The Pomp Podcast - Bitcoin OG Predicts What The World Looks Like In 20 Years | Simon Dixon

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

Simon Dixon is an early Bitcoin investor and the co-founder and CEO of BnkToTheFuture, which backed companies like Coinbase, Kraken, and BitPay. In this conversation, we break down who really controls global capital, how Wall Street is co-opting bitcoin, and what the Coldcard hack means for self custody. We also discuss AI, surveillance, data centers, the K-shaped economy, and why sovereignty will be the most important skill of the next two decades.=======================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates investment strategies across Stocks, Commodities, ETFs and Crypto. Whether you’re rotating into AI & Gold, allocating to the S&P 500, or accumulating Bitcoin, Arch Public executes your plan 24/7 without ever taking custody of your assets or funds. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com, and start your FREE automated trading strategy! =======================Need liquidity without selling your crypto? Take out a Figure Crypto-Backed Loan, allowing you to borrow against your BTC, ETH, or SOL with 12-month terms, 8.91% interest rates, and no prepayment penalties. Or check out Democratized Prime (https://figuremarkets.co/pomp) and earn ~8.5% APY on real world assets. Unlock your crypto’s potential today at Figure! https://figuremarkets.co/pomp Figure Lending LLC dba Figure (NMLS 1717824). Loans subject to approval. Crypto collateral may be liquidated. Terms apply - see full disclosures at https://figure.com/disclosures/ =======================Lava is a global platform for bitcoin financial services. Spend with Lava Card and earn up to 5% back in bitcoin with every purchase— all with no annual fee, no FX fees, and zero spread. Plus you can borrow against your bitcoin at the lowest rates, earn yield on cash, and move fiat or stablecoins globally. Get started at https://www.lava.xyz/POMP=======================0:00 - Intro1:09 - Simon's bitcoin journey since 20116:50 - Geopolitics, world order & where we disagree10:40 - Who really runs America?12:54 - Does bitcoin starve the system of capital?15:49 - The Coldcard hack & the future of self custody21:43 - The token economy & life 20 years from now29:08 - Surveillance, privacy & sovereignty33:36 - Data centers, the AI race & the K-shaped economy40:17 - BlackRock, ETF flows & what would change his mind43:39 - What the bitcoin price is telling us

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The practices of how to secure your key, I think, is the most essential skill that anyone needs to learn in the next couple of decades ahead. And so if you can learn it through trying to secure some beer coin, and then later that becomes your data, your decentralized AI, your own LLMs and hosted environments, there's only going to be two options. You have to embrace this technology, and you're either going to do it in a way where you control the key or you give the key to someone. else and they can weaponize your data. What's going on, guys? Today we got a great conversation with Simon Dixon. He's an investor and one of the Bitcoin OGs from all the way back in 2011. In this conversation, we're going to talk about some very important topics.

They're going to help you update your worldview, how capital flows, and who actually is in control of power. We talk about decentralization, sovereignty, Bitcoin, AI, and many other topics that you're probably feeling in your everyday life, but haven't yet been able to articulate. I think Simon has a very unique view of the world, and he's going to help you think through what's happening, where's the world? going, how should you invest your money, and what are the things that you should be preparing for to make sure that you and your family are in a much better spot 10 or 20 years from now?

Here's my conversation with Simon Dixon. All right, Simon, you've been in Bitcoin since 2011, and I think over the last, I don't know, decade, 15 years or so, a lot of people who are Bitcoin OGs, they started to dabble in other coins, other technologies, other areas of the industry. Some of those people were doing it purely for like profit motivation. Other people were doing it because they were interested in like, hey, how do you take this blockchain technology that I've got to be? got excited about in the early days and then use it for different use cases.

Talk a little bit about your journey and specifically because I think you kind of went from like Bitcoin only. You had exposure to a lot of other stuff. And now you're pretty much back to Bitcoin only and see that as the future of where all the value is going to accrue. Yeah. Thanks having me, Pomp. So, you know, well, I got involved, yeah, when it was only really Bitcoin and then people

were playing around with forking off and creating different versions where it's like peer coin, light coin, all these types of things. And, you know, I got involved in the sector because I tried to create a non-fractional reserve bank. So as a monetary reformer, I understood like, you know, the concepts of banking reform fractional reserve banking. And that was pretty much my life after leaving investment banking in about 2006. So when I got involved, it was because we couldn't get a banking license for a non-fractional

reserve bank. And then, you know, I was invited to the first Bitcoin conference in Prague. And I was writing a book at the time and it was the first book to include Bitcoin. And so for me, I understood banking as a way of building a bank outside the system. And so we pivoted our bank to someone that was supporting Bitcoin companies. So my first introduction was investing in many of the early Bitcoin companies, Coinbase, BitPay, Cracken, BitStamp, Ripple Labs, BitFinx, like a lot of these really early companies circle.

