring this stuff out people have been injured threatened and murdered to protect the secret and by the way the president and the vice president and the

relevant committees in congress are just as in the dark as you are while the world focuses on these ufo revelations pines and myself expose another urgent threat senior officials in europe are telling their friends capital controls financial repression are coming from imminent ufo disclosure to financial collapse this discussion reveals what insiders know but but aren't telling the public. You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts.

So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be probably should be mr pines we're in an environment of increased uncertainty you could say that yeah it is pretty crazy we're back i have you back on the show

because of a paper that i was cited in and commented on um which was the european central bank's paper about bitcoin and why people who don't have bitcoin should avoid it and try to make it illegal uh obviously the minneapolis fed maybe not obviously but the minneapolis fed came out with a paper not too long after singing a similar tune a bit different but saying that bitcoin is a risk to our ability to debase the currency and go into as much debt as possible maybe we should cut off the exit ramps for individuals and corral bitcoin into the government so that we can continue to issue debt. But particularly to the ECB, you quote tweeted something I said

and said, the European geoeconomic model has failed and the technocrats responsible cannot accept responsibility. What they can do is preempt Bitcoin's response to this failure. Note well, senior officials in Europe are telling their friends capital controls and financial repression are coming. Are you saying these central bankers are afraid of Bitcoin or they're afraid of the monster that they created themselves, a combination of the two?

I think the ECB is. I think in the U.S. it's probably a bit more nuanced and evolving in terms of there are clearly a divergence of various opinions. Institutionally, I think the U.S. system is a bit more differentiated. We can get into that. I think the ECB, though, represents the interests of Europe from a certain perspective, right, Which has been pushing a much more federalized vision of the European political system, which is premised on kind of a common economic integrated market and a currency union.

And so there, the nature of the currency has been a critical pillar of supporting this sort of geopolitical vision, right? Trying to integrate the continent, recognizing that it has very fractious and divergent local cultures, historical entities, etc. So they're much more politically sensitive to anything that could threaten the integrity of the euro as a political project, right? It's a much more political form of money. It's relatively recent, you know, in history. And it's fragile in the sense that it doesn't really span an integrated, say, military system or a geopolitical block that can stand as President Macron was sort of pushing before the Russia invasion of Ukraine as sort of a strategic autonomous system that can sort of calibrate on its own terms against increasing what is a bipolar system, the U.S. and China. And so, yeah, so Bitcoin, in this sense, represents, you know, among other things that have, you know, taken a whack at that vision of kind of European consolidation and strategic autonomy. And so the ECB, you know, which is institution created essentially to, you know, maintain and bolster that political project, I think is likely to look askance and is looking askance at anything that could threaten it. Um, and they, you know, now are looking out at a geoeconomic environment, which is not

very, um, conducive to that project. Uh, and, you know, you can go back and replay various decisions that may or may not have been made. I think maybe it was just doomed from the beginning. It's just a matter of how they want to accommodate themselves to the next few years. But they're, you know, German industry is effectively now, you know, handicapped. um they're saddled with enormous amounts of debts uh they are really stuck between a rock and a hard place in terms of calibrating themselves against u.s um military uh and strategic objectives on

the european continent because they don't really have an independent you know true military um deterrent uh that can stand on its own two feet um and so kind of uh i'd say strategically uh in a difficult spot um and then the you know few pillars of their industry are being eaten alive by china right so in terms of their automotive industry um their energy sector uh it's just not a great place um to to be if your vision is essentially try to create a monetary block uh that can reinforce the geopolitical vision they have for the european union um i think it's like the high water mark of a certain idea that you can sort of tune certain dials from an administrative bureaucracy in Brussels, and then by picking

the right inflation targets, by cleverly designing different kind of financial regulations and sort of soft capital controls and financial repression on the margin, that you can kind of keep the system, you know, aligned to that, to that objective. And that's, that works okay in a relatively stable external environment, but Europe is not in a stable external environment for all sorts of different reasons. And so now they're kind of stuck, but, you know, I think Bitcoin isn't the primary threat immediately to, to the Euro in any, in any direct fashion, but it does, I think, throw into sharp relief the conundrum that faces those administrative technocrats, which is that the system that they preside over is effectively bankrupt. And they're really,

you know, have no major sources of like get out of jail free cards, right? They've got no breakthrough AI technology. Their energy infrastructure is basically now, you know, pick, you know, hedge to U.S. liquid natural gas. They have these, you know, much more fractious internal political disputes and divergences across the continent. And it's just not great for them, right? And so I think my last part of that post was like, the whispers going out, right, to the elite who always get the heads up before, you know, big changes happen is that, you know, they're going to eventually, maybe sooner rather than later, have to do something a little bit more dramatic try to keep the project stabilized and that you know will likely go in a direction

that has usually gone in many similar cases of you know financial oppression and capital controls right is that you know the whole point is to try to keep people in right and the the game of being a good technocrat is to try to engineer those capital controls and that financial oppression in in such a way that doesn't obviously appear to be that's what it is right and so there's different maybe more technocratic ways to kind of do that in the margin through the like through the banking system through you know more um more obscure kind of technical mechanisms but it doesn't only get you so far um and if you do hit you know a major speed bump like another major shock then then those sorts of halfway measures aren't going to be sufficient and so i think there's been you

know discussions right you saw the draghi um sort of paper right the sort of he you know he's like he's like the king technocrat for for europe and he was sort of told like go off into the you know into the into the into the research cellar with a few of your trusted lieutenants and come up with like a master plan for europe to like fix europe and he came out with this long document and he basically said right like europe is hosed unless we make some like major strategic changes um and it basically is sort of going down this route of increasing sort of uh consolidation of kind of the federal common debt sort of issuance, picking and picking, choosing sort of strategic sectors to invest in and letting others effectively die, like, you know, really prioritizing across the

continent where they have a marginal competitive advantage. So it's quite ambitious. You know, it's kind of like the best shot they've got. And so, yeah, it's coming down from the top that basically the writing's on the wall that, you know, the way that Europe has sort of structured their, their geoeconomic position, uh, was premised on a whole bunch of things, you know, relatively, you know, stable, external global trade, being able to calibrate between US and China in particular, while also preserving kind of this friendly relationship with their main energy source, you know, in Russia and turn themselves right into, you know, with high education, relative large population, good geographic position, you know, in principle,

they could make that work, right? But all these things sort of went the wrong way for them, right? China, instead of being like a trade partner for them, is like actively trying to undermine most of their strategic industries. They no longer have access to the cheap energy coming out of Russia. Their internal, you know, political fractures have started to like manifest as a result. And yeah, I don't know. It's not great for them. So yeah, Bitcoin is just to them like another problem, right? That is just like another sort of external judgment on their potential strategic difficulties. So it's no surprise to me that they would not be all that positively disposed to it. And yeah, so that's Europe.

Yeah. I mean, you said it seems like the writing is on the wall, but many would argue the writing was on the wall from the onset of the euro. I mean, that's what many major economists were warning about when the euro first launched i believe in the 90s correct yeah there was a bunch of phased implementations as part of the broader integration but yeah the 90s were kind of the crucial the crucial yeah and people were warning to say i mean people they could look forward and see that the european union consolidating into this economic agreement with currency and free um uh what's the uh labor labor able to move between border somewhat freely but um it seems good in all but you have different governments and different economies with different policies

and to try to coordinate all that into a consolidated front that that acts in lockstep was warned at the onset of the euro it's unlikely it's going to happen and it seems like we're at the end state of what people were warning about in the early 90s which is it's just impossible to coordinate when you have countries like germany subsidizing countries like greece and italy it's just not going to work out in the long run i mean that's the thing it's like it's like for some definitions of long run right i think there is a hope that if they were able to kind of keep kicking any sort of major forced crisis or forced choice far enough down the road that like eventually almost by like acculturation and and like generational turnover that like

it would sort of culturally re-establish a different set of assumptions in different populations as to like the inherent legitimacy of the sort of super state institutions versus the national institutions and it was essentially as like a project of almost like state construction that like the this thing called the european commission and it's sort of you know super international institutions like the ECB, you know, have an inherent, you know, issue with legitimacy given just how new they are, right? Like the Fed has been around for a while and it's still people like think the Fed is like an illegitimate institution, but like it's basically accepted, right? It's like, it ain't going anywhere, right? Like it's just an embedded

piece of our institutional system. But like back in the twenties and thirties, like it probably wasn't, you know, it was a much more up in the air thing. If you look at like old debates in the House of Representatives, like is this, do we really still need a federal reserve? Like what the original purpose of it right so at a certain point like you know you could imagine that just like time eventually the lindy effect kicked in yeah there's sort of things eventually that start off fragile and and sort of uh you know have relatively more um loose anchors of legitimacy right just by virtue of surviving long enough that kind of like the accretion of sort of expectation starts to come into place and that's kind of how most state systems evolve right like

even the U.S. state system, right? It starts out like a thin layer of a federal system over really, very strong state institutions. And through, you know, civil wars and external events and time, like the federal structures eventually accrete more and more legitimacy, more and more power. And then, you know, you get this evolution over time. I think that was a vision behind some of these, you know, original bureaucratic moves was that this will be the trajectory, right? I think, you know, that was optimistic. I mean, we'll still, you know, the European Union is not dead by any means. And you can imagine scenarios where certain crises allow, you know, like give a bit of momentum behind sort of that push towards centralized

power. So we'll see. I wouldn't necessarily call it like dead, but I would say like the original ambitions are clearly now sputtering, right? And now they have to sort of salvage like a second best attempt, right, to keep their economies competitive in a global environment where essentially US and China are just carving up everything. And then they're exposed to increased geopolitical risk and spillover risk from instability in the Middle East as well. So they're just, they got a lot of problems to manage. That's not like they're in a position to like project global strength, right? They originally had this vision

the European Union would eventually consolidate this large economic bloc, you know, really have powerhouse geoeconomic influence that they could then, you know, stand toe to toe, you know, in a global environment with US and China as kind of the dominant poles.

And I think that's just an illusion at this point. I mean, there's even like, you know, people, serious people coming up with plans that involve are essentially like forcing the European Union, uh there are the european members to like hand over their gold to the u.s in exchange for terming out you know their debt holdings of u.s securities um as a way of essentially us like you know extracting more and more from the what you call like the imperial periphery

to sort of reinforce the strength of the core right and that in this global environment you could look you know simplify in the sense that you know there's there's a massive great power competition if not conflict playing out between kind of eurasian uh autocratic powers russia iran north korea um and china and they're kind of you know they're not necessarily like in a military alliance but they're starting to like you know directly support each other militarily whether it's north koreans sending troops and shells you know china and iran with drones and stuff and kind of just like this reinforcing block around the eurasian periphery to kind of push push against the legacy kind of what you call a g7 system uh and sort of g7 slash like nato system

um and you know we are not we're facing our own strategic challenges right our own massive debt loads our own domestic political issues our own unsustainable fiscal trajectory um and if we ever hit a, you know, a true problem. And we could be heading towards that soon. Like, well, we're going to look around to see who we can essentially make, make, make, eat that pain. Right. And the political differential is that if you can make foreign populations and foreign governments eat that pain, you know, instead of your own domestic citizens, well, that's what's going to happen. Right. And so, you know, that's, that's what, if I was Europe, that's what I'd be worried about, Is that the U.S. can, you know, whereas the Europeans can financially repress their citizens, the U.S. can financially repress all of Europe. Right. And that's likely what's going to happen. You know, I have no like this is an analytic forecast. Like this is just the direction like the global system is hierarchical. And that's that's what I would be girding against if I was Europe.

But they've got, it's not necessarily a unified system. They all have their own narrow interest to manage. Yeah, I mean, let's dive deeper into this. Earlier you said the United States is, in our economic situation, somewhat differentiated. So like diving into that side of it, like how are we differentiated and just building on that line of thought. If there is the prospect of economic turmoil on the horizon and we're looking to externalize the cost of that turmoil onto foreign lands, how does our differentiated stance enable that? Well, the U.S. is still a very – has lots of strong endogenous sources of national power, right? Like we're a continent for one, so we've got two oceans.

we have this legacy dominance of international trade through the US Navy, which is heading into some issues. But in terms of like, it's like stock versus flow, right? Like the stock of American power is extremely high, even though like you can say that it's at least not growing, right? Maybe it's declining, but like the total stock is just very high, right? We've just built up a huge stock of power over the past like 100 years, right? Winning multiple world wars, sort of constructing a global trade and financial system that just kept sort of you know recycling um benefits to to the u.s global position uh and so like hard power we still have a lot of strong hard military power obviously we've we're starting to stretch and strain that hard power it's being

you know um uh put to the test in in different conflict zones around around the world but like we've got a lot of injurious hard military power to kind of you know more than what you know say the Europeans have. And then in terms of strategic technology domains that were aggressively, as you know, modern economies trying to compete for, whether it's AI, whether it's sort of new energy systems, whether it's space, whether it's life sciences, synthetic biology, these are places where we do have kind of this engine of innovation that most other countries don't have, except for maybe China. And so they're really only like a handful of countries that can truly get to and at that technological frontier. And where there may be, you know, asymmetric takeoffs in terms of

economic, you know, productive advantage remains to be seen, right? Like the AI hype could fizzle out. But there's a like, you know, you're at the roulette table, like we've got more chips to put on different squares that could pay off, right? And even if the stack is getting lower, right? We've got more chips than anybody else at the table. So maybe we get a payoff, right? So I They never want to count us out, but it does mean if you look at your stack and it's going down and you haven't hit one of those payoffs, you're getting an increasingly, say, more vulnerable position, right? It's not necessarily like, okay, you could just sit back and relax.

And so that's where I think, obviously, US versus Europe, we've got just many different axes of strategic advantage. um and in particular you know this is like the old story of you know like it truly is like a but not you call it benign but it is a it is a global imperial system that we've essentially constructed that isn't like traditionally managed the way like old you know say the roman empire was managed foreign legions just you know de facto conquering and enslaving populations and exporting all their wealth back to the core uh or like the traditional kind of seafaring colonial empires it would like yeah like raid you know new territories kidnap slaves extract all their

hard resources and bring it back to you know the financial center of the empire but effectively that's kind of like the inherent logic of any imperial system and you can see like we have a version of that that's been constructed over the 20th century um and started off i would say a lot more like in the traditional mode of like yeah like we're going to carve up the world and we're going to compete against you know essentially a soviet imperial system wants to do their own version of that but with a slightly different ideological bent to it but the basic same mechanism just like establish more control over more more parts of the world subject local you know local populations to to essentially repression financial repression cultural repression

extract their resources to benefit you know your your domestic and elite populations it's just like this is the way these systems go um but they they tend to like expand and then sort of reach a point of zenith and then and then you know the size itself becomes a problem right there's you know lots of stories about this and the you know rise and fall of the roman empire and those sort of things are just you know inherently it's more difficult to manage these these large-scale institutional uh bureaucracies that you have to build in order to manage a global empire and at the start of building this sort of imperial system in the 40s and 50s and 60s there's a lot of energy there's a lot of like you know technical competence and like folks you know alan like the

Dulles brothers and Vannevar Bush and and and these guys that were like building these new globe spanning institutional systems it's like you know there's a lot of like energy and momentum behind it and they're kind of you know when you're in that growth mode everyone's happy everyone can kind of ride that wave but then you get to a point of let's say 70s to 90s where it was kind of like okay these are mature systems now and we're trying to manage it right and accommodate other changes in the global environment the rise of China the fall of the Soviet Union and it was like okay now we can kind of like we're sort of coasting right in that in that era nothing's really getting better nothing's really collapsing but we're kind of this is good like we're on that we're on the top

in the last 25 years i think it's been increasingly apparent that like okay like we can't we can't really keep this whole structure in place anymore right and we're trying to like you know prevent a total collapse we're trying to fight sort of rear guard actions to shore up different parts of that system as our as our principal competitors are getting stronger and more aggressive and trying to push, push it back and maybe even find ways where they can pull out, you know, supporting infrastructure for it. Um, that's where we are right now, where it's like, okay, we have this sort of like long momentum behind us, but we're kind of in this state of, um, sort of decay, institutional

decay. Uh, and we're trying to figure out, okay, we have to prioritize. We don't have as much, you know, uh, surpluses, whether it's human capital surpluses or financial surpluses by any means to kind of keep the system going. So we're trying to figure out, okay, how do we prioritize? And like one key example of this, and just say the military domain is like, you know, we kind of are at this point where we have to kind of pick and choose how much resources we can push into Eastern Europe, supporting Russia, how much resources we push into the Middle East, supporting Israel, how much resources do we need to push in to bolster

the deterrence against China and Taiwan, but also with the Philippines, but also with Japan, with australia like we're realizing we don't have like the military industrial and fiscal capacity to like walk and chew gum in all those different theaters to try to keep you know this this global system uh uh you know stabilized in in the face of of increasing uh challenge so that's where i think we're and that's like we're trying to figure out how to do this and it's clearly putting us into a bit of a quandary so for this episode of tftc is brought to you by our good friends at Unchained. Do you have an old IRA or 401k that isn't keeping up with Bitcoin? Roll over into an Unchained Bitcoin IRA and take advantage of Bitcoin's long-term potential while enjoying

