TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #609: How To Summon A UAP with Matt Pines

Episode Date: April 21, 2025

Marty sits down with Matt Pines to discuss Skywatcher's efforts to gather empirical data on UAPs. Matt Pines on Twitter: https://x.com/matthew_pines Skywatcher: https://skywatcher.ai Bitcoin Policy Summit: https://www.btcpolicysummit.org/ 0:00 - Intro 0:37 - US disclosure posture 9:09 - Skywatcher 17:13 - Fold & Coinkite 18:44 - How the data is collected 23:33 - Unchained 24:02 - What attracts UAPs 35:40 - Consciousness 54:27 - Govt psychics 57:54 - Geopolitical implications & triple hockey stick 1:10:41 - AI 1:17:41 - Will Trump build China Lite? 1:30:32 - Exopolitics 1:37:09 - Is bitcoin the great filter? 1:42:45 - Matt’s having fun 1:48:45 - Quantum breakthrough implications 2:09:59 - Bitcoin Policy Summit Shoutout to our sponsors: Fold https://tftc.io/fold Coinkite https://coinkite.com Unchained https://unchained.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/

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. So the government's admitting that we have the ability to manipulate space and time.

And Skywatcher's out there trying to summon UAPs. What the hell is going on? You just fell into the wrong timeline, my friend. Or the right one, depending on your perspective. Was that admission by the Trump administration this week part of disclosure, late disclosure? What are we classifying that as? I mean, my thesis for some time has been the government will adopt an attitude, I think, more out of necessity and constraint of what I would call as if disclosure, meaning they will increasingly be acting as if this subject is true without ever really or at least not immediately confirming or affirming it's true. So you have episodes like that speech, which, you know, Kratios is the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. He was formerly basically the head of all advanced research inside the Defense Department, including DARPA, as well as other, you know, our most highly classified, highly sensitive research projects in the Pentagon.

on um you know there's a metaphorical interpretation uh of that language some folks thought it was alluding to technologies that close the gap for human civilization across space and time technologies that accelerate transportation communications etc which is a fair interpretation i think of his first phrase but the second use of that term was at the very end where he basically said um give themselves you know encouraging people to give themselves into scientific discoveries that uh manipulate space and time the internet is not a scientific discovery um again the nature of such statements is they're um plausibly ambiguous right they don't really tell you and you just kind of have a rorschach test and folks that see the message there get a

bit of a wink out of it other folks see it as just a bunch of noise and we're kind of left talking like we're talking the malaysian airlines people are all over this yeah i mean that whole thing is is mostly i think a a grift that's been spun up around a cult-like leader so i tend not to engage with that the the orbs did not uh teleport the plane into another dimension or somewhere else on earth i mean there are likely orbs those are real things um but i think that particular uh event has been spun up by bad faith actors looking to basically manipulate community of people and collect their patreon donations so there's lots of other crazy conspiracies and very interesting topics that i think have uh i mean as skywatcher i can talk about lots of crazy stuff

and so it's interesting where where i draw the line um i just see uh i just see that as a i don't know a bit of um a bit of noise you're saying i shouldn't have that guy on the podcast i've had a bunch of people reach out to me this week you got to get them all marty i i mean you do you do what you want to do with your podcast um but uh i have i have my opinion yeah it is great do you think if it was the uh nonchalant disclosure i forget how you worded it specifically but this as if as if matter of fact could it be light signaling toward china while we're having this geopolitical boxing match with tariffs sort of like a light message hey china yes we're in this trade war but we also have some technology that you may not be aware of that we could leverage

if you get too far into this trade war yeah i mean that's you can take that as a speculative hypothesis and one data point you know in that direction is what trump said in the oval office when he was interviewed by a bunch of folks shortly after the tariff war kicked off talking about essentially you know he's riffing on lots of stuff but he basically mentioned his his sense of confidence in our in our in our defense and our weapons capabilities and made statements to the effect that we have weapons that are so much stronger. Nobody nobody has any idea how they work. Right. They're stronger than anyone has on Earth.

And they're so strong. They're so powerful. You know, nobody even understands how they work. And he's, I think, you know, pointing that to China is like we got some stuff up our sleeve. Don't think about it. And then I think in the context of this larger geoeconomic reordering and geopolitical kind of confrontation, you could say, is underway. That's across all these different dimensions of the global system, the trade system, the financial system, and then these more deep-seated structures of power, right? Like telecommunication systems, space, and ultimately, you know, deterrence on a military basis. And so this is a lot of posturing, a lot of rhetoric, a lot of subtle signaling.

And there's a larger strategic objective by at least the more, I'd say, long range oriented elements of the Trump administration to try to re-anchor a system with the U.S. at the center to kind of hold the line against an ambitious sinusphere across all these different domains. and uh but you know the hegemon has has some weaknesses has some strategic vulnerabilities treasury markets um a sense that uh we are uh decaying global power uh in in some parts of the world so they want to kind of again make america great again right they want to restore a sense of uh america as the industrial and technological leader of the civilization and to extend and define a much more explicit zone for other countries to sort of submit to basic American leadership. So essentially a tech tariff and security zone.

So you need to have kind of carrots and sticks if you want to do that, right? And so you want to look at all the different cupboards and drawers of where you might have some carrots and sticks to try to wield in this high stakes negotiation, try to pull countries into your orbit. And so it probably is a delicate balancing act to sort of subtly hint at, not just to China, but to other countries around the world, do we have some aces up our sleeve, right? That maybe the world isn't counting into the overall balance of leverage, right? Ultimately, everyone's looking around and saying, okay, if I had to boil it down, it's a lot more complicated. It's Essentially, the U.S. is trying to force countries to pick a side, right, to more to get off the fence, to not kind of try to be balancing powers, but to more overtly, you know, commit to U.S. alignment and away from, you know, entanglements, trade, cooperation, et cetera, with China.

So you have to kind of make it look like you're you still got it right. You got to kind of hint that you still have the juice to run the global system or at least provide a credible protection as well as, you know, enticement that there's some goodies down the line if you align with the U.S. And if you don't align with the U.S., maybe you will get, you know, less privileged access to those goodies that could be coming down the line. So I think this is part of this this larger game. So that's why I think this topic isn't isn't irrelevant. In fact, it's very, I think, very critically relevant to these larger geopolitical and geoeconomic shakeups, because ultimately, if you assume that this is true, folks don't have to assume that it's true.

But if you do, something like this plot that we've talked about before, and it's going to be top of mind, or at least in the back of everyone's mind, especially at the high table of geopolitical bargaining, right? Like Russia knows that we know that they know, China knows that we know that they know, etc. And so when you're thinking about how people are positioning and bluffing or not, when they allude to who's got the most strategic resilience or aces up their sleeve, this has got to be very, very much relevant. um and so let's dive into the potential of an ace actually being up our sleeve for the people who may be skeptical out there who witnessed that matter of fact admission and just thought it was it was noise like i mentioned earlier you've been doing work at skywatcher and i just want to pull

up i'm gonna read from my notes here about what your team is working on because i was with somebody last week who was describing it to me i was like what the heck is matt and his team up to what are you doing what are you doing so your team is testing two main hypotheses for uap interaction electromechanical signaling using tailored electronic signals to attract uaps and neuro meditative interaction the role of human consciousness what is it and what have been the most surprising findings that you guys have discovered using these methods yeah so my career is taking an interesting turn right so after doing years of more government national security consulting and geopolitical risk cyber

consulting and then um taking on the executive director's position at bitcoin policy institute where obviously our mission is extremely high tempo to try to decisively shift America to a pro-Bitcoin direction and translate that into concrete policy action. I also kind of dipped my foot more professionally in the UAP water. So I become a strategic advisor to this firm called Skywatcher, which is essentially an organization dedicated to collecting highly rigorous information related to anomalous phenomenon in the sky

to perform rigorous data analysis and scientific assessment of that information, and then to communicate results publicly to try to resolve this fundamental question, right? Are there anomalous objects in the sky? And it's essentially, there's two paths to coming up to an answer to that question. You can rely on the government to declassify information or to make statements, official statements or issue reports on that subject, in which case you're still essentially trusting the government, you know, in what it says. But the sky isn't classified. Right. And so if there is a reality to this phenomenon, right, with the right people, the right skills, right capabilities, you can just go out and do things right and actually demonstrate to to a higher degree of satisfaction by, you know, peers in the scientific community. And more broadly, that this is a real phenomenon. And that seemed like a more fanciful possibility until folks, you know, started to ask that question to themselves, folks that had relevant backgrounds and skills and resources and decided to basically assemble, you know, this team, which is what Skywatcher is.

Folks that have highly relevant information and knowledge about these sorts of topics have come from related government-associated activities and bring their technical skills to bear to actually go out and try to collect this data and share that in a deliberate fashion with the public and the broader scientific community. And so there's kind of two core questions, right, that we released this document called the Skywatcher Discovery Framework. Again, kind of this anchor point. This isn't about a fanciful, you know, kind of a skinwalker ranch type of sort of media operation. It's like, OK, how do we seriously collect data on this question and, you know, put resources to that task? And basically, it's, you know, principal objective is to validate this idea that there are anomalous objects in the sky. Anomalous meaning, you know, in terms of their performance characteristics, in terms of their apparent morphologies. Now, answering that question doesn't answer the origin question, right?

It just says there are some things in the sky that are doing things that normal objects don't do. And so you need to have multiple sensors, you know, different types of sensors. You need to do this repeatably. You need to do it in a rigorous fashion. You need to have consistent data collection. You know, we're talking radar, electro-optical, multiple bands of infrared, you know, direction finding, you know, with lasers to get distance, multiple human observation. And this effort is obviously, you know, maturing and expanding.

So there might be more types of sensors coming down the line and additional capabilities brought to bear to help, you know, tighten up the type of analysis that can be done. that's basically the core question uh and so there are certain techniques uh that are that are being applied in the field um because if you just took these sensors out into any random location you know maybe you'll see some stuff right there's other efforts out there to try to just have a good and consistent data collection to sort of point sensors at the sky and try to see what you can see um the folks at skywatcher have a uh you know well-motivated hypothesis that there's a way essentially improving the odds that you see something uh and there's two methods that

we have have have hypothesized are uh ways of improving the odds that anomalous phenomena will will appear near your sensors the first is you know colloquially called this dog whistle a certain way of essentially sending out signals uh electronic mechanical related signals uh that will attract uaps to to your location um they have a reason to believe that that's uh effective but of course we want to prove it we want to demonstrate to a certain degree of statistical reliability that it is in fact doing what we think it's doing and then the second is uh neuromeditative techniques right so certain individuals engaging in a certain state of consciousness uh result in similar uh phenomenon appearing in your location and we assess kind of

at our preliminary stage right now and we've you know written that into that that report that's different levels of confidence right different levels of kind of discovery uh kind of uh sort of where we would sort of set the marker for where we think these um these uh these hypotheses stand uh is moving from anecdata right anecdotes blurry cell phone videos people with claims and first person experiences that's a that's where you most of the conversation is right it's it's somewhat um inchoate sometimes very compelling but fundamentally uh ad hoc uh inconsistent uh not sort of to a scientific level of of rigor and so we want to move from that to uh standardized data collection and that's kind of the core of this whole operation is just being consistent being

standardized being rigorous being professional um using high-end uh equipment and practices to actually try to um collect good data and then generate hypotheses that you can that you can tests that you can look look through and try to demonstrate with a certain degree of confidence resolves to um uh you know ruling out uh confounding uh potential explanations birds balloons etc uh but uh you know ultimately isolates down to a high degree of confidence that there's a truly anomalous phenomena and then you can share that publicly and hopefully move the conversation forward so i wouldn't say we have we claim that these two techniques are uh proven but we have reason to believe that they could they could be uh effective and we want to know