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over the last century and maybe internally the federal government recognizes like all right we need to shed this dead skin and really reinvigorate the economy become competitive in all these areas that you just mentioned and now it's making like it's the last six or three months it's been like how could you seriously put kamala harris uh up as a presidential candidate and it's everything you just said now it's like maybe internally they recognize they need a sly roundabout way to shed the skin and enable industry to build back in a more organic way and when you factor in the elite theory that's playing out uh at the at the federal level right now leading up to this election you have kamala harris incumbent uh representative of the system that is filled with

dead skin that needs shedding and then you have donald trump backed by peter teal elon musk he's got jd van says his vice president pick um the sort of small tech backing which is funding things like andrewl um the ai movement uh small modular reactor movement and it's almost like this is the sly roundabout way to shed the skin and allow us to rebuild these critically important sectors via a mandate if if we have like a popular if trump wins the popular vote and becomes very clear that it seems that the american people want to go in this direction as opposed to staying on the course that we have been on yeah it's hard to say like how much of this is like a master plan versus just, you know, like reading a pattern into the inherent chaos of American

politics. But I do think there is a certain political economy here that you're pointing out, which is, you know, I think the traditional democratic coalition, or let's say the modern democratic coalition is sort of a coalition, I would describe it as a sort of a technocratic managerialism, right? And they have sort of a de facto trust in the existing sets of institutions, especially government institutions, where, you know, it's kind of a, the old, it's sort of, you know, what was the basic political model and meritocratic model? It's like, you go to school, you get education, you get a PhD, you work in the government, you work in a certain highly regulated industry, you develop a certain expertise in a very narrow domain, you get to a position of

relative responsibility within a pretty complicated hierarchical bureaucracy, and you have sort of a little bit of power, right? You write that policy reg over that industry, or you are in that industry and you help, you know, write the regs for yourself, or you're an academic or you're a civil servant. And in general, right, those sorts of sort of social roles have, you know, accreted more and more power over the last, say, 50 years, as we've sort of grown these bureaucratic structures. And they, you know, these only kind of go one way, right? And the lesson of just any human institution is like, there's inevitably there's sort of rot that seeps in to any system over time, right? The sort of rules only get more complicated, right? More, you know, inefficiency

kind of gets built up over time. And then you get to this point of like, you know, any system needs structural reform, right? When you get to that point. And then you get this sort of political fight over, does the reform come from within, right? Does it come from within that class of sort of managerial technocrats that look at their own institutions, you know, with a hard eye, or they're facing an external crisis, say a war, economic crisis, or what have you. And there's like enough momentum that gives, you know, enlightened new leadership in that institution to like reform it, right? Fix it from within. And versus these external pressures where it's like the sort of, we're just going to burn it down, right? We're going to clear out the dead wood,

and we're going to start with a clean slate. And I think that's where we're facing right now is like this certain set of folks that look at these institutions and they realize they've been, they've kind of reached a sort of internal pathology decay and they would just want to break them, right, from the outside and start fresh.

And I think some of that is also being, it's like, I sort of see this from, I try to be like an analyst at heart. I'm like, I kind of see both perspectives, right? I see the perspective of someone who says they're unsalvageable, they need to be replaced. Well, also I see the perspective of someone who's like, there's a lot of like uh you know these systems like it's like baby with bath water sorts of

stuff right like these systems and yeah go ahead i'm envisioning the software meme now where it's like you have like all the blocks stuck up and then there's like the one block it's like only if people knew that like this little piece at the bottom is holding everything up and yeah it's like i'm i'm more of like a traditional conservative in that sense of pragmatism which is like think about second or third order effects of any action and understand that you inherently can't predict what what's going to happen these are complex you know systems and like you know defer in general to like you know lessons of history which is like if if a thing is being done a certain way for a certain reason it's probably a good reason right why right like it might not be like just

the most prudent action be like we're just gonna you know just just erase that piece of code right Because the programmer left, you know, 20 years ago and you're like, oh, well, this probably don't need this anymore. And you just delete it and go, oh, crap, like the whole system goes down, right? And so you can have these systems where like, you can look at the code and you're like, this is really rotten code. It's really complicated. Probably half of this code doesn't really do anything, right?

I really need to get in here and like do a clean rewrite, right? It would be easier just to like delete it all and start with some fresh software. That's often easier said than done, right? Because usually the code that you're looking at is doing something really important for you. Right. In fact, if you look at I do the cyber stuff and there's many businesses like this where, you know, talk to senior engineers at some of the big tech companies, people that, you know, help keep modern civilization alive. And they they'll tell you, right, like, yeah, like we're in a Frankenstein sort of IT stack. Right. We've got some really cool new hot stuff. And then you've got this other stuff that's been here for 20 years and we're just sort of duct taping it together.

And, yeah, they'd be like, we really definitely want to like if we could, we would get rid of that. but it's holding up like critical things and there's just no way like no easy way and maybe no no low risk way to to do that swap and so you're kind of stuck and that's i think where we are at in terms of our political economy is like um we're you know and it's like okay how do you do that like in the right way and i don't have the right answer there but i think that's what we're facing these you know the pressure is just to get in there and just delete it all right and And of course, you have like the sort of Elon side of things. It's like, oh, I just go into Twitter, I delete, you know, 75% of those engineers and Twitter

still runs, right? Oh, that's proof that you could do that, right? And maybe, but that's like an N of one, right? And it was also Elon. It was also like, you know, kind of one relatively simple social media company, right? I don't know if that's like a template for reform in any arbitrary institution, right? And so, I know, I try to, like, keep myself grounded in, like, a pragmatic approach to institutional reform. But I think you're right, like, we're not really in a great spot where, you know, these are the two candidates that we have to pick from, right, in my opinion, right? Like, it's more of a symptom of where we are as a democracy that, like, these are the two options we've got, right? And I think everyone would basically be like we would much rather have like a fresh set of people with like energy and like clear competence and a vision and like clear leadership skills and demonstrated executive presence and we just don't have those on the option.

And yeah, so I'm just – I'm a little bit disappointed in our society, but that's where we are. Is the coalition that's building behind Trump not appealing to you at all? That's the one thing. Yeah. It seems like, I mean, people have been marketing as like the Avengers, Trump, Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK, Vivek Ramaswamy, many others externally, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, obviously, a lot of Silicon Valley. and it does give like it's the first time in a while where it's funny because we we had this on rabbit hole recap where i i i made the mistake of saying this seems like the most important election of our lives and got gotcha because that is what is said at every election and i've never

believed it up until this point where it's like it really does feel like we are at a critical crossing point and need to make a decision one way or the other to to try and salvage and fix things and i don't know maybe i'm naive getting duped by the propaganda but it does seem like when you see elon uh landing that ship when you see everything going on with andrel and you look at the the military budget and you look at how much it costs them to spin up their defense tech you look at starlink many other things the again smrs becoming more of a trend and trump promising that he's going to let that industry flourish like that seems much more preferable tangible and it more importantly seems tangible because we're getting examples of it every day with

product launches from the private market yeah i mean i i'm always resistant to joining a team maybe it's just like psychologically i like feel like i'm being tricked by somebody when they tell me to join their team because i feel like as soon as you decide i'm going to sign up for a team human psychology is like you know wraps itself in such a way that you tend to justify all the actions of that team and then you force yourself to make different compromises along along that way but i think you know directionally you know i i certainly like am inspired by the achievements of some of those folks like elon uh i think you just have to objectively look at what the spacex crew has done and be like this is how you you know potentially along other other directions

like reinvigorate american society reinvigorate american power uh and kind of try to you know jumpstart a new vision for you know what the a16z is called american renaissance but i also think i don't know because it's being driven by so many really rich people and like people that are experts in propaganda i'm like i don't know like it's like i am i am mentally preparing to be like god damn it marty you got your hopes up again um i mean it's just like the system is like really like there's one thing american system is really good at is like tricking people right like at scale just you know whether it's just in terms of political propaganda consumerism just like we live in a mirage right and you know the media algorithm you know just is really good

at pumping people into different tribal camps and activating that sort of limbic energy and just like directing them at each other and just these collisions of like social, emotional, psychological stress that just feeds the algorithm more, gets the eyeballs, gets the advertising. It's just designed to kind of turn you into this, this, this, this, this, you know, cog in this machine. And I don't know, I, I try not to become sucked into that. But like, just analytically, I think, you know, the U.S. is in a position, I think, to your point, like, why is this the most important election? I think it's like stock market reaching all-time highs sort of thing. It's like, in any exponential process, right, you can have, like, the decay or instability or dynamic decision

energy at stake in any given election is, like, going along this exponential curve, right? And so, like the the background environment in which making these political decisions is changing on an exponential pace and so kind of almost by definition then like any election that potentially steers that exponential trajectory in a certain way is going to have like an outsized effect relative to the previous election that's going to be almost true just by the nature of the processes that are unfolding and so the next election will be the most important election then the next after that will be the most important action like there'll just be this constant sense that like every decision will have this exponential divergent effect right so like that's just the

nature of the ride we're on right i don't think we're going to get to this point where it's like oh this was the most important election but then the next one is going to be like just a chill like oh normal thing where it just kind of like flip the coin it's like no they're all going to be just my default assumption they're all going to be like the sense of the stakes being bigger than they ever were because that's just the nature of the technological curve the geopolitical curve so like this the psychosocial curve we're on is like human beings plugged into these these uh digital systems of emotional manipulation and uh yeah so i don't know that was a bit of a rambling nonsense answer to to dodge that question of like whose camp am i in um no i don't i wasn't

yeah i don't think that was a dodge so i don't think there is a clear answer um i i think i much prefer even though i'm highly skeptical and can see myself getting my hopes up and getting duped in the future even so like i think the other path they're they're not painting uh an optimistic future like any policy there really hasn't been any clear policy put forth and it seems i mean just what we've seen in terms of their posturing towards our industry here in bitcoin like that alone yeah i think that's reducing it to a single issue vote it's like yeah it's not ambiguous there i agree with you right it's pretty clear on the you know just digital asset front that um that one side is much more positively disposed than the other side um but if i'm being like truly kind of

like real politic about it right like um i don't know like there's a sense of which you know this This is a bit more like a hot take, but it's like clearly like the like don't don't like don't don't don't sort of mid curve it. Right. Right. It's like you can imagine it's like, oh, actually, you know, Bitcoin would be better if it was tested under a much more hostile administration for their four years. Prove that can survive. Right. And then it is basically stateless money for the world. And it's just, you know, it just gets forged in the fire of another hostile administration. And then, boom, it's like, you know, invulnerable. Right. versus, okay, take the YOLO play with Trump where he's like, yeah, I'm going to buy it at scale. I'm going to put it on the national balance sheet. I'm going to like appoint a bunch of

pro-Bitcoin people to senior positions in my administration. We're going to trigger this geopolitical arms race with Saudi Arabia and China and the Emirates. And we're just going to like YOLO into Bitcoin. Like that seems almost too good to be true, right? From like a, as like a pure narrow Bitcoin perspective. Like, I don't, I don't know if it's, if it's going to work out quite as cleanly as that um and i can i'm always i'm like fundamentally like a risk analyst in the sense like like what could go wrong right with that scenario not to say that it you know net what of the net expected value could be positive relative to the alternative but like doesn't mean there aren't like corner cases to be worried about like one corner case is that like you know

like for example trump i don't think is like ideologically like born and bred a bitcoiner I think he's like, he's a mercurial politician who is just looking for votes. And he's like, these guys seem to like me. They're giving me money, you know, I'll align with them. And you know, he'll appoint positive kind of pro-Bitcoin people, right? And so eventually policy is personnel. So that would be maybe more structurally embedded. But I can imagine like corner scenarios where like the YOLO strategy is like almost too

successful in the sense that it creates like, like you can imagine, for example, just take the strategic bitcoin reserve idea right like buying 200,000 bitcoin or keeping the existing 200,000 bitcoin that we already have you know from from various seizures and just putting on the national balance sheet you know more like a signaling thing wouldn't really do much right buys a million bitcoin probably very significant for the price but would it like lead to like a financial um run on the dollar probably not but if the u.s government came out and said we're gonna buy several million bitcoin like as soon as practically possible just the effect i I mean, I don't think that's a realistic thing to do, you know, but it's like it's it's it's on the policy option set.

If they were to do that, you know, rational people would be like, well, the U.S. government is effectively telling me I shouldn't own any treasury securities. They're buying millions of Bitcoin. I'm going to buy millions of Bitcoin and sell all my treasury securities. And if that were to happen, this would be the federal government basically precipitating a run on its own debt market. and if you kind of do that you know in a in a in a rapid fashion like there could be all sorts of consequences to the banking system to the mortgage market you know there could be like a whole bunch of things that just start breaking and then in that scenario i can imagine you know the adults in the room going to trump be like you know this bitcoin thing that you just sort of you know forced us into is now like causing this financial crisis you gotta like you gotta you gotta do the

180 right and he goes oh i'm not being blamed for this these bitcoin bros they had their chance to make money on the on the on the run-up rug pull right and then you know undoes everything maybe even sells what he just bought and you know the full thing just comes like crashing down and that was like your one shot right and then never again will another president ever kind of go that direction right and so that's where i kind of worry about is like there's those corner cases of like if you're gonna you know go in this direction it's like a deliberative calibrated well thought through set of set of policy moves that you know wouldn't necessarily be like the just you know go go all in all at once um yeah but that's that's because i'm falling over like a

risk averse pragmatist there's probably other people like oh you're just like you know this is why you know this is why you're not in your private jet pines right because you You don't know how to like take the positive EV bet, you know, even if it blows up in your face, like the net EV is, you know, you conquer the world, right? So, but that's just my take. This rip was also brought to you by good friends at Zapparite. If you're a Bitcoiner and run a business or an independent contractor, you should be accepting Bitcoin as payment. If not you, then who? If we believe that fiat is systemically fragile and is a risk, the rails that that currency runs on our risk as well. You need to begin accepting Bitcoin as soon as possible.

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you by our good friends at salt of the earth you got to be hydrating freaks and while you're hydrating got to be getting your electrolytes this is the best electrolytes mix that i've ever come into contact with uh pink himalayan salt with calcium magnesium potassium sodium no sugar it tastes incredible my favorite is the orange and the pink lemonade go to drinksote.com that's drinksote.com use the code tftc when you make your purchase and you'll get 15 off i'm telling you get on it freaks you're gonna love this stuff and yeah you definitely would want this measured response like rfk was arguably more he he was pushing the yellow like we're gonna get four million bitcoin as quickly as possible but yeah no i think it would have to be a much more measured approach

simple things like all right capital gains tax is gone you can spend bitcoin and use it as a savings account uh we're gonna let the banks hold bitcoin and yeah we'll put some bitcoin in the treasury as well um but not set off the arm arms race with other geopolitical players that so you can accumulate four million bitcoin first yeah i mean the bitcoin politics institute where um um you know uh national security fellow actually now going to be supporting us sort of their head of strategy as they sort of scale up some of their operations congrats yeah yeah david zell grant mccarty these guys have you know turned that sort of yolo idea into like a legit think take now we have like 20 plus fellows uh yeah gonna be uh 2025 is gonna think it'd be a big

year for bpi um really you know scaling up a lot of the activities um but we just put out a white paper by uh he's actually an economist at in the intelligence community uh named matthew ferranti and then the title of the paper is the case for bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset um And it's like, you know, it's a decent report and it goes down kind of like the checklist of different features of Bitcoin that, you know, allow it to serve this role as a global reserve asset for central banks, for example. And it's kind of crazy to have like a guy who's a PhD from Harvard. His advisor, I think, was Ken Rogoff, who was like, you know, the NERP guy. Yeah. And so he comes out of the full institutional framework, right, piped into the intelligence community, you know, and he's just, yeah, makes perfect sense to have Bitcoin alongside gold as part of your sovereign reserve portfolio. So I think people haven't quite understood how much things have shifted in certain circles on this question, where there's some people who are still think that it's like an absurd idea.

And there's other people that are just like, yeah, it's perfectly sensible. And these people will, like, come out of that pipeline. Harvard, Rogoff, intelligence community, PhD, like, they're there. And I think this is the trajectory. This is the part where we're in this weird zone of uncertainty or, you know, where some people's Overton window has moved pretty wide. Others is still very narrow. um and i think that's like creating a lot of uh interesting dynamics inside dc where a lot of the traditional tropes about how people approach bitcoin were kind of just embedded as

like oh like you sneer at it you make fun of it it's not a serious thing and then you all of a sudden have people that are very serious people be like oh this is a serious thing and that kind of like you know for that like managerial technocrat that like prides themselves on like having a domain of expertise and control that they know the left and right corners of their field and their domains of responsibility and that you know they also have control over what comes in and out of that policy space right it affronts their um it offends or affronts them in a way psychologically to have something like bitcoin kind of come from this cypherpunk anarcho-capitalist internet bitcoin bro world and now like intrude on their stayed, well-managed, well-curated sort of policy garden.

It's like, you know, the kids across the, uh, across the road have come and, you know, sort of trample in your, in your, in your gardenias. Uh, and you know, the, the people pruning, pruning the hedges are, you know, looking up, um, an alarm. Uh, that's like where we are out right that's why you get these reactions from the ecb and you know the the the sort of regional banks of the federal reserve is like they're just offended right um but i also think it comes out of the the um it was it was the minneapolis fed or was it the uh minneapolis fed yeah yeah minneapolis fed won it was interesting because it was like both of those papers were actually like extremely bullish yeah right it's like i think they're citing you it's like it's kind of shockingly

like more bullish than i would be of like oh 10 million a coin right it was like okay like i that's not my personal target but like go for it ecb um and then the minneapolis fed which is like you know at a certain point they're like oh like if there actually is this relief valve for people to essentially escape financial oppression in the treasury market then this will be a problem as the government runs up against sort of fiscal constraints like we need to essentially corral available pools of capital into prefer into instruments that we can sort of leverage to impose financial repression right and that is the game here and i think um it's it's funny like those people though aren't thinking geopolitically or politically really

right they think in terms of how do we regulate domestic pools of capital to financially repress i think the way it's likely going to happen is we're going to as all empires do like brides and circuses for the people you know slave and misery for everybody else right like and that's the benefit slash you know moral maybe um uh you know perversion of being a citizen of an empire is that you know usually you don't get to feel the pain or at least some of your citizens usually feel the pain but usually at least you know the upper middle classes get protected because those are the ones that have political influence just the nature of these systems. And so ironically, like, I think the way this will happen, this would be more clear

under a Trump administration, TBD, how a Harris administration would manage this. I think it'd be a little bit more, I think they would struggle to find this balance between like aggressively making our allies and partners feel the pain versus like making our domestic banks and institutional pools of capital feel the pain. That's basically the game is like, who's going to feel this pain, right? We've got all this debt overhang. We've got all these implicit obligations to our elders, to our social safety nets, to rearm our societies, to re-green our societies, massive new investment in domestic manufacturing and infrastructure for all sorts of different reasons, geopolitical and climate and otherwise. Who's going to pay for that, right? Someone's

got to pick right we can't just let quote unquote the free market you know allocate credit uh you know credit um and you know if you're sitting in a policy uh or if you're sitting in a you know the top of one of these asset managers that are increasingly the source of most credit allocation or a central bank um or a large bank and you're like and you're told by the you know the powers that be you know the next marginal sort next marginal dollar of credit isn't going to go to you know fanciful fintechs or you know next whatever self-driving delivery app it's going to be semiconductors it's going to be chip fabs it's going to be ai you know sort of smr sort of uh facilities that's that's who's going to get preferred uh credit um and

the question is okay well domestically i don't think uh like under trump administration i think what they would likely do is repress our allies and partners, essentially make them finance the strategic investments as well as defray some of the costs of empire, essentially. Make them pay, right? Make the periphery pay. Create essentially a tech and tariff wall around the world and essentially tell our allies and partners

and other sort of folks straddling the fence, if you want to be behind that tech and tariff wall, Meaning we don't impose 100%, 200% tariff on you, and we don't block you from getting access to our advanced AI inference, infrastructure, et cetera, as well as maybe other technologies that could be rolling out soon, as well as our defense umbrella, our nuclear umbrella, et cetera. If you want to be under that umbrella, that sort of tech tariff nuclear umbrella, then you've got to essentially pay for the ticket to get in. And the ticket to get in is probably going to be like bicentury bonds, right? term out your debt to help us term out our debt from bills to 100 years and that's like a high stakes play uh you know i could see i could see working i could see blowing it up because it assumes you kind of have the geopolitical leverage and technical competence diplomatic confidence to

sort of force those hard choices on the europeans on the saudis and the maratis on the singaporeans on the japanese on the south koreans on the australians etc who are all facing their own issues and basically force them to eat that pain um and that might come at a geopolitical consequence in the sense that it might force that line to move further back towards us than than otherwise would right because i think the best case scenario is like if you think about like the map of the world of like where this line is going to be drawn, ideally it would be drawn like where the existing, you know, boundaries of American power are, right?

And like would never retreat, right? First island chain, Taiwan, Middle East, you know, Eastern Europe. And so the idea is if you can basically put these tech tariff geopolitical gates around that whole sphere, that sort of dollar sphere, then you get like a new lease on life, right? Because you can actually get to do another kind of injection of capital and resources, right? Maybe even force them to swap their gold, force them to swap their short-term treasury bonds.

You get to essentially absorb more capital at the core, term out your national debt, then use that to finance these strategic investments, and reinforce essentially your top-of-the-pie hierarchy in this global system. That would be like everything going well. Threading the needle. That would be like threading the needle. i think there's a narrow path you could do to to execute that um and i think there's certain people that have that on the on the drawing board but the adversary gets a vote and it assumes there are no like other fragilities or crises that could come in the way of that and it also doesn't assume that like you know that assumes that you can do the master plan across this big geopolitical chess

board and do all those hard trade-offs as if you look at like how we do diplomacy and our geoeconomic policy formation it's it's highly parochial and highly driven by like factional influence in different parts of say the state department or the intelligence community where like the people that sort of work the japan issue versus the taiwanese issue versus the you know the israel issue you know they're not necessarily are thinking in terms of american grand geoeconomic strategy. They're usually thinking in terms of how can I get, you know, a plum job after I do this year or two policy stint. And some of them are actually compromised, you know, foreign agents themselves. You know, there's a lot of incentive to implant,

you know, agents of influence in these systems because of how much power they have. And you can look at, you know, scenarios where that has occurred. So I think a lot of these people drawing up these like master grand strategy plans to like okay this is how we this is the one weird trick like save american global uh hegemony sort of if you're like okay well the detail it's like the the details are left for the you know the reader to work out it's like if only they follow this 10-step plan you know we're good when you actually look at the institutions and the bureaucracies and the people that would have to execute that and i include both any future harris or Trump administration, I haven't yet seen,

it could be proven wrong, like people that would fill those slots and be also have the, be able to then wield those instruments of bureaucratic power to then execute this grand strategy, right? It's like the hope is that we, and that what's motivating this, and this is also why I kind of had this concern,

is that, you know, the folks kind of pushing this direction and they're actually both in the sort of Trump camp and in the Harris camp, although they have a different take on it. is like China is the pacing threat. China is an industrial powerhouse. They're climbing technological value chains. They have an aggressive military modernization, ambitions under Xi to take some strategic moves, and they're really worked. The whole apparatus of American power is terrified. And so it's manifesting in different responses.

But the response on both the right and the left in many ways is that we need to emulate China in our preferred way in order to beat China. So on the left is like, we need to emulate their sense of central, like their design of like central planning and sort of credit, credit allocation by technical mandarins that know better how to, how to allocate capital in society. And we need to have, you know, essentially social censorship to make sure that like, we don't get, you know, this unity of, of cohesive force undermined as we're facing a relatively unified adversary so we need to like suppress dissent you know align finance and political capital to then you know reinforce you know american power and then along the way project

our sort of liberal vision of human rights you know uh around the world and the right is a little bit more like hard hard real politic about what we want to unleash the private sector to use the private sector as arms of this geopolitical competition uh you know geopolitical competition where essentially the private sector essentially gets to enrich themselves on this sort of great power conflict, like the Andurils of the world, the Palantirs of the world, like SpaceX of the world, like, hey, guys, we're the ones that are going to be the key to defense of Taiwan. We're going to be the ones that are the key to strategic leadership and technology and AI and space and drones, et cetera. So, you know, we need to essentially get those big contracts. We need

to get that preferred credit, you know, allocation. You need to give us subsidies for our AI data centers. You know, that's basically a different version of, you know, in the China system is like these strategic favorite industries close to the state system get preferred access to capital. So I look around, I'm like, there's not that much of a different, you know, view. It's just like, who's going to pick, like, which winners and which losers? But we've kind of all accepted this idea that we need to essentially adopt more like china style uh system of centralized control and it's just a matter of where you're drawing the lines between you know say like the anointed private sector versus like the preferred you know you sort of um sort of government uh sort of

technocrat mandarins um it's like the people in private say oh elon and peter teal and palmer lucky you know and the vc class that funds them they know better how to fight great power competition. But they don't say, oh, leave us alone, government. They say, no, give us billions of dollars in contracts. Give us cheap credit. That's not like the traditional small government conservative. That's just like, oh, actually, I want the government to support me. And I don't want to have to take orders from what I view as this corrupt, indulgent DC class. They may be right but it just happens to also be quite self-serving as an argument um so anyways that was that's my like rant on this whole thing i'm not sure where i was going with that but there

you go no but you mentioned you questioned whether either administration uh could place the right people in places of power to thread the needle that you described do you have a roster of people in your mind who would um it's tough man i mean i would say there's a characteristic type um and you know there's lots of people i think could be good but um i think it's a type of person that you don't see too much but when you see it you kind of recognize it and that you know actually i'm sort of stealing this from a uh global forecaster named uh david marin smart guy super eloquent i don't necessarily agree with all of his theses he sort of reminds me of um what's his name uh who's the geopolitical guy that always like says things with like 100 certainty uh everyone

was oh god i'm blanking on his name um people people in the comments will certainly know who i'm talking about uh i'm just like having a brain fart um he also like famously hates bitcoin uh kyle bass no no no he's like the he's a pure like uh geopolitical consultant um blanking on his name oh it's peter zahan peter zahan yeah god says zahan yes so he's like i would say he's a he's a he's a more measured i'd say intelligent version of a sort of zahan but he has the same sort of like very definitive conclusions but anyways that's an aside to say david maron has a good diagnosis though like different psychological types and this alignment to kind of our political order or disorder, as the case may be,

between, say, lateral thinkers and linear thinkers, and that this sort of managerial, technocratic system that we've built in most modern societies has really favored a type of linear thinker, right? Someone who understands these are the rules, this is how you execute, these are managing systems requires writing down rules to manage the systems, right? So you're really good at, you know, executing a plan, defining a plan. It's like strategic planning. It's all this sort of linear process of laying out and managing complicated sort of bureaucratic systems.

And those people tend to thrive in stable environments. Like almost like sort of hunter-gatherer versus agricultural, right, sort of systems. Like if you're a farmer, you know, it's really you're rewarded being a linear thinker, right? Because it's okay, this is when I plant, this is when I harvest, this is how I, you know, do minor adaptation to any changes, but it's basically a predictable sequence. And you just got to be have like a really refined, repeatable process. And when things are stable, that sort of mindset is really good. Right? Whereas the lateral thinkers more like hunter gatherers, they're like, I have to constantly bring in a multivariate complicated set of trade offs in a really high, uncertain environment. and I've got to be inherently much more flexible and adaptable and creative and energetic and proactive. I've got to constantly explore new territory to find new food or new opportunities or identify, you know, potential tail risks. So any system, you know, is always like, you know, providing either incentives or disincentives favoring one mental type or the other type.

I think our system is, I think, overly incentivized a certain type, a certain linear type, right i think most of the people that you look at when you when you're sort of okay this person is just a brain dead technocrat they're just a linear thinker right uh and so like lateral thinkers right tend to be a little bit more like higher risk right traditional entrepreneurs right folks that don't necessarily follow a certain cultural mode um and they're inherently more risky right this is this is why these are trade-offs right in human sort of institutions is like lateral thinkers are good at managing existing institutions and following existing rules and reinforcing the current rules. Linear thinkers are. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Linear thinkers. And sort of

reinforcing the stability that everyone wants, right? Everyone wants stable systems, stable societies, stable economies. No one wants to constantly have to wake up and deal with something new, right? They got other stuff to deal with. Like the job of the government, people managing systems like so that like the background infrastructure and systems of my life don't radically change from day to day. It's just like, make it work. Don't break anything. Not looking for you to radically innovate, but be just minimally competent and effective at your job. And that's fine. We need those people. I'm not saying there's one inherently better or worse type. It's very context dependent. But I think it's clear that we've over-indexed on one type.

And so if I'm like, the type of person we need making these decisions has to be much more of that lateral thinker you go back to say world war ii and maybe that's like the classic trap is like you know chamberlain versus churchill right uh it's like someone who's like grew up in a relatively stable peacetime environment understands the rules of diplomacy certain embedded expectations and is just completely taken by surprise when events go in a way that was outside of their framework right and whereas churchill is much more like much more adaptive much more perceiving lateral changes in the environment and then making high-risk gambits along that fashion. I think we need to move in that direction, more lateral thinkers.

Sometimes the systems force you in that way. When you start fighting wars, field commanders that are linear thinkers tend to get killed or get rapidly demoted or kicked out of of command positions. Because you're facing an environment where there's immense, almost immediate consequences for bad decision-making. And the problem is a lot of these environments, there isn't really that feedback loop between poor policy, right? It could be like a multi-year lag between that NSC staffer who writes that executive

order or contributes to that memo or that policy, and then it creates a big F-up. But it doesn't really become apparent, the strategic costs, until two, three years later, if not later. And by that point, the person's gone. They're in a senior position at Council on Formal Relations. They're on the think tank circuit. They're writing their book. You know, they've checked their status stamp, right, and their career. And they have no, there's no skin in the game, basically, right? So I think it's people, but it's also this like institutional expectation that like, you go into government to like do a particular job. The expectation is that you're not just going to be a permanent bureaucrat. It's like your job,

right now it's like people think and i come from some of this world is like the highest marker of status is like get to become director of national security council staff and then write that memo and then that becomes like your your brag sheet when you go to the private sector and you want to go to senior consultancy or some strategic advisory or private equity job or on a think tank and it's fine there's a whole people it's like you know is it it's a established kind of career trajectory i get it like this is our system but it has this perverse i'd say externality which is that there is not much of a skin in the game between people making policy and the effects of that policy other than just like you know you go to a debate and somebody goes well that was a

bad idea and you go yeah but i still got a good salary and a good job and i'll probably never actually like face any professional reputation like look around like nobody in positions of politics, whether it's Iraq war or anything, it's like, no one's ever faced any consequences for that. Um, so anyways, that was again, another rambling answer, but like, I want to look for like lateral thinkers and folks that are not trying to go into government to like, stay in that sort of think tank world. They're like, I'm going to come in. I'm going to do this particular job. I got like a year, two years. If I feel like I cannot make the impact that I want to make, I'm out. I'm going back. I'm doing something completely different. Right. I think you need

to have that norm established and then attract people in there that are motivated to execute on a plan, but are willing to basically adapt and break down any norms that might be implicitly established inside these institutions. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but that's like, I think the only shot you got. And I think it's also only, it's a real advantage that our system, you know, in theory has over, say, the Chinese system. Like a Chinese system, their advantage is scale and mass and the fact that they've executed this long range plan they're like they're like really good linear thinkers right in a certain way but they're also wedded to this really competent bureaucratic structure right so it's like you had linear

thinkers and actual competence because they're mostly technocrats engineers and not like lawyers um so they actually had to like figure out how to like build things that work and then they sort of played us for fools uh over many decades a lot of spaces sell off our manufacturing industrial base for parts um in order to enrich wall street and they're like yeah thank you sir we'll keep doing that as long as you're willing to hand that over um and but the one you know inherent limitation of the chinese system is because they all report up to this one guy and they're all really terrified of you know stepping out of line it does not incentivize lateral thinkers really right and so if there is an advantage we have to play is that traditionally

the american system you know usually generates more lateral thinkers you know that kind of the inherent but you know we try to find this right balance because you can just have total chaos and just like you know the the like the i'd say the um the extreme limit of a linear thinker is like a brain dead technocrat right but the extreme limit of a lateral thinker is like a pure sociopath like con artist right who's really good at talking and exploiting and moving around like an ecosystem and you have to look at a lot of silicon valley and you're like well there's a lot of those types too a lot of people that just spin castles in this castles in the air convince a bunch of rich people to give them millions of dollars absolute fraud you know vaporware and that but there's

actually little consequences for those people even in this environment right people just oh i was in the arena i was trying things my fraudulent company right just happened to fail but you know it wasn't my fault it was just i was trying a hard thing i was shooting for the moon right i was i was going after this crazy cool thing and you know i at least put my skin in the game and i was trying it you know whereas maybe you were just enriching yourself and your family members and, um, you know, uh, exploiting, uh, you know, essentially a bunch of Rube, uh, family offices. Um, so yeah, I think there's problems on both ends of the spectrum. You got Adam Nauman, uh, Theranos woman, Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman Freed, they fit that archetype, but, uh, I think