you know if you can't prove those two things those would be kind of a big deal uh and so uh yeah it's an exceptionally ambitious project i would say right maybe absurdly ambitious um but the folks involved you know i wouldn't have associated myself with it if i didn't think that if there was a group out there that you know could could credibly take a good crack at it um this would be the group right uh and uh you know i've sort of taken a bunch of swings at these low probability uh high impact uh you know activities in the past and um i don't know i have a hunch on this one listen freaks i know you're tired of me talking about fold but i'm gonna beat the drum i'm gonna beat the dead horse if you're a bitcoiner living in

the united states and you're not using fold i'm just gonna ask one question what are you doing you're leaving sats on the table they've got gift cards they've got their debit card you can use your credit card just connect your credit card to the fold app use the fold out to pay off your your credit card and you're going to stack your credit card points and bitcoin as well they even teamed up with crowd health to give their members fold plus membership at no cost don't leave sats on the table go sign up for fold today go to tftc.io slash fold there's nothing to lose except sats that you could have stacked sup freaks this rip of tftc was brought to you by our good friends at coin kite they make the cold card queue my favorite hardware wallet the most secure hardware

wallet on the market as you can see it's got the blackberry form factor full keyboard it's got two secure enclaves you create your private public keys offline the device never has to go online never does go online so you keep your bitcoin secure if you have your bitcoin on exchanges and you're looking to get it off secure it in the best way possible pick up a cold card queue go to coin kite.com find the cold card queue use the code tftc for five percent off if you're a power user of bitcoin like i am if you're running a business on a bitcoin standard if you're just a bitcoin or wants to secure your bitcoin get the most secure hardware wallet on the market go get the cold card queue it's a beautiful thing all right let's let's dive further into this like how

like the tooth the neuromeditative and the signaling what technology behind the signaling in the i guess the theory or the practice behind the neuro meditative part of it and then the data collection is it simply observational data like we do something and something appears or is there something else you're measuring in the electromagnetic field or some other sort of measurement that you're taking yes so the the data collection piece is continuing to refine and expand right there's always uh lots of different things you can try to measure right um and uh they've only really done three operations so far right so the basic um sop is essentially doing these events you know uh multi-day events out out in the desert essentially an isolated location

and you have you know large numbers of people with equipment um out in different you know uh locations you know executing these sort of test events essentially um so you want to replace the sensors and you want to basically observe what what happens over over over multiple days and try to demonstrate or build up at least a uh uh you know an evidence base uh over time um of what you can detect on on multiple sensors and so yeah the principal sensors are you know radar uh Electro-optical, so fancy cameras, multiple bands of infrared, multiple human observers, both in ground as well as aerial platforms, so helicopters, and laser range fighters, so you can see if the object is in a certain distance away from you.

So the objective with just that core sensor package is to try to get multiple correlations on an object to understand, okay, how far is it away? How high is it? How fast is it moving? what are its uh what's its radar cross-section what are its sort of signatures when it bounces back from the radar you can tell some things about the about the object just based off of kind of the the return profile um kind of the heartbeat of of the object uh from the radar uh but there's other things you could put out there right in terms of um uh magnetometers uh sort of uh other sort of detections along parts of the electromagnetic spectrum you know radio frequency detection. Um, so there's a, there's, there's lots of things you could try to put out

there. I mean, the more sensors you add, the more data you've got to analyze and cross correlates, which becomes, you know, a larger operation. And so I think the objective is to be deliberate about bringing more sensors in. Uh, I'm not, you know, I'm just an advisor. I'm not running these operations, but, uh, yeah, I mean, that's basically what, what you, what you, what you have to do here. If you want to try to rule out, okay, you see something on a, on a, on a video and you're like okay that looks weird right but okay weird is weird is weird right weird could be a plane at an odd angle or a balloon floating across the screen right but if it's moving against the wind at a consistent velocity okay it's probably not a balloon right well what could it be could be a

weird drone okay well you you have a reference class of of video of what a drone looks like at a certain distance and you can get you know a laser rangefinder on this object you know that's not it's at the same approximate distance do you know that it's not a drone right so it's about eliminating possible explanations to ultimately get down to something this is not something prosaic um and then you have to uh try to determine what what it is and so in the most recent release uh uh skywatcher put out uh basically you know described at a very high level kind of nine categories of uap that had been uh observed again not like a final classification of you know what their origin is or exactly what they are just essentially purely like phenomenological like

there's a certain thing that we've seen that will just come up with a name for that thing uh i think we're gonna come up with more information about each of those uh in the in the coming few weeks and months um but uh but yeah so you can you know watch those videos and see how this is all described um but yeah so this is you know ultimately it's like okay how do you can you do real science with this and real science is hard you have to be patient um you know and one things that attracted me to this whole thing was that the uap thing is either you're you're actually behind the circle in which case you're not talking about it or you're on podcasts and it's just pretty people's stories right or that's you know somebody's random video on youtube or

twitter and that's basically you know like sort of round around we go right uh and uh i feel like somebody has to kind of try to move the ball down the field and you know it takes takes effort takes time and money. So I'm like, hey, I really want someone to try to answer this question in a way that's transparent to the public. So just go do it. Our good friends, Parker Lewis and Dhruv Bansal are two of the deepest thinkers in Bitcoin. While they come from very different backgrounds, they've landed on the exact same conclusion. It's Bitcoin that matters, not crypto. This masterclass lays out why 21 million is the key breakthrough, how Bitcoin, not blockchain, creates decentralization why everything else will be built on bitcoin understand why bitcoin works

and why nothing else does watch the premiere at unchained.com slash tftc that's unchained.com slash tftc in terms of inciting uaps to appear is that dependent on the technology and i don't even know how to describe the neuromeditative part of it which i would like to dive in there or is it the location because you read stuff you watch documentaries and they talk about particular places on the planet where certain things happen the pyramids may be where they are because of this tesla was in colorado because uh it was optimal to do what he was trying to do with his tesla coils is there something about these specific locations or is more dependent on the technology you're using to signal to incite a an appearance or combination

of the two well separate from skywatcher and i've i've observed just in the kind of like the semi-official historical record right coming from from era for example they've put out maps that show hot spots obviously there's kind of a lot of confounding biases there because they're sort of detecting where their sensors are so there's a you know i think a lot of noise in that um there also have been you know semi-credible repeatable uh kind of reports of consistent observations in certain parts of the world certain you know sort of maritime littoral areas uh certain certain areas of the u.s uh and there's a plausibility that right but it's very hard to you know that i don't think it's much of a systematic analysis right um maybe the

us government with a lot of global sensor collection has identified and pinpointed certain hot spots and maybe people you know in the know kind of subtly act on that knowledge when they do things um or they go to look for certain locations um for skywatcher i don't know if that's motivated any particular locations i think it's a lot of it's just you know operational flexibility, right? Like you need to have a large space, uh, that you can, uh, you can operate in that's, uh, secure. That's, uh, that's, um, uh, that's relatively, you know, remote and doesn't have as, you know, uh, has, has little clutter in the, in the air as possible because, you know, Skywatch is not the military. We can't just like roll up and, you know, just sort of do stuff.

Um, we're gonna have like a military base where we have, you know, hundreds of square miles to sort of freely operate in um and uh yeah so i think given those constraints like we're trying to pick a location but um because my understanding is that you know it again we're dealing with a lot of uncontrolled variables here but the dog whistle right is is apparently effective you know wherever you put it right um but maybe you only can get a good high fidelity observation if you turn it on in a relatively uncluttered area right um if you turn around the middle of new york city right like i'm not sure like what would happen if it would people yeah just discern what's happening with all the other stuff going on um so yeah i think that's that's that uh now like the specifics of

the like of the electronic kind of methods the specific frequencies or or modulations or or whatever i don't i don't know it um i kind of don't want to know it right i think that's information that's uh should be should be closely held until you have a better understanding of the phenomenon that you could be triggering um so i think it's a matter of discretion to to to assess that um and then the neuro the neuro meditative stuff is obviously the most like evocative and challenging to i think baseline world views about the nature of human consciousness or consciousness in general um but uh yeah it's uh it's becoming increasingly uh relevant to to this larger issue and i think more socially acceptable particularly with something like the telepathy tapes becoming

popular very big right now since this is what is happening skywatcher skywatchers taking a bunch of autistic people to the desert oh well they're not autistic as well i mean i don't know i haven't diagnose them i'm being a bit facetious uh but uh and i think there'll be more information about the psionics piece or the neuro meditative operators piece in the next release so i don't want to like you know jump ahead of that um but uh yeah i mean at least i mean i was out there and i talked to some of these folks and they're like they're normal people or they're not they're not the sort of autistic children in the telepathy tapes thing they're just individuals that have claimed to had certain experiences and and also have developed a certain um practices

that allow them to uh to engage consciously with with craft or at least to um have the perception that they are uh and then have craft appear um that in our assessment right now is like very very very preliminary right um we have reason to believe by other other sources that this could be relevant but like as far as we've been able to demonstrate out in the field we haven't you know conclusively demonstrated that that's a thing um but we have enough you know uh of a basis to try to demonstrate it right and and try to collect scientific data along the way right um which is a hard hard thing to do uh you know with a with a like a dog whistle right it's an electronic signal you can turn it on turn it off and if you have a large large enough sample set

you you know essentially try to just get the correlations and and the t tests down to a point where you can say yep yep we have highly dispositive confirmation of an anomalous object and it happens to correlate with a certain degree of statistical confidence when the when the dog whistles on it's harder to do that you know in a field setting with with the neuromeditative operators right but um it's not impossible uh so ultimately it's like taking these questions from the from the realm of metaphysical speculation and kind of wooey uh you know implication to just like okay the world could be such a way how can we do something to try to indicate whether it is that way and uh and and sort of shake off whatever priors like you have right a lot of people have

like a folk metaphysics or a folk physics uh in their heads and they just assume the world is a certain way um i mean i did physics and philosophy i i had to you know i wanted to understand like what is the way the world is right and the way the world is from the perspective of isaac newton developed a certain set of models a certain set of ontologies that were quite successful uh for for his time at trying to understand the world and then develop technologies to exploit that knowledge and the history of scientific revolutions has always been a one of of uh changing the fundamental paradigm of science over over over long periods of time that that ultimately end up shifting the core kind of metaphysical assumptions um that uh that humanity has

about the nature of reality and so we happen to be in the you know first quarter of the 21st century with a certain set of metaphysical models and physical models uh of the world and uh you know the lesson of history is that uh those are likely to change um and the other lesson of history is that physics is not just this sort of uh ivory tower practiced by a bunch of eggheads at you know universities it's a core function of governments to secure national strategic advantage like the lesson you know even when we're one there was a lesson of the application of chemistry right for uh gas uh weapons and high explosives and then there was the dramatic exploitation of physics in the in the 30s um to develop nuclear weapons and i don't think that lesson was lost on national

governments that uh physics research is the foundation of national power um and that it is the key that unlocks uh the next strategic breakthrough in both energy weapons and propulsion technology so my basic thesis is i don't think open physics was really allowed to happen after 1945 um and uh so part of this is okay there's a certain part of uh the world uh a certain knowledge about the world that has maybe been intentionally kept uh secret maybe for good reason maybe there's some some knowledge that's inherently dangerous knowledge but you know i think that's a reasonable proposition but uh it's a it's a difficult question um and yeah so i think i think generally speaking folks think they know what the world is and how it works and i think

people's level of confidence in their in those assumptions is is uh way too high and that's why i think these questions are ultimately you know scientific questions they're not questions of you know will be speculation or podcast or like go out get the data show me that there's an anomaly there that my present models can't account for um and usually scientific paradigms uh shift when you have a an accretion of anomalies right there are there's a certain consensus that's baked in about a certain set of frameworks or scientific explanations and then interesting experiments happen or observations happen that are you know not easily explained by that central you know consensus paradigm but the paradigm doesn't just automatically you know take that in usually it

rejects it usually says no no no it's not possible it rules it out prima facie you know telepathy is not possible remote viewing is not possible you know uh consciousness is just a um emergent phenomenon of neurobiological chemical processes like we already have a full explanation of all this there's no anomalies there and so because they don't fit they kind of bounce off right But if they keep accumulating, you get to this moment of dissonance, right, where, you know, there's a recognition that there are true anomalies that the present conceptual paradigm can't explain. And ultimately, you know, it's like science progresses through, you know, like one funeral at a time, right? This is kind of the lesson, you know, you had kind of the certain models of science like Thomas Kuhn or who had sort of coined the term paradigm shifts, but other, you know, philosophers of science like Feyerabend and Popper kind of understood this general process is somewhat nonlinear. And that maybe we're at a moment of kind of a nonlinear shift in both our scientific models of reality as well as maybe a more, you know, like our taking metaphysics seriously, right?