I wanted to consolidate, uh, what you just said there. I think what you're trying to say is like, we need to make civil servants, servants again, uh, if we're going to fix these problems with these lateral finger thinkers lateral thinkers that get in with the express purpose and goal of fixing a particular problem over a certain period of time and then fuck off and don't try to get into the revolving door of the bureaucracy and just do their job as a civil servant and get out yeah i think you're right like i don't think that's going to change regardless of administration but i'd be i think it'd be helpful on the margin to set that expectation um and yeah i don't know i i'm not like who am i right to don't like don't sell yourself short

don't sell yourself short sir yeah yeah but i'd be like uh you know i live in dc where i live outside dc i live in mclean so i look around and i'm like you know my my personal like real estate value is basically contingent on the dc blob never never shrinking so i'm like oh yeah you know come in or cuddles be like well i realize like it's like it's kind of a fascinating fact that like the dc area sort of suburban zip codes are like some of the wealthiest in the country and i'm like what does dc do like what do we produce right like do we have a big financial capital do we have a bunch of like tech companies like why is this like the richest zip code in the country almost because the treasury is there um i mean

that's the problem right is that like this these are this is just an embedded feature of our system i don't think like an election is going to solve this and i think it's also like setting your expectations like don't hero worship right don't be like oh this is the one you know messiah figure who will go in there and clean all the rot out right i think people that believe that are the people that get played by those people right because they go oh no i'm actually going to go to washington and i'm going to be the one that cleans it up and then meanwhile they're just stuffing their pockets with money right that's like that's just like you know in history that's like this that's like the tried and true you know method um so like that's i i would need to be

proven otherwise i would love to be proven wrong but like that's that's usually how things go yeah and if you're not thinking forward i mean just you should probably be looking at what is actually happening actually the timing of this conversation is pretty um pretty incredible considering what we talked about earlier this summer that conversation was highly focused on this arms race around ai and energy and we talked a lot about computer chips and how the u.s is in a systemically weak position globally in terms of the production of these chips but we had a headline out of arizona yesterday with tsmc in the factory that they're building there and it was a shocker to me and i'm curious to get your opinion on this or if you have any uh information closer to the

source based off that headline but the headline was essentially that the tsmc foundry in arizona is producing uh chips at the quality that are being produced in taiwan and maybe even producing them faster than some of the foundries in taiwan um what is your read there have you read into this at all yeah i mean this is this is like the one benefit of the u.s system which is right now we can still bet like spend ungodly sums of money and we can import highly skilled people from the rest of the world so that's basically what we did we're like we need to have that chinese chip fab what do we need to do we just spend basically tens of billions of dollars very quickly and we need to import the thousands of actual specialized engineers from taiwan to do it there you go

right so when push comes to shove we can do that sort of thing um and of course when you're building a new facility from scratch there's all sorts of like i'm sure lessons learned that the taiwanese have like you know man to really optimize this process it would be really great if this building was a little bit closer over here and maybe this this you know facility would be a little bit more reconfigure better if it was configured here because they've been building on top of their own you know uh fab so i'm trying to expand out but you know you're always kind of you know building on top of yourself and sort of constrained a bit by what you what you were doing before So I'm not that surprised they're able to get some efficiencies and gains that they

didn't have, you know, in their home facilities because you're just starting from scratch. You're like all those good ideas, those little marginal improvements, now you can implement them essentially on a blank sheet, right? And then the fact that the federal government is basically willing to like write a blank check and subsidize this to the tune of maybe $10 billion a year, like that's like an aircraft carrier, right? Like we're going to build, you know, I mean, you know, I was still in this line from Dimitri Alperovitch, who's like, you know, we're the average, um, you know, new, uh, aircracker is

like $13 billion, essentially. That's the deal we're going to have to spend to jet, to build, you know, these advanced chip fabs. And the question is like, which is a strategic better use of money, right? Hard to say, but like you could argue, maybe the, maybe the $10 billion on a chip fab is worth it more, uh, for a strategic, um, sort of autonomy. Now I don't think it's going to important thing is like efficiency gain in terms of yield is not the same thing as like scale right so like that fab is not going to replace our dependence on taiwan by any means right like you know there's no way this is just one fab is going to like replace the our supply chain you know requirements it's really useful for uh you know the strategic parts of our

demand right for say f-35 for certain other military applications where you want like assured uh supply and so that helps de-risk on the margin some of the like acute military dependencies we have on on taiwan but in terms of the basic you know logic that still makes taiwan a strategic hinge point is not going away um because the whole economy requires tsmc chips and the whole economy is not going to get tsmc chips from arizona i'll tell you that um so this is like it's a good marginal improvement but it's like it costs a lot of money and we can throw it we can bring all those engineers here like that's our that's our ace in the hole is that we can import thousands of taiwanese engineers and we can write basically a blank check um so you know it's a it's

a w to a certain extent yeah i mean i was shocked because i i thought the speed at which i mean that was announced what last year maybe two years ago and they're saying like 2026 was when it would be i mean they had the plans for it um but yeah i think they you know at a certain point you cut enough red tape and it's not like a hard thing to do in terms of basic building like elon built the mega cluster in i think it was in memphis and it turned into the largest single um ai training cluster to date built and i think from like getting the final permits to like get the site start moving things onto the site to when it was like turned on and starting training was like less than a month i want to say it was like 20 something days yeah it was crazy insane

right like a crazy absolute feat of engineering of just like just moving millions of pounds of like high you know very expensive equipment into place you know very sensitive stuff now i think chip fab's even more sensitive um probably can't build obviously that fast but like when there's a those away um uh yeah so like you know it's good but i think people were over indexing on like oh yeah like taiwan's effed now i think people were vastly overestimating people were quote tweeting people were overestimating like that oh like this means that we can just let taiwan go right like oh yeah like there's no consequence to letting china take taiwan if we've got this arizona a facility that that would that would not be the correct um inference i would draw um i'm sure the

pentagon was happy because they're like the sooner we get essentially an assured supply of chips for some of our strategic platforms the better um but i'm not sure it changes the calculations inside redmond inside you know uh apple headquarters because that ain't gonna meet the demand for iphone 17 or you know the next gen gpus etc yeah i mean it was a pleasant surprise to see that headline yesterday we can build things as america yeah but it also was funny it was like it was like people like i don't know like you ray rob pat yourself on the back america did this when it was like america wrote the wrote the checks cut the red tape and then the taiwanese engineers did the thing it was like these guys are the ones like wasn't like a bunch of you know

american semiconductor engineers were like we're gonna build with our own brawn and brain you know this you know next gen fab in the desert is like a bunch of these like just just absolute chad taiwanese engineers that just work 20 hours a day that are like you're gonna pay me half a million dollars a year well fine i'll get you that thing right you know like i'll do it uh and i think was some like early stories about some cultural issues which would be expected because these guys were coming they're being like sorry you don't get your iphone break you don't get you know like we're working on the weekend here zoomer like you know so it's a good law for that culture to kind of penetrate and i think once it did it was like oh like this is how you have an effective

operation it's like there's there's no there's no fat right it is ruthless well that's that's part of the reason why i was surprised because i remember i think only like six maybe eight months ago you had the headlines of like the problems you're explaining they were like the dei guidelines set forth by osher whoever just did not compute with what needed to get done and i thought the the project was being set back materially from a timeline perspective um and so when the headline came out yesterday i was like holy shit i think american capitalism to a certain extent is still self-correcting right and stories like that help in terms of being like and no guys like nah this ain't we're not we're not tolerating this like we got a you

know we got a deadline like it's it's it's you're either in or you're out and we're we're crushing it here um that's a similar thing that like you know i i don't know elon's management style i don't know personally but like that's the culture he's established is like a bunch of engineers and the expectation is like you get it done as quickly as humanly possible and like failure is just you iterate immensely quickly um and you know you got to respect that sort of managerial competence uh it just is what it is you can dislike his politics you can dislike his personality but like you know those sorts of systems are highly effective the proof is in the pudding the proof is in the pudding it's like and it's like hey like instead of you know okay maybe we don't want to

elon is a flawed person like every other person is um but like at least let's not like there are lessons here to draw in other aspects of life like i want to know like who's the senior manager on that taiwanese construction team right like where's his profile like find that guy uh or her guy or her i don't know but like find that person interview them be like how'd you do this right like how can we apply that lesson lesson elsewhere and it's probably not going to come out of some mckinsey case study right like these people have you know uh yeah they're not the source of that sort of um maybe we need we need to get him on tftc freaks homework homework go find the guy bring him to me you get him on the show it is it is um so i love talking to you like help

help level me but i have been more optimistic recently than i have been in years and it's a of that headline spacex seems like narrative wise and public um sentiment wise things are definitely shifting where people are recognizing that um things aren't all well and we need to solve the problem and i think there is a problem in the first place that needs to be solved and it feels like momentum is beginning to point in the right direction yeah i mean that's also i think what differentiates in my view like the sort of inherent bitcoin versus gold ethos where like sort of you know i don't want to overly psychologize or piss off all the gold bugs but like the inherent ethos of a default of the i'd say the median gold bug is like it's an insurance

policy against the failure of every institution and you know that tends to make you much more like a prep remote of like things breaking things falling apart things just like going pear-shaped Whereas I think Bitcoiners, which, you know, the asset class is like fundamentally similar in its structural relationship to global economic and institutional risk or uncertainty. But like the ethos is much more like progressive and optimistic about the future. It's like this is a new thing that is in the process of growing and being adopted around the world. And it's it carries with it this inherent kind of like positive energy. And I think I think it's better to always like look and reinforce any social or technological trends that have that kind of dynamic, right, that have that kind of creative, future oriented, positive, you know, even optimistic mentality to it, because then you can actually get, you know, people motivated to build things that they otherwise wouldn't and contribute to a collective vision that otherwise wouldn't be realized. Um, so yeah, I think those are why like people are, people want to be inspired by big things

and big accomplishments, uh, and they don't just want to be, you know, feeling despair at their sense of, uh, powerlessness in the face of kind of faceless and decrepit institutions, or they'd much rather like build something and contribute to something that is a source of growth or rebirth or, um, you know, innovative energy. um so yeah i think i i align with that ethos certainly uh and so wherever that aligns with like you know these different initiatives i think it's it's it's like it's a natural coalition right i think that's what you're pointing at it's like people that kind of have this it's like it's vibe it's like a positive vibe it's a good vibe right like don't be don't be a don't be like don't be

a negative nancy and i was probably negative nancy the first part of this call because you didn't be realistic with like the situation but then like your your orientation to it is all about okay, how do I like build something or, you know, solve that problem? And yeah, I think, you know, Bitcoin is probably there before, right? EAC, right? Whatever it is now, that's like the Silicon Valley vibe on it. And, you know, I think there's some alignment there in some ways. But also, I think it's I try to go try to calibrate at the same time

because I also see these like sort of mimetic vibes take place and a bunch of fraud you know fraud just like bullshit artists kind of jump on the bandwagon and you know it just becomes like this another form of like social signaling it's like the crypto industry that's what yeah it's just like oh yeah i've got my like i'm a i'm doing deep tech you know blah blah blah and it's like no you're not you're just you're just a shit poster on twitter and you just post ai generated you know memes it's like go for it bro yeah there's a lot of this is like trying to people trying to align themselves with some uh fictional social community um and also you know i see this take place in like the like the

gundo valley right um which is this sort of off growth of the sort of deep tech eacc kind of subculture where a bunch of like 20 somethings tech bro oriented sort of social groups creating you know startups in el segundo valley and they're all focused on defense stuff ish right whether it's drones or um even like uh like cloud seeding i've seen one of these things and they have a certain like aesthetic right smoking cigarettes lifting weights yeah smoking cigarettes kind of mullets like you know uh like reflective uh sort of wraparound sunglasses you know bros on their camping kind of trip kind of vibe and i get it man everyone needs to bond over some shared you know in group kind of uh vibe but i just look at that and i'm like just go into your you know garage and

build the thing right like you don't need to tweet about it uh and it's like if you're tweeting about it it's probably because you're trying to impress some vc you know future vc you're trying to inflate you know that you align with this new source of money right basically at the end of day everyone's just trying to get rich and this is seen as like the next sort of play to sort of build a startup get some in-group hype about it get the word of mouth going to those you know relatively small handful of vcs that are sort of throwing money into this ecosystem and you can sort of catch that wave and even if you've got a bunch of bullshit vaporware that's fine that's never been any problem right in most so like i'm a bit cynical in some way at the same time i see

this positive energy i see it also creating this sort of um noise there's always noise right and i think people don't really want to call that out because it's seen as like oh you're deflated you're just you're crunching my vibe man right like but some of those people are just absolute you know frauds and shitheads yeah uh so no and they should be called out because the stakes as you said we're riding this exponential curve and the stakes are getting exponentially higher and we don't time for any more sbfs or adam nalman's or elizabeth holmes we got to get shit done and i mean it's fascinating if you remember the financial um i don't know if we talked about this last time. So cut me off if this will be redundant, but in the March, 2023 banking failures,

right. It turned out that Silicon Valley bank was one of the largest sources of venture finance to a whole swath of like deep tech defense oriented VCs that had made all these, you know, investments in all these different companies. And when they're going, you know, bankrupt that weekend, the defense department like freaked out. They were like, Holy crap. Right. Like all of these companies which were like you know which we had sort of sold our leadership on is like this is the next these are this is the new hot this is the new hotness all these drone stuff all this ai autonomous you know jibba jabba like it's going to come out of this new ecosystem that we're helping to seed and it was like what all those companies might go bankrupt you know next

week and they lost they lost their shit and they were like how do we they were like how do we bail these people out basically and they looked around and you know there's certain facilities credit facilities that the pentagon has one is like the office of strategic capital for example they've recently stood up and given it maybe a billion a little bit more than that maybe now and they're like okay can we just like use this capital to like bail out these companies and that that was a true case study to me is like this is where push comes to shove getting back to the other part of the part of the conversation like the the uh the the structure of allocation of credit and who gets bailed out. It's a different type of people that are going to get bailed out

now. And I think the same sort of moral hazard that the Bitcoiners learned and what kind of motivated Bitcoin is like the 2008 bailouts, et cetera. Oh, the big bankers, those get bailed out. Now in a geopolitical competition dynamic, it's probably the same types, but then other folks now that are like looking to position themselves to be strategically you know too big to fail right or too important to fail and so the game now is kind of the same game that was you know in the too big to fail era is like how do you get yourself in a position where you're too big to fail where you've got essentially this yellow socialism uh you know floor to your losses and uncapped gains and so a lot of the vc class they're not dumb right they're like how do i get essentially a put

uh how do we get like a you know like a defense department uh sort of call option right uh how do i like get that sort of moral hazard embedded into my business model um and that's to me is like you know it's just an inevitable feature when you get you know whether it's the treasury department or the fed or the defense department in the private sector is now their preferred investments and where there are strategic prerogatives, distort those private incentives, and then everyone else then has to then adapt, right? If you don't play that game, you're going to lose.

So then everyone has to play that game. And then eventually, the whole system of private, you know, capital allocation gets distorted. But to me, I don't see that being recognized as much because it's got this, like, mimetic vibe attached to it of American Renaissance. And, you know, like, we are... It's got a pretty facade.

Pretty beside. It's like, oh, Palmer Luckey isn't like Goldman Sachs. Palmer Luckey is Palmer Luckey. He's a cool guy. He's got a Hawaiian shirt on. He's wearing flip-flops. His incentives are his incentives. He's building cool stuff and he's certainly innovative. But is the defense department ever going to let Anduril not get preferred access to cheap credit? I guarantee you, that's a strong reinforcement support to his business relative to competitors and VCs would love to get, say, co-investment from, say, In-Q-Tel or other intelligence and defense-related sources of capital, which are not necessarily ROI-oriented. They're strategically oriented. And so it's a really good thing if you're a private investor

looking for a 1050x exit to have a co-investor in the capital stack that doesn't care about return. right they're happy to eat losses um they're happy to double down to keep a strategic potential you know tech investment alive um and i do worry actually that like we're generating a whole bunch of like vaporware shit right that looks cool they got really good marketing really good twitter vibes all the vcs and everyone is just going to be like has no incentive to like pop each other's balloon and because most of the tech is fundamentally not like a marketable you know app or whatever, where there's like, okay, when you launching, what's your daily active user number? What's your conversion rate? What's your, you know, growth plan to profit, et cetera,

et cetera. It's all just like, you know, I got this buddy in a senior acquisition role inside the Pentagon. Who's going to give me a hundred million dollar contract in two years. And then we're good. And you're like, okay. And then when, and then when we go to war with China, like we all just get endless buckets of money poured on us. Um, so that's the incentive right now that's in place and so i don't know again me just rambling and not talking shit from the cheap sheets i guess no it's funny too in the case of silicon valley bank it's extremely ironic considering the fact that the concentration risk is always top of mind for vcs and they were all concentrated the risk on that one bank and they all chase the same sort of hype stuff

um it's all vibes everyone just works on vibes now and sometimes it's rational to work on vibes i I mean, look at them. They're worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and I'm not. So, you know, good for them. No, I think it is important to call this out and be cognizant. It was like similar to the conversation we were having earlier with linear and lateral thinkers. You need a good mix of those type of thinkers.

And in this case, you need a good mix of actual innovation and products being brought to market and vibes that help communicate what is happening there and getting optimistic about it and if i was you know if i was like okay what's the highest roi you know to spend or what's the most effective thing we could be doing to improve our advantage over china i mean there's probably a few different ones you could pick but like the one that i see up close is just on the cyber side right like china China is in wide swaths of our critical infrastructure, and these are privately owned and operated networks for the most part.

And they have a strategic military doctrine of holding those systems at risk for the purposes of both interrupting our ability to mobilize forces in a crisis and or conflict, and to instill social panic. So that means targeting, supporting infrastructure, water, electrical ports around our military facilities in Guam, on the West Coast, and in sort of opportunistic targeting of other private critical infrastructure networks throughout the country. And I talked to a lot of these companies and critical infrastructure providers and the senior security leadership, and they recognize it's an issue.

But, you know, there is no, I would say, structural incentive for a lot of them to prioritize their scarce budgets to go after what is a very hard problem, trying to identify and kick out the chinese and do that almost on a continuous basis from the from these from their systems but like that is what will strategically deter us in a taiwan conflict and all the whiz bang stuff anderil has is going to be rendered moot if a political decision maker is basically facing an environment where you know domestically they have to respond to the urgency of you know civil unrest and uh mobilizing troops if you even can with interruptions to say the civil reserve air fleet or movements out of um out of our domestic uh ports and bases into theater

become become hampered um you're you might not even get to the point where our troops are mobilized into into the south china sea or into the taiwan it gets so bad domestically it's like all right just take taiwan please turn that's their explicit objective and senior government officials have gone public and said, we are not able to deter China from this behavior, and we have not been able to sufficiently motivate the private sector to take it seriously as a threat. So here we are in the situation where the U.S. government is admitting the strategic deterrence from this highly credible cyber threat to our critical infrastructure is not something that they, as U.S. government, can effectively protect those networks from. And then the people

that are responsible for securing those networks don't have the incentive or the capability to do it and so i'm like guys like that's the but that's not a sexy thing that doesn't get you you know you know the vibe in the american renaissance crew um because it's just kind of like it's tough right there's no easy thing you're talking to sysos you're talking to security teams you've got these legacy um networks to try to manage and ransomware and you know 17 year olds in belarus pwning them every other day. That's what their day-to-day is focused on. This future crisis event where China could just flip the switch, it's rational for them to a certain extent to push it off and make it somebody else's problem. But it leads to this collective action issue for

national security uh and there's some investments you know my company does some of this um uh in terms of cyber security and geopolitical you know risk management etc um but it's it's like an omnipresent issue and the scale of china's forces are extremely large and vastly outnumber um defenders uh in the west and so yeah i see all these people talking about china competition and countering china and building fancy drones and getting million dollar contracts and that's that's one strategy but it's like is that moving the strategic needle right um is china really worried about andrews wingman thing they're working they're working at higher layers it can be completely rendered moot as you said if the foundational layer

is i mean the way that it can be i don't think it's a checkmate everything is a matter of balance right um but they are our our system right now has this reinforcing incentive in many ways to like you know invest in show versus like real like verse like investing in the image of capability versus the actual yeah projection yeah right like real resilience real uh you know security is kind of not sexy it's not some fancy new thing it's doubling down on like known things that are just take competence consistency execution prioritization but you know it's not the new cool thing right uh i don't know if this could get you in trouble or that's a good way to start it start a question but did we have spicy do we have um like equivalent

equivalent capabilities with china's infrastructure is there is there a mexican standoff where it's like hey because i've never heard talked about have we have yeah we're not going to announce our offensive cyber capabilities which you can imagine are quite robust uh what's different is our operational military doctrine in terms of target selection and rules of engagement um and i think the precise contours of this are classified i think it's pretty clear to my understanding, that we wouldn't have as broad a set of targets for disruptive or destructive cyber attacks in a crisis or a conflict as China does for us. There is a bit of asymmetry, not in terms of capability per se, but in terms of like

What one's willing to do. Willingness to hit like an entire city in the middle of nowhere, right? Just to kind of mess with China. who knows like in the agencies of conflict those things could change or whatever but i think right now like cyber the norms of cyber warfare are still very much like in flux and not very well established and the structure of cyber deterrence is still a very unsettled kind of vague concept or kind of discourse because and this gets a little bit in the weeds of like uh rethinking cyber warfare is a book i have right over here which is just about this which is like how do

you actually think about cyber warfare as a thing and it's different than say nuclear war uh where there's you know certain elaborate uh analysis of kind of mutual issue or destruction game theoretic mechanisms of deterrence like counter force counter value targeting you know creates a strategic equilibrium where you know that i know that i could kill you and you know that i know that you could kill me back if I hit you. And so we all have an incentive not to kill each other. And so where cyber warfare, because it's one, it's hard to attribute with high confidence.

And so you nicely know immediately who did it, right? You might suspect, but is that suspicion sufficiently credible enough for policymakers to escalate along that path, right? And, you know, the attacker has every incentive to kind of obfuscate, maybe it was the North Koreans that wanted to make it look like it was the Chinese. And until you know, are you going to like retaliate, right?

And so these are the things where, and it's also like, what is a, we call like asymmetric escalation, like what's an equivalent thing that we would do, maybe not in the cyber domain, but in maybe the economic domain with sanctions or even in the military domain with like a kinetic strike somewhere, that would be like what we would consider like a proportional response to a cyber attack on American cities water supply, right? Like what's the equivalent there? Do we hit their water supply? But there's sort of human rights issues, Geneva Convention, law of war stuff. If you talk to lots of military and intelligence planners, you kind of realize that lawyers run the show now. You think, oh, it's the CIA in the back of the 60s. There are just coups everywhere. Ted Shackley is just killing people off of a memo. Nowadays, there's lawyers everywhere that have to vet and validate and approve everything that these agencies do.

So it's become actually an issue now. In fact, I think this could be a change depending on who comes in on the cyber side under Trump, where offensive cyber operations or cyber command, there's quite a restriction now in place. on, you know, what sorts of private networks can you, can you leverage? Like cyber attacks are, this is getting a little bit technical. It's like, it's not like a missile you're flying, right? You're usually going over and through, you know, sometimes allied networks, sometimes third-party systems, sometimes private, critical private sector networks to get to your target, you know, different command and control systems they have to set up. And you don't necessarily know exactly, it's hard to predict what like the quote blast radius is, right? You hit a missile,

you know you've modeled out right it's gonna this is basically the kill box this is like collateral damage you can model that you can predict it you can tell the decision maker you launch that missile this is the you know expected effect accepted collateral damage etc with cyber especially when you're hitting critical infrastructure you know there's all sorts of cascading things like oh we didn't mean to knock out the power to that hospital but that's what happened and then now that their generator which we thought would kick in didn't kick in and now you've got 20 babies on ventilators that die. That's now the consideration of if you're using these sorts of capabilities in a conflict, it's very fuzzy, very hard. And we're very litigious, bureaucratic systems. So China

doesn't actually have as many of those compunctions. And so that's a long-winded way of saying it would be very messy and this is not well-established terrain. And because of that very fact you know there isn't really a credible deterrence in place is basically the the upshot it's not like nuclear weapons where oh if they hit us they know we're going to hit them and it kind of leads to this strategic balance where we're probably safe right from nuclear war unless things really go wrong whereas with these sorts of cyber attacks on domestic critical infrastructure i wouldn't have as nearly as much confidence in that like deterrence framework um especially given the fact that china's kind of telegraphed this like this is in their doctrine and they're

making kind of making kind of a show in certain ways of being in these networks with the explicit purpose of taking them out um and kind of proving to our population you know in our political leadership that that they could that's kind of that's kind of the point yeah of it so anyways scary stuff very scary stuff we didn't even get the uaps and i know you're gonna run but uh well i'm good if you want to keep going for a bit all right you tell me when you want to i'm good i love bringing you on the last two times this is the second time first time brought you on i want to talk disclosure this time i wanted to do the whole episode on disclosure but you have such a breadth of knowledge and all these other things i just

uh inevitably rabbit holes jump down all these rabbit holes disclosure it's disclosure seems like your um your guilty pleasure outside of all this this work or does it fit into all this as well i don't know if i have a way to rationally embed it in any consistent way it just sort of happened um yeah i could reconstruct where i got to where i got but i don't think it was like a planned you know but somehow now i'm in a position i have met a number of people had a number of conversations that i've just been forced to reconcile my worldview in you know a variety of ways to yeah the fact that non-human intelligence is real that it has been interacting with humanity this interaction is ongoing and there's elements of what you would call our

defense and intelligence and um defense industrial system has been aware of that for a long time uh exactly how much they know exactly what they know i'm on i don't have a high confidence assessment of that but that core set of things this court that core set of propositions is at issue and that's sort of like the then like the lump in the throat right that's like that's the kidney stone that we're struggling to pass as as as a society as a political system and we're in the middle of that kidney stone passing uh if that's maybe an uncomfortable metaphor i guess it should be um and yeah so that's where we are uh disclosure capital d whatever this whole thing is kind of a semantic debate is obscuring what i think is really the critical issue which is

what's happening inside congress what's happening um behind the scenes a number of these um briefings and uh submissions to members of congress committees in congress that attest to and provide evidence to validate that those sorts of that that set of core propositions i just stated which is really just me quoting a senior army um colonel carl now who i believe has first-hand knowledge of these programs. It was helping to push what has been termed the UAP Disclosure Act in Congress. So we'll see. I mean, the next thing to look forward to in terms of the political side of this, right now it looks like there are going to be hearings in Congress on November 13th. Actually, it'll be hosted under the House Cybersecurity Information Technology

subcommittee of all things uh crossover uh from our conversation um are you going to go to this hearing uh i don't know i have no i'm not testifying i'll tell you that i'm not i'm not a witness um we'll see if you know my calendar is clear i can actually go physically um but i'll probably be watching it for sure um and i know that the objective for that conference for that committee hearing is to have new information be testified to by people with significant experience. Again, we're in the kind of throes of when, as you get closer to an event like that, you can imagine, you know, there's lots of people would rather that not happen. And so I think there's all sorts of maneuvers being executed to try to stop that or call

certain witnesses etc um again it's a matter of power politics to see who shows up and what they say at this point but it's clear that we now have this factional battle playing out right like that's that's obvious you can sort of see it uh between the folks who would rather this information or at least a large portion of information not come out in a certain way and the people who would and this is the this is the bargaining process that's that's playing out um Lou Elizondo is an important individual to pay attention to. His book, Imminent, is a very important read, and he's going to be starting a national tour very soon talking about this. And yeah, this is going to be a thing we're just going to have to adjust to over the next... I always hate to give timelines, but it's only going to become more and more salient in our policy and public and social discourse. everything is consumed now by the election just it's impossible for anything to break through

right so election we'll see what happens in the election we'll see what happens with the new congress and then next year we'll roll into you know normal politics still craziness but um this will be climbing uh into discourse there's lots of questions everyone has right like what what is what has already been what has already been laid bare and what do you expect will be laid bare i know you said you don't have supreme knowledge of everything but i know that you've been talking to a lot of people and have some ideas about and what are the ramifications for for a man with a wife and two young children yeah there's a lot there i'd say there's there's two basic classes of ways information is coming out one is like in a what you call like official processes meaning

official, say either FOIA documents that get released, official declassified records that go into the National Archive, which is now required by law. So those are starting to flow into a repository hosted at the National Archives, Library of Congress. It's on the internet. You can start looking at it now. And new documents are starting to be declassified by the cognizant agencies that hold these records are required by law to upload these documents. Now, I don't expect those documents to be like the motherlode, you know, disclosure pieces of evidence, but it's sort of the trickle that is now happening. And then the logical extrapolation or expansion of that sort of formal official process would be subject to the passage of something like the UAP

Disclosure Act, which was introduced by Senator Schumer, Senator Rounds last year, co-sponsored by Gillibrand, Rubio, Heinrich Young, and this was reintroduced earlier this year, did not actually get into the National Defense Authorization Act like it did last year. There are people who believe, and it's all behind closed doors politics, that there could be an opportunity to reintroduce that language into the bill and conference committee will see. There's all sorts of technical maneuvers and leadership prerogatives that are at play when you get to that part of the sort of legislative sausage making. But, you know, in that scenario

where something like the UAP Disclosure Act is passed, that sets up a much more formal and official process for an independent review board that has powers of subpoena and unilateral declassification, as well as the capacity to take eminent domain possession of, quote, non-human technologies, technologies of unknown origin associated with non-human intelligence and biological materials that's what the law has as written states and you know you can interpret that plain language is what it's referring to um so that would be this official process of what in some circles is called controlled disclosure the idea being that this review board that now has this you know independent executive level authority to look across the entire agency

and private private sector industrial you know base you know aerospace companies and you know essentially pull everything to them, then they, you know, they'd have nine member panel, there'd be positions of national stature to do a review and make recommendations to the president on which portions of those records and materials should be disclosed to the American people in what manner. So that literally calls for a controlled disclosure campaign plan. So that would be like the controlled official disclosure process established by law, nominated you know senior people to this uh seven-year term at this review board then they go through this process information would come out to the american public subject to presidential

override that is the that is the process that is that has been developed and pushed for by certain faction of what we call the pro-disclosure people inside the defense and intelligence communities and their um allies on the hill uh so that is one track there's a lot of you know grassroots momentum and try to get that passed and some congress will see there's another track which is the unofficial uncontrolled disclosure of information right and this is honestly much harder to like point like to like uh like a mechanism or like a process because it's inherently uncontrolled it's inherently subject to individuals deciding to come forward with information in what way in what manner in what time and so unlike a you know piece of law that says this has to be

published in 180 days to the congressional you know to the national archives this would be some guy or some girl some senior so some woman i should say um uh that has held a position of senior responsibility uh inside the government coming out and saying what they know and there are certain individuals that have already done that they just haven't been in positions of of significant enough national um responsibility that has like you know triggered what i would call like a belief cascade right where it's like the the median person on social media goes oh that person said that huh that's weird is this a psyop or is he really or are here there or she really telling us something um but this sort of people have moved on that trajectory um i mean

one of the most recent individual i point people to is a guy named harold malmgren who you know everyone knows henry kissinger he i would argue was as influential and had as much power as henry kissinger did uh for much of the 20th century but nobody knows his name and that's for a reason uh harold malmgren well i won't give his full bio you can look at his wikipedia page um he you know was one of his uh sort of mcnamara whiz kids in the 50s went into um the kennedy administration uh was basically the guy that was our kid he was like 26 or whatever when he when he was sent to the Pentagon war room during the missile crisis to hold Curtis LeMay back from nuking the Soviets, which he was able to do by successfully kind of stalling Curtis LeMay

and his generals who just were itching to drop something. So that's where you got to start in sort of national security apparatus. And then he has come out and he's getting up in years and he's survived a bout of cancer and he's moved back into DC to be at the front row for what's coming. And he's stated now on Twitter publicly, and I've had private conversations with him where he's said similar things um uh you know he said explicitly like non-human intelligence is real and we have recovered vehicles craft uh as a result and then we're working to figure out how they work um that's what he said and uh he's described a few anecdotes from his career uh one uh was when he was posted up in los alamos i think it was all los alamos um it was at least in

albuquerque where he was sent to help do like the design cost build for our first anti-ballistic missile system in 1963 which at the time was actually nuclear based because we didn't have any other way to block you know hitting nuclear missiles coming in we were basically launching nukes at them to blow them up in space uh and so he was sent there to basically help figure out what that system should do and how how to build it and so he had all the clearances for our nuclear weapons department department of energy clearances as well as you know our top secret war plans etc So he was like among the most cleared people. And he had meetings out there with a guy named Lawrence Geis, who's the director of the Western Division of the Atomic Energy Commission, who had responsibility over all those labs, Sandia, Los Alamos, etc. And Lawrence Geis, who actually turned out to be the grandfather by marriage slash adoption of Jeff Bezos, of all people, he told Herod Malmgren that they were working on reverse engineering UFO objects that they had retrieved.

um told him that 1963 and then sometime later in a separate context he had a private briefing with the essentially number two guy at the ci uh named richard bissell who was kind of like the guy that got stuff done he stood up area 51 um created kind of all of our you know all the ci is like special aerospace projects uh you know from then on and was managing a lot of the covert action stuff from the 60s on. He had a private briefing with Richard Bissell. Richard Bissell told him of the same thing, that they were working on reverse engineering, what Richard Bissell called other world technologies. So this is what Harold Malgren has said now in public. I know he knows a lot more than that, but that's what he said. And he's just an example

of an individual that has held senior position. And then he went on to serve multiple presidents. He was a chief economic advisor, international trade negotiations. This guy was like a polymath, served multiple presidents, but he was like a man behind the scenes, was never trying to get public attention or build power for himself like Kissinger was. He was kind of the shadow Kissinger who had the back channels to the Soviets at the most senior levels and then back channels to a lot of other countries from the 60s really through the 70s.