Like the, you know, essentially what attracted me, uh, to, to, uh, physics and philosophy is like these core questions, uh, like there's really kind of two, which is, uh, what's the nature of reality, uh, from a, from a description that we can write down in math, which is physics and what's the nature of reality that, that we experience, uh, as, as a subjective conscious being. Right. And those are basically like, what's the, what's physics and what's consciousness questions. And ultimately when I see this sort of, you know, skywatcher initiative essentially is

taking at least a bite at a certain part of that apple which is okay if there are anomalous objects out there um truly not anomalous that are non of non-human origin well that is a very suggestive and highly valuable hint at new physics and if it turns out that there's a deep connection at least phenomenologically between human consciousness and those objects well that you know also is highly suggestive direction uh to explore to understand the nature of consciousness so these are the two most fundamental questions about reality that humans have at the moment i don't know i want to try to get at least closer to the answer i do as well i love this stuff because it's extremely hubristic and naive to think that there's that we've figured it all

out i think time history has shown that whenever society thinks they've figured it all out somebody like newton comes comes along it's like yeah well actually the world may work this way and when it comes to the neuromeditative side telepathy remote viewing manifestation like there there's definitely something that we're actually talking about it yesterday is uh matt was like oh stop talking about this matt odell but uh i truly believe like it's funny like the amount of bitcoin blocks had been mined via bid axis in the last year is somewhat uh somewhat anomalous when you factor in the amount of hash rate they produce versus the amount of blocks that that they produce and somebody hopped in my mentions the other day it was like it may be like some form of quantum

bending via manifestation the fact that we can see the chips and we're thinking about is this to mine a block uh does that sort of bend reality and shift the probability in the favor of owners of bid axes just because they have this somewhat ability to manifest block production because they're looking at the chip producing the hashes i don't know if that's that's true or not but i think it's just interesting to explore those type of ideas i don't know if i've ever talked about the experiment with you but i definitely talked about jesse michaels um you know well when he he was on the podcast but the experiment of the um the light in the box with the four quadrants of the plant in one quadrant and a probabilistic random generator where it should hit each quadrant

equally over a certain period of time but when the plant's in the box it hits the quadrant with the plant in it um at a at a higher rate than than should happen so there is this like sort of quantum bending of life towards um of life being able to sort of bend reality in its favor and yeah it definitely gets into the quantum realm which fascinates me and i'm not going to pretend like i can fully understand it but i think my caveman brain is attuned enough to be like there's a there there i think yeah i mean this is again i it's it's funny because if you had talked to me i'd say even two three years ago about this stuff i would have been kind of looked down my nose at you kind of sneering haughty oh you're just you're just mixing quantum gibberish

you know woo-woo nonsense with some half-baked studies that people want to be true right and uh you know i was a hard-nosed physics guy okay give me the equation give me the studies give me the give me the math right no give me this woo-woo quantum bullshit um and i still have this sort of i'd say a visceral reaction to kind of woo-woo quantum bullshit where you have a mystery that seems non-local and you just go oh quantum is this sort of non-local mystery and so that explains this other non-local mystery it's this kind of connection between quantum mechanics and consciousness it's kind of at the surface level the thing people kind of reach for when it's just a bunch of weird sort of wooey new agey things it's quantum healing etc um i find i have a sort

of a visceral visceral aversion to it but on the other hand i know there's something really weird going on in reality right that we don't have a coherent framework for and there are uh i think deep structures to to existence that are heavily related to what it means to be an observer um i won't go too far down that particular you know category theoretic and hypergraph model rabbit hole but uh i think ultimately this kind of new agey kind of surface level intuition isn't at the end of the day it doesn't end up being wrong it's kind of it's kind of the bell curve thing right or like whatever that the meme right where it's like yeah the bell curve is just yeah like consciousness is not local quantum mechanics is not local like you can manifest reality and the

mid-curve is like no physicalism is real you know consciousness is just an emergent phenomenon right daniel dennett churchland or right like none of this new age bullshit is real and then the right curve is like basically some you know extremely abstruse category theoretic you know model of the computational branch pairs of existence and you know new spendix completion and foliation of the hypergraph, yada, yada, yada, right? And it's like, ultimately, it just turns into, yeah, observers are essentially slicing reality in a certain preferred reference frame. Similar observers slice it in a similar way.

So they observe a similar reality that exists, sort of we exist essentially in a common, say, epistemic and ontological reference frame. But, you know, so there's a deep kind of metaphysical and physical relationship between the nature of observers and how they kind of slice through what is a much more kind of, I think, highly variegated, complex, almost infinite dimensional object. And that ultimately just, you know, you just describe that as, yeah, yeah, essentially,

you know, something like manifestation could be considered true, although probably not in the way it's kind of typically packaged up in like the secret, right? It just happens to turn out that human consciousness and consciousness in general is an irreducible and fundamental feature of reality. And so once you have to bite that bullet, you have to kind of, you know, kind of invert the way you normally think about um the relationship between uh objective independent observables right the things that we normally take to be sort of the concrete stuff of existence that we are observing or interacting with the kind of the phenomenon that we measure as part

of our our experience um and there's a you know a very kind of fraught you know age-old question in his in in philosophy of science and uh ontology sort of the nature of the external world and you know realism versus subjectivism um and i think like all these sorts of classic philosophical dichotomies it's always kind of a mix of both is the answer right that they're kind of false dichotomies um but you know you can go from the air ultimately this is the way science sort of works is you need to kind of go out and do the frontier experiments to kind of try to collect anomalies and then on the other end you need to have like serious scientists philosophers essentially trying to come up with candidate explanations that are trying to reach to that

data and try to like interplay and do a dance with those anomalies and to try to come up with a new conceptual framework right i think ultimately we're gonna we're gonna have to be we're gonna have to come up with new frameworks like new vocabularies new models new math essentially that's kind of been the history i expect that that to continue um and uh and then you know we're gonna wake up in 20 30 years and it's just going to be kind of accepted that that the world is a different way than we thought you know 20 30 years before um and uh but yeah i mean the the neuromeditative stuff is the one that i was the toughest for me to kind of bite the bullet on or at least thus far i'm i'm you know i'm suspending disbelief um certainly um and i've

also had very interesting interactions with people you know very very powerful individuals that like hold to some some some similar sorts of beliefs um and you know it's you know human beings are fallible at all scales right there's a a fractal you know disposition to uh heterodox beliefs and you know uh things that also tend to give you a sense of your own power right if you uh if you believe that you can if your will you know is is essentially metaphysical in the world it's a sense of oh i can i can now uh i can manifest existence um yeah that's that's a difficult question for me because it's always a dances between the metaphor and the ontological implication right and uh but the the story of the bid axis is like okay well the good thing about

bitcoin is it's a you know it's a probabilistic process right so you should be able to tell over time if that's a statistically relevant anomaly i haven't done the math it'd be interesting to see like how far how many standard deviations is it from you know just a pure pure whether it's a poisson process or something like that um is uh is uh is that uh is that block reward um coming in and there was a a major lab set up at princeton called the princeton parapsychology lab which was doing these experiments for many years it was shut down maybe 10 years ago but uh but they were they took a very serious effort i think maybe you know jesse michaels has talked about some of those things um you know different studies that they had done to try to like you know pin down like

these like anomalous fringe psi related phenomenon um and uh some people are convinced that they're legit um there's some interesting things you can do now with like uh random random number generators or quantum uh random number generators uh which i mean i've seen some results of i haven't seen like you know the scientific um papers but um interesting you know sort of initial data, you know, quantum random number generator is a pretty simple thing. It's like you have a photon source, a beam splitter, and then kind of two detectors A and B. And so, and this is like a pretty standard setup in like any physical, any optical physics lab, which I worked in at Hopkins, setting up these beam splitters.

So they're really, really precise in the sense you can pretty much get exactly 50% kind of split right between detector A, detector B. And they use a lot of quantum computing, all sorts of stuff. And so it's but you can package a pretty small device. So it's a photon source beam splitter, two detectors, and you just have a read on the screen, which is like, you know, this line of like, you know, a and B, right? So like, say there's a million photons a second, and it's doing a measurement, say 10 times a second, you're basically getting

a plot of any given point in time, you know, was it was it what was an A or B, and it's like a smooth average, right? So you would expect right, that line to just be 50%, right, kind of tiny little fluctuations right just sort of random noise above 50 50 um but what if you put people around it that are engaging in these uh uh you know apparent neuro meditative practices um do you see deflection characteristically from the 50 percent uh do you see that deflection above a certain statistical threshold say one in 100 or one in 200 does that does that deflection take on a characteristic curve is that characteristic curve a degree of deflection

consistent over many repeated trials if you did that experiment i think that's like highly suggestive data there's something anomalous happening how and why or what uh remains to be explained but i don't think you could just rule out that observation if you were able to demonstrate that there's a statistically significant anomaly there that's a pretty simple experiment that can be done right now um and uh yeah i think that's kind of what you just need to do right uh so maybe we'll be doing that so you just have somebody engaging in neuro meditative activity basically standing there being like i'm rooting for a just like thinking a a a i mean this is beyond my expertise but i don't know if it's literally you root for a

or you just engage in a certain you know lots of people engage in these practices right they're not like super anomalous right like transcendental meditation holotropic breathing uh you know do like hemi-sync bioral beats like it's not truly exotic but um you know it just you know shifts people into different states of consciousness we're just you know they they they you know people that meditate kind of know that right kind of qualitative it's a different experience right i mean different traditions have different names for it but it's very clear that there are different states of consciousness human beings can engage in i mean the most exogenous ones are induced by psychedelics right where it's very clear that when you're on different psychedelics the world you

you perceive is radically different the degrees of freedom the structures the patterns the phenomenological presentation of information is like radically different um so you know whether you ascribe ontological reality to that presentation is a whole separate like loaded question but it's very clear that like the normal waking sort of conscious mode where we're navigating reality or having conversations or assessing you know you know the like the work day the emails is like a certain narrow slice of the of the the the space of possible conscious states that humans can engage it um and then there's a question if there are certain sets of the states that have a non-local effect on random processes for example that's a

that's a scientifically formulatable and testable question and then and the telepathy tapes is the same thing which is like uh same thing i was i was very much um uh intrigued uh had my curiosity peaked uh uh certainly by by those episodes um and i think it's a it's about time we have the you know the science done right let's have you know again it's a difficult more fraught thing you gotta get irb approval you have to put you know these are these are children right these are these are families um that are claiming to have these abilities uh in these conditions and so you have to kind of set up the right controlled experimental conditions to try to see okay can they actually

read the minds of their parents from an isolated room right can you show that that that uh that uh that knowledge that they have could not be gained in any other way than through some sort of non-local consciousness right and it's typically with the mothers right again when you say typically it's like i haven't seen no data so i've seen no like t tests of like but you know people construct all of plausible explanations you know pair bonding evolutionary selection you know early infants can't communicate so they have to bond with the mother and if there's this um natural ability that's in all sort of biological creatures above a certain level of evolution the evolution would select for it um at a certain phase of development and that would maybe lead to a bias in terms of the

the gendered presentation of that effect yeah no i've i mean this is weird it's gonna sound weird i've had an experience like this in my life where my brother and i were irish twins we're only 11 months apart we shared a room for 18 years and we have i'd like to think we have a deep connection there was an instance uh my sister-in-law my brother-in-law the night of their wedding or the morning after the night of their wedding i woke up and my cousin my wife my then girlfriend and i slept in the same room and my cousin had actually shared a room my brother and i down the shore in summers over over like a 10-year period my cousin and i woke up and the first thing we thought is like there's something wrong with connor and lo and behold like he was

in the hospital and there was just something we both like woke up and just like i had a weird feeling we're like there's something wrong with connor specifically like we both singled in on my brother and he was in the hospital and um that was like a weird an example of something like this that um that i truly believe this is the only example i've heard of but like there there is some sort of weird you see here with twins all the time like there is this sort of telepathic connection yeah no i've heard similar similar stories right and this is this is why it's so elusive and it's hard to pin down because often often the stories when you experience them they're extremely compelling and you kind of know that that what happened happened right and it's i think

a very similar um epistemics to like the ufo phenomenon right well like people that observe these things that have a first person encounter uh with these objects or with the beings it's like they know this is real right but it's it's hard but it it's a personal story it's like it creates this um this kind of cleavage between their sense of the reality of what they experienced and then anyone who hasn't and it's like how to communicate the veridicality of that experience to a third person that hasn't seen it it's just kind of this accretion of people having these anomalous experiences building up over time i think we've seen this kind of take place and then also the social taboos against discussing it as a thing right there's always lots of press

preference falsification in society certain sets of taboos where topics are considered um you know off limits to discuss and i think both of these taboos and obviously bitcoiners know know know how to observe when taboos are shifting right in society um where where you just you're like yeah this is a thing that's an in-group kind of um discussion topic but i know the out group sees it as fringe or taboo or not serious those are not objective facts those are just how human beings choose to relate to certain issues and i think the uap phenomenon and psi phenomenon are are two very important subjects that are undergoing this this uh socialization process and we're in the middle of it right now um but that that idea of synchronicity that idea of

non-local connection between human beings or even animals um is something i take very seriously right as like data right i have you know lots of potential will be like physical and metaphysical explanations for it but um it's also something i think the government has paid close attention to for a long period of time, right? So just like it kind of served the government's interest to have kind of UAPs be a fringe taboo subject that was scorned by popular discussion as part of a psychological operation

to, you know, dissuade serious attention on it. I think the same thing has been underway on the side side, right? I think for very similar reasons. And so the supposition then that I've drawn is, OK, I believe with a high likelihood that there are legacy programs, so to speak, that have been under high degrees of compartmentalization associated with UAP retrieval and reverse engineering of non-human objects, craft with highly anomalous material construction and performance characteristics. I think also the study of anomalous forms of human consciousness or capacities associated with human human consciousness have also been the subjects of deep and very serious, long running study by U.S. government or related entities. And I think those two research activities were intimately related.

um and uh and so yeah i think this is the the rest of the world sort of slowly and very haltingly and um uncomfortably kind of adjusting itself to certain facts and and knowledge that uh certain elements of our society uh have known for for some time um and this is the process of integrating that knowledge in a in a deliberative fashion across society that's the process we're under we're undergoing right now yeah i you know me they call me marty jones i'm very uh very much open to all these theories and all that but i think the the smoking gun for me this was years ago men who stare at goats like i truly believe that the government does try to normalize some ideas via hollywood and i think that movie specifically was like the government's working

on remote viewing and telepathic sort of endeavors. And it's been laid bare in declassified documents that they have been testing this stuff. Yeah. And it's it's not like a historical thing like those are active programs. Pretty sure of that. I mean, you just read Lou Elizondo's book and going back to your your point about, OK, that

there seems to be some biological connection here. some evolutionary selection pressure here uh it doesn't take a whole lot to kind of engineer a kind of plausible scientific explanation which is if if consciousness is fundamental if there are degrees of freedom that are accessible to conscious beings um there's a root structure of reality that isn't just you know essentially billiard balls you know particle fields etc um then uh evolution would would would explore it right like it would just it's a degree of freedom that evolution has a selection advantage to figure out how to how to use um and if there were ways of essentially getting small hints of danger right um through uh through exploiting that degree of

freedom well that would be a selection advantage and and maybe in modern society right or in modern ever since we became agrarian settled civilization like that latent ability which has became attenuated um over time sort of socialized out of us especially as we grew but in certain parts population maybe through just genetic uh lottery as well as professional self-selection right especially individuals say involved in special operations or high-risk intelligence uh activities um those those abilities that were latent or genetically um you know gifted uh are uh are extremely relevant and if that were the case you would expect the government to be very active in identifying such individuals and steering them into such programs um because they would have a

selection advantage. They would be less likely to get killed in an ambush, right, when they're conducting a high-risk operation behind enemy lines. And maybe some of those individuals might even have an exceptionally strong ability to engage with these other types of these anomalous programs relating to UAPs. And you would want to put those individuals to work in those programs. So this is kind of a Bayesian branch sort of inference process, where if you present someone with a proposition at the further end of the branch, like the government has psychic spies that are summoning uap objects trying to even fly them with psychic uh human beings it sounds kooky and crazy right but if you actually start from a you know more you know just one branch up

right this is a slight deviation from your current priors and worldviews and you just add on these plausible assumptions and uh inferences from uh government and associated first person experiences you can kind of get yourself out to that part of the tree it's only like a few hops um but most people don't do that most people just like just sort of look at the outer proposition and it it's so far from their current priors that it seems impossible um i think that's uh not likely to be true yeah i'm pulling this back into the context of what's going on geopolitically right now the matter of fact statement earlier this week because considering everything that's going on there does within the administration there

does seem to be like a calm cool and collected um sort of stature or some sort of perspective that they're putting forward it does from my observation does feel like they think they have an ace up their sleeve whether it's something economically um we were talking about it yesterday on the bitcoin magazine or bitcoin conference spaces like this idea of um pricing the gold up uh repricing the gold to its current price and maybe dumping it buying bitcoin as a geopolitical move to do to china what what happened when they went on a silver standard when the world was adopting the gold standard um you talk about the the technology that we may have that we haven't disclosed yet that is sort of a trump card that's what that's

i don't know just getting back to the metaphysical the spidey sense that you were just describing it like observing all this it's just like what is being portrayed publicly in the mainstream media and even um via some press conferences by administration officials like it just seems like that's all a facade a sort of sideshow that's being presented to the world while things are happening behind the scenes. Yeah, I think it's actually kind of a mix of both, to be honest. I think you have both a kind of O'Doyle rules mentality, right? There's a bunch of like extremely self-confident blowhards just driving themselves off a cliff. And I won't name certain individuals in the administration who I think have that type,

right? And then I think there are kind of like the master planners who think they have the ace up their sleeve. Right. But like the Trump administration isn't this sort of, you know, entirely coherent. Right. It's like a court with lots of different factions. Some, I think, that feel like they have more farsightedness, others that are, you know, much more able to kind of win the president's ear for a particular purpose in a particular day. So I think it's both at once. Right. But yeah, I mean, you're you're I had almost the same sort of sort of vibe right of of what's really going on here it's like there's a certain sense of confidence right that's undergirding this administration it could be unfounded confidence

could be this sort of irrational or dual rules um blowhardness um but it also could be based off of what they believe is to be pretty solid advantages and there are two two categories of that uh type of advantage that they might be leaning on right one is like this very exotic type of thing like the true you know whatever breakthrough propulsion or energy that they've got you know locked up for decades that now they've got their hands on as they've taken the reins of power and done some doge purges and tried to like corner the legacy programs and do all the behind the scenes yada yada yada you know that's a scenario um but then there's just the more prosaic quote unquote um you know in the in the in the public domain uh technology curves that they might just be looking

at as giving them kind of a get-out-of-jail-free card in the next two to three years, potentially sooner, when it comes to AI and energy in particular, right? And so, I mean, it's not a surprise that, like, you know, folks are very much obsessed with these exponential curves on AI scaling, and they seem to be holding up, and it's becoming increasingly the opinion inside relevant tech circles and filtering into the political circles that were not that far away from having essentially frontier models that are generated principally by other frontier models to the point where humans are no longer the primary factors of production

for new AI systems. And that is then leading people to speculate, if you hit to that point in the next 16, 24, 36 months, do you get to a point of bootstrapping self-improvement? and uh that then kicks in you know a new phase of the exponential curve uh and that we could be hitting a few of these phase transitions um where most ai research is or ai research is you know accelerated dramatically um and then becomes uh less and less relevant uh with humans in the loop and then gets this sort of takeoff whether it's a slow or a fast takeoff but essentially where we

become less relevant to its future improvement uh there's that sort of sort of trend lines which folks are now you know pulling forward to something like 2027 2028 maybe 2029 um which is in the political time horizon of of dc now right that's like you know when jd wants to run for president right uh and uh and so that's that's one major i think exogenous variable that's coming in that's saying that's you know could be a deus ex machina right for okay there's a bunch of tariff induced mess there's supply chain snarls there's maybe even a recession but don't worry like agi is going to come to the rescue in 2026 2027 and everyone will forget it because we've got this productivity miracle that combined with you know the certain strong hints again

it's hard to tell how much of this people talking their book but and it's always been around the corner this idea of uh economically relevant fusion uh so helium is you know altman and teal backed firm they took soft bank money their evaluation about four and a half billion earlier this year um they i mean whispers are that they're they're planning to sort of unveil their their system which is being built on in washington next year um i think there's a lot being lined up for like america's birthday to be honest as like uh you know okay let's let's do this big like massive flex basically on the world on your domestic politics like yeah yeah 25 25 was messy but we had to clean up the biden regime's messes we had to deal with all the china stuff we had to

like you know you know basically and you could like you know we had to kind of we had to crack some skulls it was messy it was it was confusing it was chaotic don't worry you know that's all behind us now and then they roll out you know the stuff they roll out oh look ai's coming it's gonna it's gonna it's gonna it's gonna be awesome we've got we've got fusion coming it's gonna be awesome we made all these trade deals we're making so much money like we're probably going to do yield curve control on the back end and we're going to be printing money to boost asset prices we're going to lie about inflation don't worry right so it's like we're gonna do it's gonna be a massive psyop trick right but they need to have a few like you know a few things that kind of goose

the popular imagination um uh so that might be part of this uh overall sense of confidence um But I do think like this idea of a techno industrial revolution is top of mind for the sort of core policy engine inside inside the Trump administration, like they're laser focused on AI, robotics, breakthrough energy and space. And, you know, in principle, it has nothing to do with UAPs. I think in practice, I think it's you're sort of stepping stones in that in that direction. um and uh and yeah and i think it's no coincidence that um china sort of subtly released a news report about their own you know fusion research reactor they have a few different versions of it but this one in particular happened essentially be a clone of the particular technique that helion uses um and so this is now like the high high stakes technology competition for these breakthrough

industries now the deep seek stuff has been poured over by re think boy on twitter but it's a real it's a real sense of concern i think ultimately we're going to head towards a recognition that um no one can really win this race to be honest um because if we if we get too far ahead i mean the folks behind this kind of ai 2027 kind of new report they they're worried that if the u.s actually gets this uh this this takeoff lead that china will literally just invade taiwan or we're just like nuke the supply chains or bomb our data centers or do something like which now seems fanciful but but in the in the sort of realist logic of if someone's about to have a runaway strategic overmatch you just have to eliminate it and be willing to risk war in order in order to do

that and these are sorts of the propositions that sound like okay this was like a less wrong blog but now they're i think they're going to be the subject of you know high level discussions inside dc um so we're in this bizarre era of i would say accelerating disruptions the kind of hockey sticks that are overlapping and i see these three hockey sticks that i just happen to you know be paying close attention to like there's the bitcoin hockey stick all your listeners are very focused on a bunch of you know autists saw that hockey stick coming a long time ago and you know when a bunch of autists see a certain hockey stick coming i pay attention when they start like you know shaking the sheet there's a hockey stick coming and this is the this is gradually and

then there's gonna be suddenly here you know and most of the world goes oh you're you're crazy like that's not gonna happen and you know i don't know okay i think certain subsets of of of this uh community are are uh a little bit hyperbolic but i think the general vibe is yeah they're seeing something coming so there's that hockey stick there's the ai hockey stick and then there's the the uap hockey stick maybe less in terms of the actual phenomenon accelerating but more like uh the preference cascade and the official um official stance towards the topic going going through a kind of a hockey stick which will have actual hockey stick effects on our society and economy and i'm just looking at these three things and i see each community kind of in their own

autistic little bubble right it's like the bitcoiners just obsessed about bitcoin that's the only thing hyper bitcoinization is this astrological event it's coming you know the i will be redeemed for having been proven right you know the naysayers the no-coiners they'll get their comeuppance you know the great the great i told you so moment will will be upon us and there'll be a characteristic before and after right where bitcoin is and bitcoiners essentially get to run the show in the ai community it's the same idea you had kind of fringe blogs obsessed with AGI. And now it's like, okay, it's now the thing inside DC, just like Bitcoin is like, you know, it's the topic of national policy. It's no secret that, or it's no surprise that