And then became like an international consultant to a bunch of Japanese conglomerates in the 80s, et cetera, and GM and all these, you know, big powerhouse companies. He's a super well-connected guy, you know, one of the more well-respected sort of geopolitical trade, economics, national security folks. And he's just come out and just said it, heart in the paint, this is real. We've been figuring this stuff out. Most people don't know who Harold Malmgren is, don't know his career, don't know what he's done or what he's seen or how respected he is in different corridors of power.

So they haven't really, you know, assumed that into their, you know, update, you know, that Bayesian update in this thing, which I agree for everyone has to start very, very low and then only climbs in a gradual fashion, you know, as you appraise what amounts to right now is like circumstantial testimony, right. From people that may be in position to know, right. So this is the, this is the trajectory we're on where people that are in those closed circles of trust that by happenstance, you happen to develop, you develop, I'd say a higher credence in this in this in this set of somewhat disconcerting information um then the average person just because it hasn't penetrated kind of the social media mainstream media bubble yet

because we haven't had like that person that household name type person come out and say something similar so that's kind of where we are in waiting for if the official process doesn't play out the way that it could play out if certain things happen in congress then you're in this unofficial process which is by definition kind of less controlled less predictable um and you know you could see information come out in a much more just disjunctive fashion where individuals just decide i'm coming up at the end of my life or i believe this is the right moment or for whatever reason i'm just gonna come out and say what i have to say um and so that could happen um i've heard there's individuals like this that are prepared to come forward

until they do though it's kind of like a personal decision at their discretion you know some people say it's more confident it's more confident i don't i have no idea right but it's like you know i'll see when i see it but i but as someone who looks around different corners and tries to predict the what-ifs i'm at the point now where i have to like make those factor that into my like decision tree of like possible scenarios like what if someone like this said this type of thing what might that trigger how would our society react to it um and yeah and then you know more on the you know personal side of like you know the the real tough nugget here is like what the heck is actually going on here right and that's that's another two-hour

conversation 20-hour conversation you know but there is no i think easy answer that's i think there's a reason why this has been kept secret it's not just because we want to get some secret tech and develop an asymmetric advantage over China. It's probably a core reason. But I think there's probably other things motivating this as well, maybe even good reasons in theory to keep it from the mass public until you have a plan to communicate it. And I look at certain things that Luis Elizondo has said that are, you know, not assuring in that respect. And he said this a few times now and every time people you know uncomfortably gulp and it's unclear how to react to it because it's so vague but you know he titled his book imminent

for one that's the name of his book uh he's been asked about like some future event or some uh you know, uh, scenario that would present, uh, like a destabilizing effect on society in some way. What that is, he has not given any color, but you can look at a few examples of his comments where he's referring to, you know, or he's answering questions about those rumors of a future event. Uh, and he doesn't dismiss it by any means. He just says, I can't, i'm not approved to talk about that yet um and he's denied that for example just yesterday he was asked this question uh well this is thursday he was asked this question uh about like is the event this you know this asteroid that might do a flyby of earth in 2027 and he goes no no it has

nothing to do with that and he goes beyond that i can't talk about it i was like so there's there actually is an it i was like so there's an it that you can't talk about that refers to some future event that potentially helped you know inform why you called your book imminent it's like bro like like that's i don't know like i understand he has reasons he has left and right bounds about what he can or cannot say but i know for the people that pay attention to the ufo stuff which i you know some are very professional and some are minor but some are not necessarily psychologically even keeled that's like kerosene on the fire man that's like holy shit like what are you talking about you're talking about like an invasion you're talking about like what are you talking about

bro what does your god say are we like in the middle of a three bodies like story where there's an alien race coming to take over our planet because theirs has been destroyed is it simply tech that allow us to explore the stars and we need to figure out how we handle that i is it onanaki are they living among us i mean again these you're you're hitting on all the canonical kind of tropes and i think because we've been in an information vacuum people have constructed elaborate scenarios and stories what amount to almost ufo folklore at this point and individuals with firsthand experience that they say reinforces a certain number of those folklore i am like fundamentally agnostic with respect to all of that at this point i can

construct all sorts of different scenarios in my mind but i have like very thin like anchors of hard evidence and even you know even among the you know high confidence conversations i've had like nothing has really given me any better better way to steer um other than you know i have more first principles assessment which is like basically just combining the two things that i think are more likely true which is one like this interaction for lack of a better term has not is not new in the sense it's not just because i didn't just start you know 1940s when we started dating it's been persistent throughout human history maybe even throughout history of life on earth and therefore would you know i don't think that it's like just we just happen to live at like the one

you know fraction of that entire history that something different is going to happen right it could be right but like you'd have to then make a separate argument that's because of our technological development it's because of reaching some takeoff with ai or space exploration or i mean that's been one of the uh the bitcoin theories and i drew bansal those jokes is like once you discover like that's when you when you discover something like bitcoin you can prove that you can create this somewhat incorruptible monetary system you were then invited to join the intergalactic community in the cosmos i mean it's a great story i mean and in fact you know there are people with immense professional bona fides like um uh a gentleman named uh

haim ashed who was the father of the israeli space force you know like among the most decorated most senior he was a physicist built their you know most secret military space projects you know was like top of the pile he gave him he wrote a book actually in hebrew and it was i don't think actually even a full translation has been made but like partial transcript of some interviews he's given he's just outright says yeah like we've had interaction with representatives of the like i don't know what the translation are but like galactic federation bonkers stuff bonkers stuff but he said it this is a guy who's just like you know he's top of the pile in the israeli space technology scientific uh hierarchy and he's just like i'm just gonna put out there but it was so

bonkers nobody had any reference point and they really didn't explain it anymore it's just like yeah yeah like this is it this is what's had but it's what's been happening like peace and i was like okay like let's just put that over there let's not you know put any particular weight on it but he said it um so yeah i mean you have to you have when you're once you start going down this tree you have to like you have to contemplate a variety of sci-fi kind of scenarios and it's it's difficult to get a good grasp on what's what's really going on um but i also think i mean this is i guess it goes really far deep but like i think to really understand what might be happening with any advanced intelligence um it by assumption means that whatever we're interacting

with has knowledge of the nature of reality that we don't have and therefore has also exploited that knowledge into you know what we would consider magical technology but is really just some way of exploiting the degrees of freedom that the universe allows intelligence to exploit and that could radically um violate you know certain paradigms that we've just grown accustomed to informed by our current scientific understanding of reality but that shouldn't be a surprise because that's what science has done to us over the last few hundred years right every great major revolution starting with like copernicus has like radically revised our sense of like where we are reality what's possible in reality what are the rules that govern reality and therefore like what

technology can we build that's like that's all human civilization has really been doing for the last few hundred years is like bootstrapping ourselves up from fundamental physics knowledge to technology to like expanding our civilization and just like doing cool shit so we have a certain embedded sense of assumptions about um local realism and uh sort of locality of physical and causal interactions the smoothness of you know a three plus one dimensional manifold that we are embedded in and this sort of spookiness of quantum mechanics is there but you know we don't really need to care about in our everyday life and but i think by assumption like any advanced intelligence is playing in the spookiness they're playing in that that zone of reality that we don't

really have a good handle on now and so any attempt to kind of model what's happening right Fundamentally isn't just going to be like a probe from another star, I think. It's going to be a little bit weird. It might be a probe from a star, but the science that it's leveraging to get here is going to take advantage of knowledge that to us is sort of incomprehensible or would require us really stretching our current conceptual frameworks of fundamental physics. And that's why I think these go hand in hand of like really investing in expanding the boundaries of our current fundamental physics knowledge is going to be sort of essential to

understand this NHI thing. It isn't just going to come from, I think, daddy government being like, we figured it all out. We've just been keeping it a secret. And here you go. Here's like an easy cheat sheet for the American public to read. It's like, yep, this is the new thing. You just got to fold it in there. Because, you know, trying to explain quantum mechanics to the average person is not an easy thing to do, right? But you don't really have to because nobody needs to know about quantum mechanics right unless you're engineering you know semiconductors whatever and then you're fine you just build the stuff um but this might be a thing that like requires us trying to communicate aspects of reality that are more like in the language of

fundamental physics and really stretching our our vocabularies and our mental models and even our religious or spiritual metaphysical frameworks and that's a tough task and honestly from my perspective that's not really the function of government to do right like the government shouldn't be the one and i wouldn't trust the government to give people like that capital t truth whatever it is that they're putting down on that briefing it's like actually no here's the nature of reality we learned it from the alien god you know it's like hey buddy i need i need to do this again i'm gonna get a second opinion i think uh well that drives into the other question like how do we not how do we know we're not getting duped by project blue beam or something

like that right because that's been a theory for a while is that this is where this narrative is going to be used to control humans and it's really not real but you can uh create a narrative and get enough people of stature to to beat the drum on the narrative to make people believe it's real but it's just used as a control mechanism i mean this is certainly you have to factor in as part of all this is like there's certainly propaganda and um manipulation happening regardless right It's like, you know, either the government or some subsets of the government are trying to manipulate some people into believing aliens are real when they're not. Or there's parts of the government that are trying to manipulate people into believing they're not real when they are. And there might even be groups doing both at the same time. Right.

And so I actually believe there probably are groups doing both at the same time. Right. And in fact, there's probably some there's evidence for that. Right. where the air force office special investigations has actually created uh used essentially ufo as a cover story for truly secret real you know like air sports projects right the famous case in ufo circles is richard doughty and this scientist that was monitoring an air force base thought he saw like weird stuff and he was like you know getting attention for it and the air force basically deluded this guy into thinking that he was seeing was actually ufos and then he was getting all he was being fed information from an air force intelligence officer that was complete nonsense

fake information he ended up killing himself so not a great outcome um but that's a case study where like the air force and elements of the government have constructive used ufos as a psychological manipulation to to cover perfectly you know conventional secret programs um so there's like evidence of that right i think though that's not if you actually look into what's been happening right like i'm actually tracking the details that is not a sufficient explanation by any means to what is really going on here um between what's happening in congress and various other witnesses and whistleblowers and and people associated with these legacy programs um so this is where in counterintelligence as james jesus engleton called it like it's a hall of

it's a wilderness of mirrors right like it's it's very difficult to ascertain like ground truth what's a counterintelligence reflection off a real program that is you know like i can imagine like you know just to paint a scenario here there are special access programs the government has these there's normal conventional special access programs there's unacknowledged special access programs that we don't acknowledge or admit they exist and then there's waived unacknowledged special access programs which we also don't even brief um in on paper to the senior leadership in congress there's they get like a verbal briefing only on those things so imagining the scenario where you have that super secret waves unacknowledged special access program any any such

program has a counterintelligence uh team assigned to it whose job it is is to like create very plausible deceptions to cover the mission and even existence of that program from adversaries or anybody else and so their job is to constantly monitor for any references to that program or anyone that might come in contact with it and feed them nonsense information about it right are making it look, make it, you know, even potentially use UFOs because you're like, hey, yeah, this is actually the UFO program. And then anybody who talks about it looks like a loon, right? Right? It throws everyone off the scent. And you can imagine a scenario where like that's happening. And then that conventional, say, wave-dungeon knowledge special access program is actually

being used to cover secret R&D on like conventional programs, you know, for hypersonic, whatever, space, whatever. We do a bunch of secret stuff, right? But then you can imagine a scenario where like that conventional way of doing a knowledge special access program has a subcompartment that most of the other people in that, you know, in that WUSAP don't know about that is actually doing reverse engineering on, you know, technologies of unknown origin, right. And the non-human intelligence stuff, right. So it's like you can have this like layered onion of secrecy and

counterintelligence and deception that from the outside, honestly, is like epistemically impenetrable because any like any ping you try to send, it's like, it's like sending radar into like, into the earth, right? You're getting different reflections off of the different layers and you're trying to interpret from like the back scatter, right? Like what's, what's the layer made of what's behind it. What's the next layer. And you're fundamentally in a position of just fraught uncertainty. And so I, it's a fair position to be like, until something comes out,

I'm just going to assume it's a PSYOP. I mean, it's like, for me, it's like more like, well, okay. But that doesn't really adjudicate where you stand. because there's probably psyops everywhere you you turn right it's like the question is though at the end of the day right like what is this where where's the where's the beef right what does it matter for me in my life at a certain point it's words it's statements it's pictures it's images yada yada yada like when does you know the stock market crash right when does when do people lose their minds right or or not and people just go on with their day

uh and i think that will be like inherently though like a non-linear and like more like a zero to one thing and i don't think anyone's going to have like the heads up on that uh i think that's what they're struggling with now is that i think what's motivating some of this is that there's a belief by some individuals that there is going to be a zero to one moment and that they want to do there as much as they can to sort of foam the runway to mitigate the impact of that zero to one um and they want to do that without necessarily precipitating a zero to one before right that's sufficiently before the runway is sufficiently foamed so there's this inherent tension of like if we just do nothing that's like worst case scenario if we try to do something we could

you know make it worse or bring it forward before we have you know enough preparation so this kind of catch-22 um i recognize that's not ideal uh and for the average person in civil society it's probably rational to like not psychologically over stress about it until you have to because unless you can really do much then you're just kind of like uh agonizing over something that's like really bizarre and hard to get your head around um but yeah i think at least where i am at this point is like i try to rationally incorporate the relatively high confidence information into a worldview that i think i can systematically you know adapt myself to without you know being totally destabilized and then preparing for different tail scenarios

that could go many different directions and like you know life is inherently risky and uncertain and you know human civilization is not you know fated to any destiny uh so we just have to make good decisions uh and be contemplative and um open-minded on our position in the world and i think you know that's yeah and maybe the more zen mentality is probably a healthy one is just uh you know we should probably take a harder look at ourselves and our history and yeah like the fraught nature of our existence as a species and be like maybe we should clean up our act We might get some external forcing function in that respect, but maybe better if it's self-generated. Yeah, and so there's lots there, right?

But for me, I'm probably like a physics and philosophy person. Everyone right now is obsessed with technology, right? Everyone is worshiping at the altar of AI and space rockets. It's cool stuff. It's inspiring stuff. But it's fundamentally like leveraging science, physics. It's like 100 years old. Like Turing, you know, von Neumann architectures for computing, you know, basic, you know, conventional rocketry and general relativistic corrections and circuitry using quantum mechanics.

It's like 100 years old stuff. And we're just now like, you know, fully extracting the technological, you know, juice out of that science fruit. So we should get some new science fruit to squeeze. And I think when we do that, I think the possibility space of human civilization will make what we're currently being awed by, which it is awe-inspiring, the SpaceX rockets being captured, right? That will look like child's play, right? And so I think we should just know that that's an option for us if we really pursued it without too much bias or taboo. uh and so yeah the optimistic scenario is whatever the zero to one event is if it is even such an event will allow us to open up that possibility space for fundamental scientific um kind of

paradigm shifts uh that would be quite transformative for our species um and that's been the trajectory we're on we're like we're just riding this we're riding this rocket ship up baby there's no getting off this thing um so it's an exciting time to be alive uh even if it's you know somewhat uh you know not as it's not like 1950s you know sit in your white picket fence and go to your nine-to-five job and raise your two kids and you know cash the paycheck every two weeks it's going to be a different world i think um so yeah just strap in you know be healthily skeptical but also So I think, I mean, my whole thing is trying to get people to be not so surprised. I mean, that's it, right?