David Sachs is the AI and crypto czar. These are two conjoined kind of accelerating digital disruptions. The UAP thing is a bit different, has different underlying processes, but it has its own sociological characteristics like Bitcoin, kind of in-group community, podcasters influencers you know factions right canonical lore uh they have to be like you have to go down the rabbit hole to understand uh and uh and then there's a there's a redemptive event that's just around the corner right instead of hyper bitcoinization it's it's disclosure right or instead of uh you know the singularity or the agi takeoff it's it's this disclosure um or consciousness uh awakening and i'm just looking at these three different topics that are all like

objectively accelerating in various ways depending on how you measure it but i'm very close to all three of them and i just discerned this this acceleration um and uh they have the same sort of sociological uh patterns uh you know manifested in each um they're all happening at this roughly the same time with like a speculative you know convergence in terms of maybe uh you know like kink in the curve happening towards the end of this decade which is not that far away um and uh that's just like an observation i don't know if there's underlying explanation uh if it's just a coincidence maybe it's evidence we're in a simulation maybe i'm living in a truman show and you know it just happens to be these like niche interests are like now the things driving human

civilization uh potentially um but uh yeah i just have to like i'm either completely schizophrenic in a truman show or it's actually happening um and i can't do much about being a schizophrenic or being in a tribute show. So I have to operate on the assumption that it's actually happening. In which case, okay. There's a high amount of leverage in making the right decisions

and trying to interpret events in the right way, you know, quickly. So yeah, I'm, I'd say I'm a little bit stressed out. You don't look stressed. You're wearing a great Friday shirt. You know, I'm holding it together, man. hold it together you know no but i completely like i i don't i still haven't figured out my

mind because uh i haven't gone down the rabbit hole enough how uap sort of fits into this convergence i can definitely see the convergence of ai and bitcoin very clearly like if this ai does become autonomous to agree a degree and it gets to the point where it's competent at completing very complex multi-stage task and interacting with with other models and other agents like it's going to need money and i think that money will be bitcoin and it was funny i'm not sure if you saw it the um i think it was old but the clip resurfaced yesterday the um the experiment that this company did with ai agents in minecraft and they independently sort of converged on the gems in minecraft and as money and essentially create like a sound money

um system sound monetary system within within their minecraft server um sort of naturally the ai agents are like oh no this is the best money so i think something similarly will play out there with the emergence of competent agents and autonomous agents and their recognition of bitcoin is good money and that'll lead to a weird form of bitcoin adoption where these agents actually want it to complete task i don't know how the um uap fits into that but i mean i could explain okay i think these things are going to converge uh so you know it requires certain more speculative assumptions but um you know like the most direct one that i can imagine is kind of uh technology change right in particular two types of technology technology that increases

the efficiency of refining gold from the earth's crust and or bringing asteroids into becoming economically viable sources of gold. If you change the stock, if you change like a one time supply shock of gold and or you change the supply, the stock to flow ratio of gold, gold no longer ceases to be that viable as a monetary metal and markets will discount that pretty quickly into the future. So right now, most people, I say common, I say baseline time frame for asteroid mining is 2040 on the earliest side. Probably if you just look at, you know, more likely scenarios, 2050 to 2060, which is beyond most of the duration of most bonds, most derivatives markets, most commodity futures markets. And so that's like a thing that's not priced in literally.

There's no instrument really to trade that. But if you had technology start to diffuse in the next five to 10 years, that dramatically accelerated or expanded the capabilities for high efficiency, say, laser based or refining and or novel propulsion systems that made asteroid mining much more feasible on a shorter time horizon. Right. That would then pull forward people's expectations from, say, 2050, 2060 to like 2030, 2040. And then that starts getting priced into derivatives markets for and commodities futures pricing around around gold. And that that's like a one time thing, right? Like that's human civilization was digging things out of the dirt for 5000 years. That became monetary metal for all of our civilization. And I think people just assume that like the technological growth curve that's accelerating in all these other ways will not have any implication.

on the stock to flow ratio of gold which seems like i don't know like people are making all sorts of assumptions around agi changing synthetic biology and breakthroughs infusion research and all these other crazy world civilizational uh shifts on our technological capacity but no one assumes that like this one little number right from you know that's core to the to the function of gold in the monetary system goes from say two or three percent a year to five or ten or 15 to 20 percent a year and gold then effectively becomes demonetized becomes more like a copper right um that's again you know i don't have to put too many assumptions into about real like aliens and shit uh to to to make it seem that like actual gold will become demonetized in the next

10 to 20 years um uh by by pricing in these these technological disruptions which could manifest in 20 30 years um and then there's lots of other stuff right that could compound on top of that Uh, and that's, so in a world of like accelerating technology change and, uh, where the factors of production and, um, automation and, and, and, and agentic, uh, artificial intelligence that start to produce, um, new processes, uh, that are radically more efficient and more effective than current industrial processes. Then I look around at anything that is currently scarce, right? Like the, like one sort of banal way of summarizing is like, uh, you know, if we don't, if,

If the ASI doesn't kill us, or we don't use it to develop pathogens that wipe ourselves out, or cyber attacks that take down the global grid, if we actually get, say, a good, you know, ASI transition path, you know, we're going to be in a world of like, decreasing scarcity for most industrial products, most goods that satisfy human needs, and we'll just be expanding factors of production at an extremely high rate. um and so the world system will need uh something that is that is scarce that is not going to be um uh you know uh devalued by some you know technological breakthrough right it's like the risk of the 20th century was governments will devalue your your currency right and the risk of 21st century is that technology will devalue your your scarce assets right um and So you're going to need digital scarcity that, you know, is a has difficulty adjustment. So regardless of your factors of production breakthroughs, your Moore's law or your energy growth rate, you know, Bitcoin will still keep producing to its supply schedule. Yeah.

I think that's just like too much schizo to pack into one scenario. I think it's likely to be true. the problem is i look around dc and i see the kind of typical think tanks doing the typical think tank thing and everyone's like in a tizzy about tariffs in the geoeconomic u.s china jibba jabba and i'm like okay that's a six-month issue like yeah what's it what's a six-year issue a six-year issue is this stuff um and six years is like i've got young kids like okay this i'm not trading the next six months i i want a life i want to trade in my life over the next six years to sure that like i am prepared for these disruptions and i would like the government to have a time

horizon that matches mine um and i don't see that i see everyone just obsessed with the noise of the day and having a hot take and yeah well going back to um this confidence this i don't know if it's a doyle rules confidence or measure confidence due to information that the trump administration has that has not been disclosed but i think there were two things in recent weeks that really piqued my interest in the sense that like oh there's there's some recognition here and it plays into the geopolitical sort of brush up we have with china right now specifically is oklo had the red tape ripped off like oakland go begin planting your smrs down um i think they have an official contract with the

government to do something on military bases which is good to see i've been following oklo for years um they were um they were very active within the bitcoin mining community like trying to just game plan with bitcoin miners about how bitcoin mining could help them sort of bootstrap their economic viability nice and the places they wanted to go so it's like cool to see the red tape there and then the other thing i mentioned yesterday on the spaces that we were both on the again matter of fact disclosure that in i believe 2016 or 2017 uh we were made aware that there were transformers being imported from china that were being integrated into substations that had back doors that would enable china to remote shut them down and disrupt our grid um so saying

like planting this flag in the sand for anybody paying attention like no we are going to do some reshoring or shifting of our manufacturing supply chains because there is this achilles heel that that could potentially exist within our grid system that uh in the form of this backdoor that china's integrated into some of these these transformers so those two things it's like recognizing that's happening and then at the same time letting the nuclear proliferation nuclear energy proliferation really begin to take off yeah well it's kind of interesting our our next door neighbors uh at bpi um uh the office downtown right now which is in an industrious is is akla they're like literally next to us and then uh just just down the hall like

one office over is a quantum computing uh you know company so it's like okay you know they're all right there right throw them all together um but uh no i think you're you're you're right i think my expectation i think this administration is putting together a you know they want to change the narrative ultimately right they kind of fucked up the last two weeks and i think the the wiser hands are now taking control of the wheel and the odoyo rules chance is now you know saying like shut up guys like let's get let's get our shit together um and now they're you know they're trying to put together packages of big ideas i think one of those could be a multi-trillion dollar like techno-industrial investment project um you know a big big

bazooka essentially designed to hit all of these things right domestic reshoring semiconductors but also nuclear energy supply chain, as well as nuclear energy production, space technologies, automated manufacturing, you know, the idea to kind of get robotics back. I mean, it's basically their panic that like China basically has the Silicon Valley ecosystem driving a flywheel, but for advanced manufacturing and robotics and drones and EVs. And they have a whole massive, you know, giga clusters of these sorts of integrated ecosystems that they've built up over 20, 30 years. And we're like, oh shit,

we need to kind of like catch up to them on those industries and like look ourselves in the mirror and be like, okay, yeah, we've got all the software and the whizbang gizmos and we've got what we do. Do we actually have the hard manufacturing capacity,

the industrial ecosystems to match that? It's going to require trillions of dollars of crash investment, which, you know, where's that money coming from, right? You're going to have to borrow, right? And so this idea of fiscal probity, fiscal consolidation, I think is all just a big psyop. I think it's just it's just basically to engineer, you know, a certain agreement with the with the Republicans for the reconciliation process now before they find other tools to to to to basically goose fiscal spending.

But but done in a essentially their version of industrial policy. And it's going to be quite controversial, I think, in some of the Republican coalition, because there's a lot of folks that are very much, you know, against industrial policy. But I'd say like the ascendant wing, you know, inside the U.S. is that this is a techno industrial competition that is for all the marbles, basically. And it's going to be taking place in the next, you know, between now and 2030, essentially. And so, you know, Katie barred the door. Screw the bond market. Like, I'm sorry, guys. We got to win.

Right. we're we've now like we've now declared a trade war which is effectively now total economic war with china like supply chains are effed right now like there's like no freight coming in we're basically like you know we basically mutually embargoed each other it's like we are we're like we're people are going to the mattresses right and there's you know it's high stakes um and in that environment you know people are like oh you're threatening the fed and depends i'm like bro like like of course of course they are right like what do you like what is i was talking about this like six months ago like of course they are um now of course there's a how they do it right

whether it's they literally fire him or they just basically put him in a corner or they put some sort of doge minion by his computer that just types in instructions from from from besant or something right it's like no sorry like yeah you're not fired but like you know we've cut off all your access to your to your computer systems and uh you know uh u.s marshals are now preventing you from speaking at the podium right it's like i don't know like you could be there's lots of ways of of you know enforcing uh fiscal dominance those are those are more hyperbolic but um i think that's just just is going to happen right and then we're going to use all sorts of measures to do like backdoor qe um like that's just going to happen uh we're going to use japanese central

bank to do uh you know swaps century bonds maybe even that could be funded with dollar swap lines as like a what i call like geopolitical reach around qe um it's not the fed explicitly buying up these bonds it's just using you know providing dollar liquidity to other central banks to buy up our bonds i think that's just what what's going to happen and they're gonna um like as a sign of like the overton window shifting i was listening to um the odd lots podcast uh and they just had a guy on there a lawyer who is you know talking to them about you know this kind of mar-a-lago core to this idea of could they just um decide unilaterally to like extend the duration of existing treasury securities and you know uh um you know tracy and uh and what's his name

incredulous that the lawyer who's like uh teaches like he's like his niche expertise is like sovereign bond market law he's like yeah like the government has decided to like extend the duration of their existing issues there's like no contractual it wouldn't be considered a contractual default if they were just like yeah that 10-year bond we're gonna take we're now going to pay it over 30 years and uh they're able to amortize the payments of extend the amortization schedule so they don't have to roll over debt interesting just you're allowed to decide yeah like we're just gonna we're gonna manage our duration you know now i think that would be like the extreme end of the end of the uh policy option set right i think the more

more reasonable is basically trying to find these ways of monetizing assets um to uh plus up the tga that can be used to fund buybacks. An even more clever idea might be to use the sovereign wealth fund as an off-balance sheet entity that can essentially leverage up and buy debt as like a sinking fund. I noticed that Scott Bassett took a picture with Seb Gorka in front of a portrait of Alexander Hamilton the other day. And these guys are not, these guys like signaling.

They like doing these little hints. And Hamilton's like famous innovation in American financial history was uh this idea of a sinking fund essentially how do you officially create an off-balance sheet entity that kind of helps relieve the government of of debt right and it came from bank of england kind of related innovations in the 17th century but it's like okay we got too much debt we got essentially this you know we got someone's got to eat these losses how do we kind of cleverly structure essentially essentially deep like printing money but using a series of financial engineering tricks where um it's not obvious how the money is printed right and where the effects

are in the in on the government's balance sheet and aside wealth fund is a very useful vehicle for that right that you could uh that you could use um so i i just think people underestimate when push comes to shove when the government's when when a when a powerful government is backed into a corner like they'll come up with they'll come up with shit man like everyone's like oh no no i think during a 2008 financial crisis it was like this is the moment the system's going to collapse right like the dollar's dead because no one thought the fed could just expand its balance sheet to like nine trillion dollars or whatever and you go oh well you know i didn't think that they could expand the balance sheet to nine trillion dollars well they did it's like when

we think the fed the fed's collective balance sheet or sovereign wealth funds couldn't expand the balance sheet to 20 30 trillion dollars you go oh no they can't do that i don't know they can't or like in the 30s where we basically defaulted on the debt and everyone thought oh this is going to be like a run on the u.s dollar yeah it's like stock marketing collapse like you know it was just there you go we're just flipping the script or 1971 like went off the gold standard yeah there was some it was stagflation people like i think people underestimate the like sheer inertia of power in the global system um and that there are lots of tricks up the government sleeve do all sorts of accounting you know maneuvers there's like armies of lawyers

inside the fed and the treasury whose like sole job is to like come up with this like like obscure shit and and then in a crisis it's like boom there you go and you're like oh i that that's not allowed like there are rules it's like there's no rules bro what the hell they want um uh and yeah so i just think you know when push comes to shove and trump is of course this you know now is commander-in-chief that's willing to wield executive authority you know in a in a self uh confident way without you know self-constraint right um and there's an irony here i'm i'm in a hot take ramble but there's an irony also like you know i have mixed opinions of of of the policy approach and the implementation here um

and and one of the you know the negative uh opinions is it's essentially central planning It's effectively, you know, Trump just deciding, OK, here's what the tariffs should be. Here's how I'm going to rewire the global trade system. And I think there's doing it out of a strategic, you know, ambition and a way to challenge Chinese mercantilism and rewrite the global balance of of competitive advantage. And so you kind of have to have executives do do, you know, national policy in the national interest. But I think that quickly goes into this, you know, domain where a few smart people at the top can decide where credit should be allocated, right? Like, you know, we need more robot factories. So here's $10 billion to build some robot factories.

And in the end, right, those just become grift machines where people close to the circles of power get preferred access to the money printer, right? This is the classic Bitcoin argument about QE and all the other sort of distortions in the financial system is there's a, you know, there's an inherent pathology that that generates. And just because it's your guys doing it doesn't mean it's like good, right? And so I think just this is the great tension, I think, between national security, strategic competition, you know, this tendency that to beat China, we have to kind of emulate China is very dangerous. because like we don't want to just emulate china like it's like we don't want to just become the america version of china light right with uh central planning credit capital controls financial repression you know uh preferred allocation of credit to like strategic industrial sectors effectively state-owned enterprises that are arm's length from the you know elite factions

that run the country that seems like not a recipe for free markets innovation competition the thing that actually america you know at least uh at least rhetorically has positioned itself as the leader of so there's there's a danger here that like we just sort of go full we go full china but in like our own way i hope we don't do that and i think bitcoin is a natural counterbalance to that right ultimately right yeah no i'm pulling up the tweet because there's something that's confirming this these is already a headline yesterday breaking spacex andrel and palantir teaming up to lead bid to build trump's golden dome u.s missile defense system it's like those three companies are very uh yeah tightly aligned and that also is like okay you know if i have my

um if i put on a certain a certain lens here of uh uap informed a speculation um you know i i it's it's my strong belief that uh the star wars program in the in the 80s was effectively a cover for you know ramping up these these uap programs which were kind of in stasis in the 70s a bit after carter came in and kind of purged the cia and there was the stagflation shit a lot of financial insecurity and so i think whatever research programs were kind of you know put on some bit of stasis a bit and i think reagan came in he's like all right we're gonna we're gonna ante up on this stuff and it by that point they had been sort of semi-privatized so and there was a lot of incentive to kind of turn the turn the machine

back on i think the star wars uh initiative sdi was basically just a massive front to like ramp up these secret r&d programs um uh and of course that was to the great benefit of the dominant sort of techno-industrial defense system at the time which was dominated by you know lockheed um all these defense primes right in northrop grumman etc which have now kind of been on the wane uh as these ascendant defense primes ai uh infused sort of silicon valley originated uh palantir uh andoril spacex kind of uh elon teal orbit companies are now in the driver's seat in in the kind of the political economy of the defense intelligence and industrial system uh and so the golden dome is kind of like to me essentially star wars 2.0 right it's the big front but so

if my assumption was that star wars 1.0 was essentially a a front for you know rejiggering and uh you know catalyzing acceleration of the these more exotic programs i think golden stuff would be the natural um similar modern counterpart and of course it's all framed as this uh u.s china competition um but yeah i mean but then you get to these you want to go real uh real rabbit hole here is like okay the thing that about the nhi conversation people don't want to take seriously is like the implications of it being true right everyone just wants to like just take that one little dip in the water and go okay yeah this universe is a big place there's probably other intelligent civilizations around hey maybe even you know that that uh that

planet we just made observations of actually has life and maybe that means life is pretty common throughout the universe you accept that and maybe they're sending probes around a buzz you know hither and yon but but if uh you know you have to like take take very seriously your view of geopolitics in light of what you might call exo politics right if geopolitics is the relations between uh human states human institutions on terra firma then exo politics is the relation between human civilization and non-human civilizations um which again following that basic logic of you're on a bayesian tree and you just carry forward the inference from limb to limb from branch to branch then uh if you're at a point of the branch where you you know take on at least

as plausible that there are non-human intelligences associated with some higher order some higher exo-political you know local uh to our to our galactic neighborhood system of intelligence is there some regulative principle that governs the relationships between those entities and their technology and their you know activities something you might call a civilization um and we're embedded in it and we are just you know waking up to that fact right um to my mind there's like an inverse of the ai alignment problem now right so everyone in ai circles is obsessed with this idea that we need to align uh these ai civil these ai systems which could be constructing their own independent civilization you know alien to us we need to ensure that their civilization

there's their activities essentially their goals and norms are aligned with ours in some way right to ensure that our interests aren't uh you know supervened or abrogated you know and there's failure modes of extinction risk uh if that alignment doesn't occur successfully so that's obviously the obsession of all the uh sort of agi asi pilled uh autists in san francisco but i think there's a more important uh alignment question which is alignment of human civilization in the light of the potential reality of a higher a higher order civilization uh or a higher order structure uh of norms that uh we we're dimly aware of and that you that become more relevant when you reach certain levels of technological capacity right where you're now essentially coming out of

your little walled garden here and you're now going to be entering the cosmic club well there's certain rules of behavior you have to abide by um and uh you know if you don't abide by those i don't know what the what the constraint or sanction is uh so it to my mind it it it's quite important that we understand what those norms are what those rules are what those constraints are. And we sort of align ourselves and our AIs in such a way that we sort of integrate as a cooperative member of that larger community, so to speak, right? That's essentially we're auditioning whether we like it or not for membership in a cosmic club, right? And that cosmic club has certain norms, right? Certain rules of decorum, you could say. And maybe human

beings are not exactly the most um uh the most decorous uh species are we uncouth are we uncouth we're a little uncouth we're like you know we're like uh you know there's there's maybe bitcoiners right a bit uncouth but you know when we come to dc we come to a bitcoin policy event right even jack mallers puts on a suit right so it's uh it's like hey you know it's a little bit uncomfortable for humans to kind of put on this uh this suit right uh of behavior but we're gonna have to i think um and this is i think where the consciousness thing comes comes into play because i think it's not just a technological component to that um maturity it's a it's a consciousness element of maturity as well yeah no it can't go back to the convergence of these three things it

almost feels like we're playing through fermi's paradox and getting to the great filter and is our ability like i that's and this is a theory we've talked about on this show as it pertains bitcoin since the beginning which is this idea that to enter this cosmic uh society as you described it like maybe one of the preconditions is that you have to prove that you can invent a money that operates in the way that bitcoin does that is open fair verifiable transparent if you will and then like you combine that with like ai and like to your point like i like to take the optimistic point of view which is like where this convergence is happening it's very obvious and we're pushing it forward and when it does ultimately converge at some point

probably in the near future within the decade um have we sort of threaded the needle of proving we can invent money like this we can create artificial intelligence like this combine them and we are advanced enough to enter the cosmic community if you will and get through the great filter before we kill ourselves yes and you know of course there's a lot of there's a lot of stakes in uh how you reason through that type of question but there are these odd you know i'm not one of folks who just sees destiny or providence right but i but i notice anomalies right and it's just you know there's sort of an anomaly associated with the convergence of all these different um patterns and trends and just like historical contingencies like trump just surviving you know

by us you know a hair right uh literally um and uh if i if i really want to stitch together kind kind of a bit of a sci-fi plot that I find, you know, chuckle, that I chuckle over is, okay, assume we're on the timeline here where Bitcoin becomes global money, right? In 2040, 2050, what elements of human society are going to essentially have the most capital? Going to be Bitcoiners, right? And like, what is the characteristic sort of cognitive phenotype of a Bitcoiner? They're pretty much autistic. They're obsessed with technology. They've probably read a lot of sci-fi and uh their mission in life was for bitcoin to become global money so once they succeed at that and they're trillionaires and they're still very autistic

and obsessed with technology what are they gonna do they're likely gonna you know use that money and they're sort of not necessarily loyal to and haven't been enculturated into the same systems of institutions that you know most most rich people have been so they might create new institutions right new think tanks new research and development uh consortia new sort of breakthrough breakthrough technology new media right new sort of civilizational uh primitives you could say uh or you know structures um orthogonal maybe interrelated with existing institutions so what cohort of the near future you know present path of humanity if we survive is likely going to create super breakthrough technologies likely going to be a bunch of you know extremely autistic

extremely wealthy Bitcoiners. And what if, in the space of possible technologies, something like, you know, time travel or, you know, time, you know, exploration is possible? Now, we don't understand the nature of space-time. We think it's a high-level emergent, you know, phenomenon as well as some other deeper, more complicated structure. But if there's something like, you know,

that in the degrees of possibility for technology, obviously there's the famous grandfather paradox, But there's ways around that, depending on how you model the metaphysics and physics of time. And so just assume that it's possible, right? So then what element of human civilization would likely first create such technology would likely be weaponized autistic Bitcoiners who would then have an interest in ensuring that Bitcoin gets created, right? And so if you would, maybe you can't send back beings, but maybe you can send back kind of information to kind of self-replicate these sort of AI time probes that then want to, you know, collect information from history, right, to train future AI models, right, where maybe they're really saturated with capturing data. So you need to go back in time to get more data. And then also, you know, maybe engage with their conscious AI time probes human beings to shepherd events in the path that they, you know, they see as, you know, their desirable outcome.