I'm not trying to convince anybody of anything. It's just more like, you know, in the off chance that something like this does come into full view, it isn't going to be like, well, what the hell? If you were like, yeah, that Pines guy said some shit about it. Like, I heard that before. It's like, I got like, I got a few wheels turning already. and then you can start spinning those a bit faster and then seek out information with a little bit you know with your mindset maybe somewhat already seasoned like as the ice this i thought the

skillet has already been seasoned a bit uh and you know you're ready to go uh with whatever comes next so i don't know you get quite philosophical when you get down this territory here yeah it's and uh yeah i mean it comes out of these conversations i've had which are you know they start off very kind of like nuts and bolts like what exactly is going on the ins and outs of politics and congress and witnesses and whistleblowers and documentaries and yada yada yada and that's kind of like the that's like the the things you can sort of throw on the on the board is like hard and you can start tying the yarn against it and then you like step back and you're like okay well what the hell are you talking about man when you say like like because

it's just a it's like taking your certain normal view on reality and being like this and that's that's a hard it's like that's a lot of friction in that in that move um yeah and also like i i don't know i'm also hesitant to like because of this like human psychology we we are really vulnerable to like religious cults of all forms and i you know there's certain subsets of the ufo community and whatever that are like very much have like a like a eschatological cult vibe and you know it's like the end of the world you know the god savior alien yada yada yada it's like a similar i mean bitcoin has some of this is like the you know eschatological hyper bitcoinization will like i'm the i'm the out group from this you know weird niche community and i have a weird

obsession and we have our own canonical reference points for our for our uh for our belief system and it envisages this sort of grand revelation slash transformation of the global order and and people that sort of snickered and and looked down and sneered uh you know will will i'll be able to say i told you so and the true believers shall be rewarded in the after in the aftermath right in the post event whatever transformation right we're all gonna get girlfriends right uh uh so i mean there's a that's a typical habit of human belief um i try to resist uh and it's a you know it's a it's like you always want there to be like this this this event um and so i've been really resistant to this to that whole thing and i've just been but i forced to have to pay

attention to what someone like louis andrew says and other folks like that who allude some more explicitly than others um in public and in private to something like that and i have to just like i can't ignore it right um but now that we're in this sort of liminal zone where it's been sort of hinted at enough by enough figures with that sort of professional authority it's kind of we're in the most dangerous zone for the formation of those sorts of like essentially like ufo cults right and they and then these folks become like the intelligence prophets intelligence you know community prophets that are bringing down the good word of the future revelation right like this we've seen this pattern before in human belief formation and people will

go oh you know give us the give us the tablets from the mountaintop joseph smith right like this is this is what we do um and uh yeah and you can even see mormonism i don't want to offend any mormons but like mormonism is essentially like a ufo cult uh if you read the scripture it's not to say it's wrong or you know like an illegitimate belief system it just it shares a lot of the sort morphological characteristics of that kind of theology um and uh yeah um yeah and mormonism is fascinating if you want a whole nother rant about mormonism um and uh just sort of like it's it's it's structural embeddedness and it probably has some overlap to the ufo story but just in like the narrow intelligence community vibe um like a huge a huge number like basically a pipeline

of fbi and especially cia officers have basically come out of mormon communities right come out of mormon colleges and it's because like one they're very clean right they're they don't do drugs they don't drink they don't even have caffeine they travel the world they have you know they speak um they come from like usually hierarchical uh institutional system where like they're essentially deferred to their leaders right so it's you know really good to have those folks inside those intelligence bureaucracies they take instructions you know yes sir um uh and and also they're aligned with like a very wealthy you know such like the the they have a two trillion dollar wealth fund they're enormously wealthy and they such a control utah like utah was originally

established to be like an independent sovereign nation and they own most of florida too i'm pretty sure it's it's insane how much money they got and you can like an american history with just through the lens of like mormon influence it's kind of it's kind of insane um like like howard hughes you know the famous you know aerospace engineer um you know basically built up vegas and basically was the arm of the cia for some of the more you know expensive covert operations like the Glomar Explorer, building the different special planes to facilitate all the drug trafficking kind of operations, and also facilitating the hit squads that Nixon wanted to set up when he was the vice president. Howard Hughes was the go-between to organized crime.

But Howard Hughes was surrounded by essentially Mormon handlers. So Frank Gay, his brother, was a last name was also gay they were like church elders um and towards the end of howard hughes's life he became kind of delusional schizophrenic um kind of a recluse you know that they sort of took over his operations including uh including sumo corporation which was like the conglomerate that was stood up that was basically just doing a bunch of covert action shenanigans and secret technology research for the cia um and these guys were running it essentially and i had a cryptic tweet nobody really understood where um if you actually look at elon musk his his like consigliere number two who runs his family office runs his like private

security uh is actually like sits on leadership positions of spacex and tesla i believe um and boring company uh i forget his name uh blank blank blank blank out now but he's also a church elder in the morbid church um and it's like huh this is like a bit of a symmetry between this kind of eccentric tech billionaire with like connections to you know security state advanced technology you know happens to have you know a very senior mormon guy kind of running his running his shop running his money uh it's like this seems like a pattern um and last point on that the symbol of the uh was called deseret was going to be the name of the sort of mormon state that was going to be stood up they had their own they actually had their own constitutional

convention it was adapted become the state constitution of utah um the symbol was the sort of like the beehive and uh i don't know if you know but like 15 years ago it's now been public report, like the NSA built their largest data center to date, um, out in Utah. And, uh, the nickname slash code name is now public for that data center was called the bumble hive. Um, and they use the same imagery, uh, that, that, you know, same sort of symbol of the sort of, uh, bees nest. Uh, it's quite interesting, you know, or just, you know, these sorts of connection points.

Anyways, that was a bit of a, a rambling, uh, aside, but I want to throw that in there. everybody's focused on the jews it may be the mormons man it's uh i mean i have nothing against any anyone of any denomination i find it fascinating from just you know you know we think we live in a highly secularized society of just purely kind of um instrumental bureaucratic systems right like the cia and the defense department it was just like okay like federal agencies they got budgets they got policy program documents etc but they're also like they're human institutions and human institutions fundamentally like like there's always this tension in any society between you know rationalization of human institutions right like formalized procedures

bureaucratic control you know everything is explicit written down formalized inspectable accountable that's kind of the you know the francis fukuyama kind of project of like institutional creation and then there's like the you know always intention of like personalization of those institutions where it's you know pat it's sort of the the mantles of leadership are passed down right from like patron to supporter or from you know father to son even right and they become captured by by other systems of power uh that they're where their processes of essentially production or reproduction of who's running those institutions essentially gets kind of absorbed by a different, a different institution,

right? A much more personalized institution or institution that maybe has a different internal mandate. And that's, that's we in the West, cause we're relatively new, you know, state system is kind of maybe the sort of Roosevelt created like the modern state. And then we won World War II with these institutions and we sort of grew them and they had sort of a lot of technocratic man you know managerial ethos embedded in them in the first wave of people that took them over in the 50s and through the 70s but then you know i can imagine like there were other systems of power that grew up and were pretty had like 100

200 years to develop inside america you know mormon church is one of them like a lot of like the say banking families and sort of you know attached sort of you know sort of law firms like brown brothers harriman right uh those sorts of guys that were you know since you created the cia um you know they they think of themselves as like you know they have loyalty to their class or even like their more narrow social or even the religious you know institution and they trace that back right and so when these other institutions get created that have a nominal you know more like impersonal structure and meant to have these processes that are you know meant to insulate them from any other stakeholders' interests. We've seen cases where they can be captured,

they can be absorbed, they can be manipulated from the inside. I mean, yeah, I mean, the Brown Brothers Harriman is a classy example where like, you know, you just look at all the people that were running that organization and then going back to like the Robert Barron, you know, families that control basically most of the industries in the post-civil war era and um you know it was like you know prescott bush like these and they just created they like wrote a memo to truman to create the cia and they're like that's our thing and we're gonna then have you know a bunch of these nazis come in to help us stand up our operations and so there's parts of our history that we just don't like to talk about that are not as like ray raw america um but

important sort of sociological things to like understand and i think they actually have a connection to this to this uap thing in a way that makes it kind of uncomfortable to talk about because when we talk about well then who actually has access to this information who has access to these these materials was it you told me or is it like people it's like raytheon and boeing that are essentially well yeah i mean a lot of the i think it's probably been farmed out to you know multiple companies including you know the big ones right lockheed raytheon um scic aerospace corporation um biology materials as well to maybe other entities um but this is my point right like those when we think about format to those companies what are

we what are we really saying like does the ceo know is it part of their like internal org chart is there like a svp of alien research no of course not right so i think we need to like think about it as um you know we don't have a name for what is the organization that is likely you know the true custodian this information because this organization probably doesn't have a corporate org chart it's a more bureaucratic org chart there's like maybe pockets that align or isomorphic to or using sort of the dual structure of those formal institutional um struck you know organizational hierarchies but there's an implicit understanding of you know their second hat that they wear yeah you don't codify any of the hierarchy and it's you know

it's like the second hat you wear is to perform these other functions and that's more of like a lateral set of relationships that form between different individuals in different existing institutions and so it's a it's much more of like a amorphous i think blob right i don't think it's like give me the org chart of the quote legacy program i think there probably are real legit secret, secret programs that are formally established inside the US government to study this stuff. But I think that's actually more a matter of like, I don't know, on like the intelligence surveillance reconnaissance side, right? Like we're, we're, we're picking this stuff up on our different sensor networks. We would rather not those sensor networks, those sense,

those, those detections of anomalous vehicles, you know, to sort of make it out into the broader military intelligence enterprise. We'd rather not, you know, any Joe Schmo of the TSSCI that has access to these different sensor platforms to be able to see the detections of these anomalous vehicles. So we would want to put in a little filter and carve that out to a special subset where only certain people can look at it. And so I think there's probably those sorts of programs that are formalized inside the military and intelligence system.

But then there are these other programs we're really talking about, which is, you know, did they delaminate from official government oversight at some point? and now we're in this position of solving kind of two key problems and i think i talked this in other forums is like the you know the folks in congress have really two major issues to grapple with right most we talked about the disclosure issue and of course that's like the you know sixty four thousand dollar question but there's also this more mundane question of like accountability right of the main allegation by grush and other folks is that you know these programs have been sort of either illegally using, say, independent research and development

authorities and funding essentially corporate white-collar fraud. They have also violated certain statutes that require reporting to Congress of special access programs. They've also maybe misapplied Department of Energy or Atomic Energy Act secrecy provisions to you know, inappropriately keep these informations classified. And so there's, you know, that there's a disclosure question. There's this accountability question. Like how can the Congress and even the executive branch, national leadership, put in place or reestablish oversight and control and accountability over those programs?

And that is almost, I think, a precondition for disclosure itself, at least in the minds of those people. If you're a senior senator, if you're a president, vice president, you would rather you get reestablished at the top of this set of activities where you now have the briefings, you have all the information, you've got control of it before you go then to the public and you say what you want to say about that. The worst possible thing is for it to come out that everything we were just talking about is true. And by the way, the president and the vice president and the relevant committees in Congress are just as in the dark as you are. That would be really destabilizing and like not what someone in a position of national power ever wants to have

happen. That like fundamentally makes them look sort of impotent, right? Makes them look like they're not actually in charge of what they should be in charge of. And it's like, well, why are you what are you doing bro or or ma'am uh and i think that's that's the conundrum is like as they've learned more about these programs and the nature of their their activities and the sensitivity and the potential you know uh legal problems that have to be addressed they first want to try to solve that accountability problem that's like what aero is sort of about but then it kind of got subverted from the inside so that's now the second move for this UAP Disclosure Act is to try to, these are like congressional gambits to try to

put in place accountability, which for their perspective needs to happen before you can have disclosure. But there might be a different timeline that, that leads to quote disclosure in a less controlled fashion that happens regardless of whether they've established accountability. And that's, that's my diagnosis of where we are is kind of this, these interweaving lines uh because yeah i mean the uap disclosure act senator schumer senator rounds these folks signed you know they said they said they said this in public too like credible evidence and testimony indicates that relevant uap records have been withhold from disclosure and that legislative and executive branch accountability has otherwise been lacking as of this date and

you know there's like only two elected they said elected officials and legislative and executive branches lack essentially accountability of these programs there's only two elected officials in the government the president the vice president that was the senate stating in the bill that they believe as a result of credible evidence and testimony that these programs exist and they have not been properly briefed to the president and the vice president i mean you can park the existential stuff about nhi whatever that's just like a constitutional almost crisis there that they're basically saying they're saying that like there's a bunch of this crazy stuff that's going on and like the president vice president have not been told about it i'm like you just can't have

that in a democracy like we're going all this we're going we're agonizing over who we're going to elect and it's like okay well who actually runs it like nobody's who's actually like you're telling me that like it doesn't really matter who's in the show because apparently they're not told about the most important thing that that they would need to be told about um so like that's you know it's kind of you push the uap stuff and it becomes kind of this kind of sneery uncomfortable topic but it's like guys like we're talking about a democracy and the inherent legitimacy of our political system there's no better like prism to look at it than look at it through this and be like okay well doesn't seem for no other reason like even if

you don't think that there's a there there that there actually is aliens or whatever you should believe you should be concerned that senior senators including the majority leader of the senate is saying that he thinks there's some shenanigans going on that the president the vice president and the national leadership in congress is not properly briefed into like that should be non-partisan uncontroversial non-taboo like five alarm fire crisis but because it's like you got this uap thing attached to it it's like you know it's it's it's it's too sort of uh too much of a stigma yeah um so anyways we don't have to go too far down this rabbit hole but um what are the chances that disclosure comes from outside the u.s like you mentioned the israeli

um space program leader who nonchalantly admitted to stuff like there are people within the u.s worried about some other country was coming out and yellowing it Yes. I think that is a serious concern. In fact, you can infer that from the language from the Senate themselves in one of the bills they passed. In fact, it was even, I forget the exact piece of legislation, but it was basically the quote was, in order to mitigate the possibility of foreign technology surprise the federal government must broaden awareness of historical exotic technology antecedents previously provided by the federal government for research and development purposes i have that line memorized i was gonna say that's impressive i mean it's not like i memorized the whole bill but i've memorized that line because that line is among the most important like sentences that i've read in any piece of

congressional texts. And people just sort of gloss over. But if you really linger on each phrase of it, it basically tells you the story here, right? At least it tells you what these people writing the legislation think is the story, which is in order to mitigate the possibility of foreign technology surprise. And it's not just the foreign disclosure of this information, meaning foreign strategic surprise, foreign propaganda surprise, meaning China coming out, for example, and saying to the U.S. or to the world, the U.S. has been illegally keeping this a secret, husbanding this material for their own imperial military gain, withholding technology from the rest of the planet, and that we, in order to ensure a common shared future for humankind, we have

engaged in positive diplomatic relations with the NHI that are here. And we are going to create a program of technology development and transfer to the rest of the world. and you know everyone be like well that's ridiculous that's insane prove it and they go here you go look what we got and they go okay i guess china's china runs the show now i mean then the u.s would be totally flat-footed right so it's not even that that they're saying they're saying foreign technology surprise so what you're saying is that china may have actually engineered reverse engineered or had inspired technological platforms and capabilities as a result of their

own research and development programs associated with historical technology exotic antecedents. And that is the problem. That's why we need to broaden awareness of those historical programs, those historical technology antecedents that we previously provided by the federal government for research and development purposes. So we provided these exotic technology antecedents to somebody. It leaves out that sort of prepositional clause. It's like, who do we provide it to? You know, it's clearly like private aerospace or a private consortium associated with these programs. And we need to broaden awareness of those historical activities in order to mitigate the possibility of China announcing or demonstrating technological surprise. Like that, like there's so much embedded in that one sentence.

It's kind of like blows your mind, right? But they put it there. And I've heard similar things reinforced that emphasize all different parts of that sentence. And that is, I think, a lot of what's driving some of the national security anxiety is that you can easily imagine a scenario where, say, we did cook up some special stuff as a result of having access to these things. You know, that would give us a strategic advantage. And I, you know, being an American patriot, would not want to see those national advantages compromised in any way, right? That ensures our economic security or national security, you know, as long as they're prudently wielded in a democratic fashion, right? They're wielded in the service of a democratic, you know, elected government, right? That's the purpose of a civilian-controlled military, etc., an intelligence system that serves policymakers and not its own agenda. But that's, in theory, that's why those programs need to be kept secret. And those technological capabilities should be kept secret. But if China has made a break for these things, and maybe made some breakthroughs, that would be problematic for the rest of the Defense Department that maybe isn't mostly aware of these things, and especially Congress that is not mostly aware of these things. And now that this is out, we're like, well, we can't really do this sort of traditional tech arms race the way we've been doing it for the past 75 years. The secrecy silos aren't set up to do the scale arms race competition now that we have a peer competitor that is potentially, you know, getting a jump on us. So we need to broaden awareness. We need to bring additional, you know, groups, expertise, academics, the Palantirs, the Enderils, the SpaceX engineers, etc. They need to get access to some of these materials so that we can keep our competitive edge.