And so they want to make sure Bitcoin exists. They want to make sure Satoshi gets the right, you know, inspiration at the right time. And so then it would also explain why you need to have these things, these three things converge. You need to have kind of a Bitcoin thing happen. You need to have it happen around the same time that the AGI thing happens. And it kind of also needs to happen around the recognition that these time probes are real. Right. So this would be like my like sci-fi sort of schizo integration of these three. um now i think there's other things that that story doesn't explain there's lots of other weird

weird stuff associated with uaps and and uh human consciousness but i just find that's a funny it's a funny story that i as i tell it it starts to become superficially plausible it's very compelling your right side i'm left side left side of me has always been like there's something there's like basically the answer is these are all like david bailey's you know time probes and like robot uh robot uh synthetic biology you know artifacts that he's sending back in time just for the lulls yeah it is a fun timeline are you are you having fun i have an amazing amount of fun man like i'll tell you like i my life is just bizarre uh and so i have to kind of lean into the absurdity of it um because you know not too long ago i was doing the normal cyber china

consulting bit and just sort of leaning in on my on the side into bitcoin and then increasingly also into uaps and and then when i decided to basically do the professional like jump in 100 into bitcoin to help lead api as it kind of takes on this like critical and sort of you know very very um like uh time sensitive mission right to effectively try to lock in uh uh you know uh strategic shifts in u.s bitcoin policy so as basically the exact same moment i went in all on this like the uap stuff started like crashing into me right like i don't seek it out really It's like, I'll, I'll say yes to any meeting. I'll talk to anybody. Um, but I don't really have, I don't have like an agenda. I was like, I just, I'm just curious. I want to understand

what's going on. Like, I'm not selling a newsletter. I don't have a podcast about it. I'm just like, okay, I'll have, I'll, I'll meet with people and you know, they tell me some stuff. I'm like, okay, that's, that's interesting. Uh, is there anyone else I should talk to? Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I'll just keep doing that over and over until you talk to pretty much almost everyone you should. Um, and now basically these things are all like interleaving. Like I can't tell you, Can't name names, but I can't tell you the number of people, very wealthy, important people in various different fields that either have the first conversation is a Bitcoin conversation and then it bounces back to UAPs or consciousness. Or people that I encounter on the UAP consciousness side who either have a background in Bitcoin or crypto, they made a lot of money in it, and now this is their thing. And there's just like this, you know, bizarre kind of inter interweaving of these two very, you know, pretty facie distant issues and social graphs that are very much connected in some in some some weird way.

And somehow I find myself sort of stumbling into the center of both of those, you know, social graphs and policy issues. And there's people in Congress that I have conversations with literally about Bitcoin and about UAPs, like members of Congress that are very interested in both in both things and like in positions. i'm like what this is like in a it's just an absurd state of affairs right to like i say that and it sounds you know like nonsense but it's like it's almost like you manifested your own reality you know that's what i'm saying it's either it's like a truman show except like you know it's the universe is projecting like the thoughts uh of like the bizarre uh you know timeline into into the you know into the path in front of me and it's like what's the maximally interesting thing for matt pines right to have happened it's like it's a massively narcissistic

way to view reality right it's like oh no the universe is is designing itself to like provide me the most like you know exact balance of like extreme stress cognitive you know uh stimulation stimulation and like potential personal fulfillment but like just just kind of the carrot is just in front of you right you never quite get get your hands on it it's uh it's wild man um well so yeah so i basically like lean i'm just like decided okay i'm just gonna lean into it all right and just be like yep if this is the timeline we're in then going back to my my earlier kind of i could say highly speculative thesis is that these are the three hockey sticks they're all gonna happen at the same time dc and most of the world has no idea you know it doesn't take either of those

three seriously if they do they maybe take one of those three seriously let alone all three and i take all three very seriously and it's like okay act as if those three those those three things are happening and then try to re reason about how they're gonna you know uh intersect with each other right um and then try to play that out in our present geopolitical and geoeconomic context i mean i'm like okay that's like i stopped there but i think it's we need new institutions we need new you kind of need to break break legacy modes of thinking like i talked to folks at these institutions um atlantic council rand etc and i had these conversations with folks there and they all secretly like are very curious about these things right i think bitcoin is becoming more

normalized right they're kind of stepping dipping toes in the water there the uap stuff for example rand has like a secret mailing list where people send uap related articles to each other um but they don't talk about it and there's no like no commentary it's just like a secret little like distribution which is like for me fundamentally like a huge problem because here's rand like their whole mission is like strategic foresight and analysis for the government and you have you know a bunch of phds in there who's like their whole job is to like look around quarters and yet they have this taboo this preference falsification is so strong that like institutionally it's incapable of taking this question seriously and so now i'm looking i was like oh shit it's

like you know bitcoins have this realization like you know the people in charge really don't know what they're doing right like there's no there's no there's no secret man behind the curtain with the master plan who's like looking out you know four or five steps ahead right there's like literally it's all just humans you know doing normal human dumb shit uh and responding to their own narrow institutional incentives so i think we need just need to like okay there's like a blank space there like we sort of saw it with bpi is like nobody's actually just doing you know serious bitcoin policy in dc bitcoin is a serious thing it's going to have implications for government policy all these different levels just just do a think tank bit write some white papers host some

host some events and then boom like david zell and grant mccarty just like did the thing and now it's a real serious thing and because there was just you know reality is malleable right in that in that way uh and i think uh we don't we don't like uh reason out of domain right we don't like take that and just sort of play in other these other areas but i think it's true it's true across the board i do it too i think people can manifest i think individuals like yourself david grant exists to bring this change about they realize you can just do things you could do the things and things happen um but the one the one thing i want to wrap up on is like talking about this convergence particularly now uap um bitcoin if we're running under the assumption that there is

some sort of physics breakthrough that exists particularly in the realm of quantum mechanics it's been a big topic more recently in bitcoin this idea of shots 56 not being quantum resistant like especially if there is some faction of the administration that recognizes that bitcoin is going to be integral to the future of economic dominance in the world and And they may have a trump card in the sense that they have access to information about physics and advances in that field that probably revolve around quantum mechanics. like with that information like why would you be so aggressive with bitcoin adoption knowing that it does potentially have this quantum sort of achilles heel if something isn't uh added to the protocol in terms of quantum resistant address structures so is there anything at

the intersection there that you've been thinking about yeah so i've been i mean i wrote a whole novel about quantum computing and ai uh i mean i started writing it like nine or ten years ago and it's all about basically a quantum computer that you know gets hooked up to the nsa's databases and does a recursive self-improvement um so i was like you know autistically obsessed with this for a while even before i kind of started talking about bitcoin um and then on the cyber side i did a lot related to, you know, cyber threats and US-China technology competition. And I gained some information

from very highly placed individuals that, you know, they indicated to me, at least at the time, this has been the last two years, that cryptographically relevant quantum computing was at least 20 years away, maybe 10 at the outset. But really, essentially,

it's still a basic science project. And this is the view from folks inside. very well-placed positions in the U.S. government. Again, such assessments would be classified. And so I don't know if they gave me classified information or if they're just feeding me bullshit. But the thing about cryptography that's very, you have to always think about it adversarially, right?

And think about the structures of incentives for cryptographic changes at scale in society, not just across Bitcoin, right? And we have evidence, right, from the Stone Leaks that certain encryption schemes were intentionally weakened in very non-obvious ways. NSA has armies of mathematicians whose sole job is to come up with extremely hard-to-detect weaknesses in encryption protocols,

as well as engineer such weaknesses in such protocols. And so then you have to kind of think about this adversarially, right, In the sense of, you know, and the government is not like a universal thing, right? Like you can imagine certain folks at the White House level want to do Bitcoin and there's certain folks who don't like Bitcoin, right? So from the perspective of people that don't like Bitcoin, so you like put like a simple matrix is like quantum computing is a threat in the near term or is not a threat in the near term.

And then the government likes Bitcoin or doesn't like Bitcoin, right? And you kind of have to reason each of those different quadrants. And I can imagine scenarios where the government doesn't like Bitcoin and quantum computing is actually not a threat, but where they have an incentive to make it seem like it's a threat to try to force the Bitcoin community and as well as lots of other people to basically change their encryption schema to say one of these lattice based methods, which is relatively new, has been tested, released by Nest and people have poured over it. But, you know, the lesson of cryptography is sometimes these these sorts of weaknesses can be very, very hard to know unless you're like, you know, if you have 500 mathematicians working full time like the NSA does. And so you have to have that inherent thing in the back of your mind that, you know. Changing something, especially because of some novel threat that's sort of urgent, right, that can be done to stimulate action that maybe wouldn't otherwise happen. So that's a threat model. Right. There's like people I think you have to reason in different types of threat models.

There is the actual threat from quantum computing that could break break at least shot to be six. And then there's maybe a further breakthrough that would that would threaten Grover for for for mining. That's much I think that requires a much higher threshold in terms of a functional logical qubits. I am I think it's a serious question to be seriously explored. But I think if you're evaluating this rationally as a Bitcoiner, you need to lay out the matrix of scenarios here. And a key scenario is a intentional amplification of the threat of quantum computing in order to accelerate the adoption of weak cryptography to undermine Bitcoin. And that has historical evidence for it. And in terms of latent government, certain government agencies have the intention and the possible capability to do it.

Right. So that's a scenario that has reasonable historical fact pattern, you know, agencies that are pushing such cryptographic schemes and have the capabilities, you know, in theory to insert undetectable weaknesses into such schemes or to design such schemes in such a way that they're breakable only by them. Right. With their own special techniques and computing power. So that's a pretty substantial scenario to put on the board. You weigh that against the scenario of a continued progress in cryptographically relevant quantum computing that reaches a threshold where it can present a threat to to public private key pairs that are that are that are vulnerable, which is especially like the early coins in particular. so i think we need to reason reason through it uh systematically as a community i think we need to do hard analysis i don't think it's something that you could just wave away either way um and i think you need to you know be rational about assessing evidence for each of those different possibilities um and also think about the the game theoretic dynamics associated with like different crises right because you know systems of rough consensus are very

very stable right unless there's some some massive crisis at least perception of a massive crisis that activates all the human participants in the network in a similar way right and then kind of you can get failure modes where um where like okay everyone has to have this decision and this is like maybe a separate podcast like you get you need to get james and lop on you get all these guys that have their ideas about how this would play out right in sequence of okay where along this scenario in terms of continued, say, overt progress by the known labs, Microsoft, IBM, Google, et cetera, and continued demonstration of increasing size of functional logical qubits. They keep publishing papers that show they're getting to a threshold where maybe they could

be within striking distance of SHA, et cetera. What do we think we're going to be doing, the collective royal we, as a development community, as industry, as miners, et cetera? So how do we respond to that? Right. There's different bips that have been proposed. They have, I think, different tradeoffs in terms of, you know, lots of technical details and and then other unknown, you know, incentive dynamics associated with how such a bit would be introduced. um what you do with the vulnerable coins right some some proposals you need to like you need to burn them right it's effectively a hard fork right um or do you put them into some sort of you know massive multi-sig right it's kind of this uh or just leave them vulnerable um i think it's it's a fascinating question to take seriously if only because i think it acts as a prism to view

some of the core policy and game theoretic questions around bitcoin in light of bitcoin's new seriousness and new level that it's operating at. It's operating at the level where you can imagine a new version of the New York meeting taking place, except it's at the National Security Council. And who's invited to that meeting? And what decisions are getting made? And how effective would those decisions be in the minds of participants and their ability to implement those decisions? Different exchange

operators okay that's u.s based but what does that mean for you know dubai what does it mean for singapore right so there are it's a fascinating question right i think bpi may even design some tales of exercises to sort of just sort of play this out because i think even if you don't have a strong opinion on the quantum computing threat uh itself i think taking it seriously as a threat scenario is very useful to sort of start to tease out some of these new game theoretic and kind of policy incentive questions around Bitcoin and the rough consensus development model. And I think then, you know,

they also informed the larger technical debate about ossification, right? It's beyond my technical competence to adjudicate, but I think we are in this moment of sense that Bitcoin is, you know, I think some developers feel like if there's no changes that happen now-ish, no changes will happen,

unless there's this crisis moment. But then you can imagine standards like, oh, if we're rolling out BIP, you know, the i think it's was it 59 i forget the one that's quant the quantum resistant one it's 385 385 uh then uh you know what what we should do op ctv or something right um you know things things like that it's better to just discuss them out in the open now um as a broader community and uh understand where the corner cases are um and what people's maybe latent attitudes are because sometimes people will think something but they don't want to say it um for whatever reason

because there's an internal social culture in different uh communities such as sub communities inside bitcoin um or it's like if you say if you say anything you're sort of speaking it into existence so don't say the thing um you're manifesting the wrong thing uh i don't know man it's it's a fascinating i think quantum and the other thing i'll say about quantum is that it is also in the top of mind of policymakers inside dc um it's one of the top questions gets asked actually about like stable coins and bitcoin in general is like what's your plan for quantum right uh like howard lutnick is going around that's all he's talking about you know among other things um and now i suspect it's basically because he took the job at commerce

and the first thing they gave him was a briefing by nist um on the quantum stuff um because it's their whole thing and they're really trying to get you know the leadership to basically amplify it and kind of scare corporate america into adopting post-quantum you know cryptographic schemes which is they know is going to be a multi-year process you know update firmware embed it in all these different corporate systems it's very very complicated very expensive to you know swap out encryption um that's built into a lot of you know complicated software stacks so as bureaucratic matter they wanted to elevate it to the principal and get him scared right be like china's almost there sir like if we don't get it like they're going to get it and then we have to ensure that

you know our system isn't bricked by china um which could be could be real threat um but it's also a very you know it's exactly the same thing you would do if you're like you know we would like to have different encryption um out there so yeah i think i think i don't know if it's going to be a spillover though from the from the uap stuff to be honest because i think that the physics there is more disruptive in other ways um i think the physics there is uh you know i go back to the earlier comment i had about how you know we we we figured out the physics of the atom and we created nuclear weapons so whatever the next thing that we figure out about the physics of say space-time or the you know additional um additional field content associated with uh maybe a higher

order symmetry group that is more fundamental than the symmetries associated with the standard model maybe there's some structure that uh unifies uh these different um uh scales of nature and then we understand that structure we understand maybe there are additional fields uh additional forces additional degrees of freedom that you can exploit um they maybe have different energy scales associated with them and might unlock huge amounts of energy and once you do that i mean the lesson was going from chemical propulsion or chemical uh energy sources to atomic energy sources was orders of magnitude increase so i don't know my expectation would be the next thing would be orders of magnitude increase further um and it's not clear to me what you know the the uh

proliferation constraint on that would be like there's a proliferation constraint around nuclear weapons you have to have centrifuges you got to have you know uranium ore you got to have lots of physicists and scientists you know plutonium pits and triggers and all sorts of stuff um if it turns out that maybe you just need something some other maybe uh highly uh uh, uh, maybe just very strong magnetic field that's being, uh, uh, amplified, um, at a very high frequency, uh, in a certain metamaterial in a certain pattern, you get an anomalous effect. Maybe there's other, other things to do with, uh, you know, neutrinos or things, uh, in the standard model that all of a sudden you can now use as a source of technology, communication or

weapon that's i don't know i'm worried about pulling the black ball out of that out of that jar and then it would also kind of explain the secrecy to be honest it's like hey like there's something here that if it really gets out you know anyone with a certain degree of competence could just you know wipe us all out uh would not be good would not be good would not want that to get proliferated until we become a bit more mature as a species i mean this guy goes to peter teal's whole bit which is we're either if you survive you know this technological kind of acceleration um or exponential quote post-singularity moment you either become uh like an like an angel uh like an angelic species that's sort of uh fully altruistic

we're no member of that society um even has like the is it even able to form like the intention to destroy right other elements of society the universe they become perfectly altruistic perfectly beneficent other-minded cooperative right kind of you know the higher the the all the harmonic angels are singing in the perfect choir right in the cosmic order and there would just be no way to to um try to weaponize their technology so either become that like you become angels or you become demons you become a totalitarian lockdown sort of borg society that's so controlled that uh you know a single point of control can unilaterally enforce uh you know counterproliferation of such destructive technologies and um and that might you know be

be like failure modes it's like you either elevate your consciousness where you just kind of you just you just don't be dicks anymore and like the risk of using this technology poorly just kind of goes away because you realize just not cool to do and that's going to become it becomes inbuilt to your nature as a being or you uh become subservient to some ai totalitarian bork and uh you know it's bad uh that was the that was the crux of his lecture series his antichrist first armageddon and yeah but actually i actually don't agree with it necessarily because i actually think both are different versions of the same thing right like they're just they're just different ways of essentially describing what amounts to uh subsumption of the individual

to some aggregate collective um where like just depends on where the where the uh where the uh the uh the force of constraint is being applied right it's essentially if you had the force of constraint built into your personality like a neural link chip that made everyone in society perfectly cooperative and benevolent and there was no urge for rage or doing having wrong think right you know pressing the bad button that kills everybody that just is a you know there's a little chip in your brain that stops you from pressing the bad button how is that different than just like being subsumed to some ai board because as soon as you have that chip in your head that can like selectively you know constrain you know universally and with perfect uh you know

fidelity uh beliefs and decisions by any member of society you know it's kind of the same thing as being a ai totalitarian borg or this angelic harmonic structure so i think there's like that can't be the way this this works i think that think you know like the bit is consciousness this is why like the is the uh the relief valve is recognizing that there is a certain um uh hard reality to um individual consciousness but it's not a like a monad right you aren't like you aren't just in an individual consciousness right you also are in a degree of uh uh structure interrelations and interdependence with other individual nexuses of consciousness so there's a mutual dependence but you're you're an aggregate you're not a unity and i think being able to have

a stable aggregate that doesn't collapse into like a totalitarian unity is kind of the whole bit um which is kind of the whole i don't know like metaphorical point of bitcoin is like how do you have a collect how do you have consensus that is in a unity right how do you have you know essentially individuals making individual decisions that are in the rational self-interest that i'm able to secure their individual you know property rights essentially um in a sphere of freedom uh but participate in a essentially a collective project that has a higher order that has a structure that's endured that's enduring and stable but like okay that's kind of the it's like the metaphor that i think we want to try to apply at all scales it's like say say with ai

right do you want to have it all collapse into like the god ai where everyone basically just has to pay tithe to elon or or uh or sam and he just controls society or do we have decentralized ai right do we have intelligence in our pockets that's tuned to us protected by us control you know we control our data that we can build and participate in the economy with um and maybe it's the whole maybe if i really apply that to uaps right it's like you know some some folks see uaps as these angelic creatures you know some see that as demonic um these are like our religious labels um but there's clearly like a a certain uh variation in the phenomenology associated with these patterns of interaction or engagement that we interpret as benign or hostile or

or beneficial um and maybe there is like a difference at that scale in terms of oh well there's a verge there's a mode of engagement interaction that's kind of this this uh this this right balance between individuation and like collective uh higher order right and there's there's never like the whole point is to find that balance so that you don't collapse, you know, society or become, you know, subject to some hegemonic hive mind Borg. And that seems like the project, right? It's like, okay, that's like, that's the, that's, that's the path. We have, that's the,

that's the thread we have to put through the needle here. That's my, that's my schizo wrap up. Well, do we even have to thread that needle or we just, there's yin and yang and there's always going to be these. benign neutral positive and negative forces that are just interplaying and weaving in and out of each other yeah or or or an asteroid just comes out of you know our blind spot and wipes us out and you know there you go maybe that would universe doesn't owe you anything bro you know great meteor death please come put us out of our misery of thinking

of all these complex problems they're fun though it's always fun chatting about them with you quick correction it's bit 360 not bit 385 for the quantum resistant hash um this is always fun i'm looking forward to bpi's event in june yes exactly yep so so phase one in the bit is to uh lock in pro bitcoin policy in the us and so we're going heavy in the paint on that and so we're putting on our annual flagship event in washington dc june 25th uh bitcoin policy summit sign up um uh request a ticket it will be you know not gonna be bragging but i think it's gonna be a legit legit thing i think people people are gonna be excited about it um so yeah uh be on the lookout for more more stuff coming out of bpi on that front really

want to um drive the agenda inside dc on bitcoin and carry the momentum on these things let's do bitcoin reserve obviously ideas around bit bonds but a whole swath of issues relating to human rights the ability to use bitcoin um without government censorship uh without um you know prosecuting uh you know developers of open source software uh you know pushing bitcoin as both a global neutral reserve asset but also as a peer-to-peer global settlement system um that's That's our core mission and see how that interfaces now with these questions about AI, mining, energy. The good thing about Bitcoin is it's not one thing. It's like 7,000 different things.

And so it keeps us busy and entertained inside DC. And so really proud of the work that BPI is doing, the team that we've now assembled. And we're really excited to open up this partnership with PubKey in DC, essentially a Bitcoin embassy. Hopefully over the summer, we'll be opening that up. yeah having uh events happy hours essentially a cultural node downtown uh for bitcoiners uh to you know uh to to congregate a little bit of a of a shelling point um hopefully uh in in in progress there so yeah really really excited man like this year is just it's accelerating um and it's fun to kind of you know help help steer what uh bitcoin policy might look like in the next few

It really is. Get your suits pressed. If you're going to DC. Yeah. You got to clean up, you know. Shave. Put on your orange tie. Get a good orange tie. Okay. Don't go to Macy's and buy one off the rack. Get a Hermes. Spend a little money. Get a good orange tie. Okay. Yeah. Buy a ticket. You know, it's like, okay, go to Vegas. You're going to waste that money on slot machines and bullshit. You know, save that money. Buy a ticket to the Bitcoin policy summit do it do it don't be late matthew thank you for indulging me my my questions about all these different topics here very well versed on all of them so i really appreciate your time

and uh your relative expertise i really don't know what i'm talking about but i think you do i think you don't i'll say i'll say words i'm just the llm just just auto completing whatever pops into the prefrontal cortex here don't don't be humble okay you know you know what you're talking about yeah you are whatever peace and love freaks freaks thank you for listening to the show i hope you liked it if you did like it please make sure you subscribe rate review the show it helps us out a lot and also if you like these conversations i've come to realize that many people listen to the podcast they don't know we have another sort of layer of this media company we have the newsletter the bitcoin brief go to tftc.io make sure you subscribe there a lot

of the topics that are discussed on this podcast i write about five days a week in the newsletter we also have the tftc elite tier if you sign up for that become a member we have a private discord server for the elite freaks out there where we're dropping ad-free versions of this show and having discussions about everything we talk about a day early logan wanted me to make sure if you want to get the show a day early become a tftc elite member you will get that we have our discord server right now it's conversation between myself and tftc elite tier members but we're going to expand that we'll probably do closed q and a's with people in the industry I may be doing macro Mondays

So join us Go to tftc.io Subscribe Find the button in the top right corner of the website Become a TFTC Elite member Thank you for joining us Take care