But you can't really do that and still kind of keep this 70-year kind of secrecy in place, right? You got to assume that the genie is going to be out of the bottle as soon as you bring in a bunch of these SpaceX guys, right? So you've got to plan for the disclosure piece, at least partial disclosure, in parallel with any broadening of the awareness to keep up the technological race. But that's also kind of a narrow military-industrial complex way of thinking about it. It basically is like, we need to keep making better weapons as a result of having this NHI tech, which I can see from a narrow bureaucratic lens is sort of rational in its own terms. But it's also prima facie absurd, maybe even insane, like in a clinical sense, to think that that's the most important thing, right? When you have, you know, the opportunity here to broaden awareness on a civilizational scale for all of humanity in a fashion that's not just predicated on developing better weapons to go fight wars with China, But to like finally change the predicate of the global system, which maybe doesn't need to have such an intensely competitive dynamic between, say, U.S. and China and Russia in a competitive arms race with nuclear weapons.

Maybe there's a different game we can play that's like more positive some that's oriented to this much different game now that we're all aware of that has like a whole bunch of other stakeholders and actors that we weren't otherwise considering in a lot of our competitive positions and national decision making. so that's but that's that's a hard thing to get like the defense department and the intelligence community to do because what's the job of the intelligence community and defense department is to plan for and win wars against other countries that's like their job and so you're kind of saying like hey guys don't do that job do this other job and i get it that's like that that's not their mandate right and so ironically we're kind of stuck in this thing where like, you know, we don't have a bureaucratic institution that is set up to manage this particular topic, right?

So if I was actually like, it sounds kind of trite, but what you kind of actually need to do is set up like a department or agency, like that is just focused on this, right? It's a kind of like, you know, it sounds absurd with like, oh, you're just another department or agency, right? More government. Well, no, as you're describing, I'm like, all right, private sector disclosure people just rip the band-aid off and tell all this well that's what's happening now right there's a conference happening the soul conference that's basically this sort of thing happening since in

the civil so the private sector is doing this on their own right um because enough people know now and there's enough you know people deal with different motivations some are much more religious or spiritual or academic or intellectual but some are just like financially motivated like hey like there's alpha here i can get myself in a better position maybe if the government actually does open this stuff up there could be you know new consortiums of venture capital and technology you know companies and academic institutions that could form you know research collaboratives and win and bid contracts and get access to these materials like there's only so much to go around right it's probably not like an infinite supply of this stuff and i don't think the government

would just be like here you go everybody come take a look at it it would probably be more like selective expansion of research it's physical stuff it's not information oh we have physical materials we have crafts i know we have crafts but like my assumption or understanding was that by reverse engineering it's opened up information that can be leveraged by anybody is it like literal chemical stuff that is not native to this planet that makes this type of operation possible well yeah now we're getting into like what we actually i don't know this is more speculation about what what new physics or material science um you know the the closest thing i've heard that gets me somewhere towards uh

that is statements by hal putoff who is a senior physicist the intelligence community who's likely touched these programs at one point or another i don't think he's been core to them by any means, but I think he's swimmed around them enough and has also done a lot of other sort of spooky stuff in the intelligence community. And he's mentioned the fact that in the context of a conversation he had with Eric Weinstein, that the U.S. government has classified areas of physics relating to topological physics and materials science in association with this UAP topic. So, and this kind of aligns with something that a national security official said to

uh, Mark Andreessen, uh, and, uh, whatever his partner, um, Ben Horowitz, uh, ACCC, when they're talking about AI regulation and, you know, the national security council was like, you know, we have classified entire branches of fundamental physics for national security purposes. Like we, we can do the same for AI when in response to, you know, Andreessen Horowitz, uh, Mark Andreessen is basically saying you can't classify math, right? It's just basic math, basic science. And the guy's like, yeah, we can. We did it. And, you know, and then he made that quote public. And so they're referring to, yeah, probably classified fundamental physics. Unclear in my brain whether this is truly fundamental theoretical physics, like entirely new theoretical paradigms, like beyond the standard model of particle physics, you know, some sort of quantum gravity theory, et cetera, that's like classified. that would be a stretch at least but i'm open to that as a possibility i think it's more plausible that we're referring to as uh like topological physics material science right so like metamaterials

certain um arrangements of sort of known material right known atomic uh ingredients essentially but in a certain special configuration uh that gives rise to like emergent properties right and there's been some some proposals for what that could be right i mean it's all somewhat speculative but you know there's been serious dimensions of physics of research that the u.s government is known to be engaged in that you could imagine going on the term like anti-gravity right like this has been a serious trajectory of u.s government research you can kind of see parts of it kind of like spin into the open and then kind of comes sucks gets sucked back in right so you're not sure like how much of that's i mean we invest in blue sky research in tons of

different areas uh including crazy stuff because you just you never know what's going to pay off and so i think we've definitely been investing in this research i just don't know how much we've made breakthroughs in and so if we bring in outside experts i don't know to what extent it is just like technology transfer like actual technology like hey lockheed's been able to make two or three of these like and you know that are inspired but they're like super finicky they're like extremely fragile like they're like proof of concept sorts of stuff and they can't really make them at scale they can't really do them you can't really turn them into a true capability or a platform that's like reliable enough for use and operations because you know the the secrecy is so

much only so many people involved they just can't make them and they can't make enough or they can't you know do as much testing as they otherwise would and so if you did bring in say more resources more people turned it into a little like a normal secret program then you would be able to throw a lot more engineering sort of operational um turning to maybe more of operational capability right that's truly that's true speculation but i can imagine a scenario where like we figured some stuff out but it's not like useful enough right as like a military capability uh maybe it's used for like really special surveillance things or doing other spooky stuff but it's not like a war winning thing that like china would be deterred by um so if you want

to turn the special knowledge into something that's like war deterring you need to like integrated into the normal into the you know the white or gray system of military production and to do that though you have to explain how you figured out anti-gravity how'd you figure out this crazy stuff right like you know maybe you can keep that like where you got it from a secret but those might be like two two mixed together right um and so yeah but i think it is getting back to the private sector like there are individuals i've talked to them right folks that are well-resourced, serious folks, careers in Silicon Valley and venture capital and Wall Street that have been convinced and are now, you know, like capitalists trying to

like position themselves for advantage, trying to put in place, okay, what sorts of partners do I need? What sorts of relationships do I need to have so that when or if the government does broaden awareness of these historical technology antecedents, that they're first in the door, right? There's kind of that positioning. And then we've had examples of this in the past with like Bigelow Aerospace creating that BAS, you know, company essentially that got the first contract through appropriations that were brought in by Harry Reid and crew. It's actually secret money to send up OSAP, which was this, you know, which was what, you know, Lou Lozano was first brought in on as a counterintelligence officer supporting James Likatsky, who is a rocket scientist who's running that program at Defense Intelligence Agency. So that was like an example of this where a private sector operator was trying to set up this contract vehicle to basically take possession of a craft that apparently Lockheed wanted to divest themselves of because it's been sitting somewhere and they had to spend all this money to keep it a secret and they weren't really doing anything with it anymore. They were just like in storage, but really expensive storage.

And they wanted to like give it away. And I don't know. That's what was said. And the CIA blocked it apparently. So there's examples of this of like, you know, people trying to sniff around. and then put themselves in positions of private sector advantage um so i wouldn't i that i would expect that to just you know happen but at a much larger scale uh and once you do that it's kind of like the whole counterintelligence system that you set up is not going to work anymore and you

kind of just have to just bite the bullet now start thinking laterally yeah start thinking laterally be like all right guys like the thing we were doing for the last 80 years it's gotta it's gotta it's gotta change um but again it's hard to change those people's minds like they've been doing a certain thing a certain way and i don't begrudge them to a certain extent like no one wants the stuff to blow up on their watch right like i don't have to deal with this is my this is not i don't want this to be another problem i have to deal with right like can you just guys wait two years until i retire and then deal with it and make it that other person's problem uh i think that's a lot of what's going on is like until it's truly urgent you know this

going back to the very beginning of this conversation is like incentives and you know short-term thinking and you know kind of kicking the can in a lot of ways well that line that you mentioned from the bill like there is a chance that china is beating us at this and could leverage it like we don't have time for a community to get set up to the bureaucratic process over the course of years i mean that's one of my main motivations for talking about this publicly i mean other than whatever I get to spew on some of this stuff is like, I do think there is a deep and strategic national security implication here from our social taboo, right? Because it's not considered a part of the policy discourse in DC among people who normally style themselves strategic thinkers

and who are experts in all things, trying to competition technology, AI, Taiwan, yada, yada, yada. I've had these conversations with these people, you know, this is not on the radar at all they just don't even think it's happening they just like are ignoring it entirely it's a complete blind spot and i'm like it's in those blind spots that the truck hits you right right it's usually not you're looking at the front window and it's like oh yeah like i know exactly how many smart minds i need to throw into the taiwan strait in order to in order to deter like this is the sm2 sm3 sm6 missile production rate that i need to meet to have the indopatcom requirement met in 2028 like there are people who can just spew that all the way down and you bring

in uap stuff and they're just like you are like you're not a serious person like you're off your rocker i'll tell you this president xi and putin these guys these guys know what's going on like these guys know what's going on in fact david grush i think alluded to this and one of the things he was doing his investigation when he was on the uap task force he was a super senior cleared person in ro nga and he was cleared to like among the more sensitive compartments across the government, including our human intelligence collection system. And he described reading foreign source reporting on our programs, right? So this is, you know, our intercepts or our partners' intercepts or Five Eyes partners' intercepts of a foreign country's intelligence,

internal intelligence reporting to their leadership. That's a result of their collection spying on our legacy programs, right? So you get kind of this reflection that takes place, right? And I think that's kind of what's been happening. Right. And I think just there's a similar system to kind of keep those reflections from getting to the rest of the, you know, the rest of the intelligence, our U.S. intelligence system. Right. And David Grush, being a do-gooder millennial, was like, well, this is not good. Like, we got to figure out what's going on here. And that is the problem. Right. Because we've kept our leadership, I think, in the strategic dark on this subject for too long. we've backed ourselves into a corner those people have you know probably violated the law i don't want people to go to jail you know just because right but though maybe there needs to be some

sort of amnesty or yeah you know amnesty get the info out there sorry yeah i mean i think that's kind of the issue now is like a lot of people were like i'd be fine testifying and spilling the beans but i need you know a doj letter you know you know giving me blanket immunity for any crimes or high crimes or misdemeanors or whatever that i may have accomplished in service of this you know secret being protected um some of it might be pretty nasty stuff so uh yeah there's probably a lot of you know rotten vegetables in in the in that fridge um maybe like we just have people people murdered or that's what david rush has said um yeah that people have been injured threatened and murdered to protect the secret uh it's been credibly alleged um through law

enforcement investigations to that i'm aware of um and he's given names of individuals he believes were uh victims of such a sanction uh to congress um which is you know you go back to you know there are i mean you you would you would hate to think that that's what happened but like it's not surprising like you would expect it you would expect it you know we were doing we were hitting people right it wasn't like an abnormal thing and like you would hope that maybe those norms government killed jfk like it's not surprising well i would say our government i would say some people you know oh this gets a whole different rabbit hole but like yeah i think it's pretty clear that like jfk was killed by it was yeah it was the it was the s force um you know

stood up to hit the hit castro that yeah turned around and whacked him but yeah listen to danny sheehan on that he's got that uh we're gonna get down too many rabbit holes here we need to do we need to do a follow-up on this well this is the thing is like i know i i try to you know this is the thing is like conspiracy thinking it's like there's so many different conspiracies out there right and in our modern media ecosystem right every crazy idea can get amplified and anchored into a million different ways and i think there are true conspiracies in history right like the world is just basically the story of different conspiracies right that like history is just the conspiracies that were written about and documented right it's like most most major world

events don't happen because of you know a popular vote they happen because a small group of people with a lot of power and influence decided to do certain things at certain times to get more power and influence it's just like you really get history this is all conspiracies the assassination of Julius Caesar, total conspiracy, right? Most of human history is dispopulated by these hinge events that were the result of conspiracies. People conspiring to do things to gain power. And so I think it's just a mode of analysis of institutional systems of power that are mostly opaque to the average observer. And you have to be prudent and rational and not hyperbolic and not assume the Illuminati is lurking around every corner, right?

But I think people that paint everything as just conspiracy thinking, and therefore the evolution of these systems and major developments in global politics are just sort of like natural processes like the weather, right? That are just like forces that don't require any analysis or inspection. That seems like a delusional way to approach the world. That's like truly like irrational to think there are no conspiracies, like because history is just defined by conspiracies. uh and i just have to be measured and like be fact-based and like approach history with an open eye to understanding like you know how the structure of power actually works um it's not like there's some you know like reptilian over you know overlords uh at least not that i'm aware maybe we'll find out maybe we'll find out maybe that's what maybe maybe i mean the world's a

weird place man uh i just think you know people need to be open-minded um but not so open-minded that they fall victims to um you know everything that's on the internet yeah i've been guilty of that in the past i like to think i'm getting better at it luckily i mean it's like you gotta go you gotta find the right right measure here right and it's like i don't begrudge people exploring the frontier of different ideas and but it's like okay always always like holding everything lightly yeah and always come back always coming back being grounded and just kind of like all right like i'm not going to ignore anything but i'm not just going to believe everything right and i'm going to like i'm going to like try to steer somewhere in between this

morass because everyone's trying to manipulate you man like everyone's got an angle everyone's trying to hype something up everyone's got some fear-mongering you know take on whatever and that gets them clicks to get some eyeballs um so that's like the structural incentive for a lot of folks now um but yeah i mean the the things that are truly matter probably aren't going to be all that visible right to most to most observers right i think we started this whole conversation i was like the i was told by someone very well connected inside you know european financial stuff uh that yeah like word has gone out that like yeah capital controls are coming but it's it's said not like a conspiracy like we are have this master plan it's just like

you know people in positions of power and influence that are close to those they just know things before everyone else yeah this tale is all this time and so that and it allows them to take measures beforehand to protect themselves protect their money protect their friends right and so if you point to that and say hey like people are planning and introducing capital controls and financial pressure and you're like oh you're you're a conspiracy theorist it's like well no you're covering for the guys that are just trying to get out of the burning theater before everyone else does i'm trying to like let everyone else know the theater's on fire uh now i want to stampede but i was like you should just be aware that like you know there

are asymmetries and knowledge in the world right and this uap story is just another example of that there's asymmetries of knowledge um and some of it's self-imposed like some people just don't want to know or don't want to look at this information because it's uncomfortable or because it doesn't fit into their existing mental models um and i think you know that's that's your it's your prerogative but i mean this is the way this information is being disseminated it is intentionally being done in an asymmetric fashion uh just in the same way that those capital that capital control stuff is it's like they're trying to get some of their friends and people in positions to get on side before everyone else and that's like in other contexts people observe this

as perfectly normal right or normal in the sense of like yeah we expect hedge funds to know more about whatever deals or there's always the rumors of like say the stripe acquisition of bridge right oh yeah people in the vc community knew that was coming right whispers were going around that that was gonna that did that deal was in the works yeah i mean everybody talked about silicon valley bank peter teal nature all founder funds companies got off and then i mean it's just like this is the way the world works like this is everywhere everything it's like you just play that out fractally in any given system it just happens to be the systems that you happen to be no or close to that just seems obvious that like of course like i'm at i'm closer to those in groups those hierarchies of

knowledge and therefore that's perfectly normal for me to know that before someone else does and maybe i can arbitrage that or whatever but when you were when that same process plays out in a maybe at a much more strategic level much more larger more opaque systems you know that you don't have as much insight into um it's disconcerting and so you dismiss it i think it's just like it's the same process it's the same sociological phenomenon playing out uh i don't know you could call it whatever you want but that's what it's that's what's happening uh i don't know deal with it matthew pines oh man we've been we've been ripping god i love talking to you it always makes me feel like better than uh worse at the same time not worse but

scared not scared i'm actually more comfortable about disclosure than i was you were scaring the shit out of me like when we might see you in nashville maybe outside the park talking i mean it's i i try to calibrate it's like you need to give people a little bit of a spark to wake them up right to get them motivated to learn more but then it's like you're not trying to fear monger and you're just trying to like it's like you're trying it's like you're knocking on the door right and someone's sleeping and they're not going to hear you so you got to like get a pound on the door and someone goes wakes up like what the hell why are you pounding on my door hey bro you want to have a conversation right it's kind of like that kind of thing right you need to pound

on the door door opens up and then you can kind of like okay now it's and everyone finds their own way right to explore this topic um but you just gotta you know there's no like easy answer there's no quick resolution it's just being comfortable with being uncomfortable i guess so Yeah. If you've been in Bitcoin for long enough, you should be comfortable with being uncomfortable. So that's why I think that this your audience, this community is probably more psychologically attuned to dealing with volatility and uncertainty and pricing dramatic change into the future. So go spread the word, freaks. We're going to catch up again. We got a hearing on November 13th. Who knows? Maybe we'll get more information. and I think you'll be back on the show at some point

in the next six months, if you'll come back. Yeah, yeah, man. Yeah. All right. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on. Enjoy your weekend. Peace and love, freaks.

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