And we were, but as you raise finance for these companies, inevitably you kind of share a part of the journey from them all being Bitcoin companies to them slowly adding Ethereum or adding a stable coin or starting getting into tokenized securities. And then they become public companies. And then they're no longer, no longer in how I remember Bitcoin, which was us versus the banks in the room, kind of, you know, activists. So when you have a business and you're invested in over 100 different companies,

inevitably weird stuff happens. Like one of those companies, say we invested in securitize and it becomes a security token. Then you have to figure out how to deliver a security token because we were custodying assets for other people. We were, you know, looking at investing in Bitcoin mining, then suddenly Ethereum comes along and everyone's talking about, well, I want, that was funded by the Bitcoin community. Initially, it was a Bitcoin ICO. And so you inevitably get taken in all these different directions. Then someone will swap their equity for tokens. And so it's virtually impossible to remain a Bitcoin only from that just initial journey of saying, right, no venture capitalists, we're investing in the sector. How do we support the companies?

And kind of, you know, we hit this stage where a lot of our portfolio companies started going public. And so at that stage, we actively just thought, well, what's the best we can do for our shareholders, investors? And we were just thinking, actually, it's just to maybe buy back with Bitcoin, help them get some Bitcoin and self-custody, manage the portfolio, and just make everyone's life a bit more easier and a bit more sovereign. So at the moment, it is, yeah, just about converting those assets into Bitcoin and helping people be more sovereign. If you had never gone into the equity of companies, if you had never, you know, ended up with all these tokens, et cetera, would you have made more money just holding the original Bitcoin or going down the path that you went down? Yeah, so my first Bitcoin purchase was $3. And, you know, we were acquiring more Bitcoin every month. Sometimes we were mining.

sometimes we were doing receiving Bitcoin dividends. I think if I just look back at everything, there was a massive amount of complexity for like 15, probably be another five years, 20 years. If it was just literally, just buying Bitcoin every month, dollar cost averaging, I reckon I would have outperformed. But I wouldn't have gained the experience. You know, then that was 15 years of going through everything

in this journey to kind of get to the place where you are now. But I think just pure financially. I mean, yeah, dollar cost and averaging. I think a lot of, you know, I was giving away a lot of Bitcoin in the early days. Like I'd give a Bitcoin to anyone that would show up at the seminar in the early days. But it was $3. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bought a Mars bar at the first Bitcoin conference for a Bitcoin.

Like one of the hackers in a hackathon hacked together, like a Bitcoin vending machine and like a Bitcoin QR code and stuff. But yeah, I mean, if it was just purely from analyzing financial returns, then all of that stuff in the middle. I mean, you know, we had, I think, crack and outperformed Bitcoin at a certain period. We were involved in the BitFinex recovery. That was the first security token. That paid significantly higher than Bitcoin returns. Exodus was one of the companies they did really well. So we had our fair, but I also had our fair share of disasters along the way.

When you think about Bitcoin today, you're Bitcoin only, but I think a lot of the Bitcoin, maybe thesis that you hold, is driven by your worldview. And one of the aspects that I think is very interesting is you and I, I think, have some agreement on where the world is going, but also some disagreement. And so maybe I think you know where I stand on a lot of things, or maybe at least what I talk about. Like, what are some of the areas that you think we disagree the most? I think that's probably the most interesting stuff to talk through. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think so when I think of the world, I think of geopolitics and macro. A lot of people kind of think of geopolitics and macro as a bit like how they think of their own world, which is like picking a team sport. And so you're either on like Team America, Team China or something like that, you know, just based upon your own environment. I kind of think of the world of geopolitics and macro as radical realism in terms of. trying to figure out through monetary flows how the world works and what's happening,

not seeing it better than it is, not seeing it worse than it is. And so some people, when I'm doing my like macro geopolitical analysis, they come from a perspective of, I mean, a lot of my followers are American, right? So if I'm talking about what I think's happening in America, what I think's happening in China, what I think's happening in the Middle East, they may see that as Dumaism because I think we're going through a change of world order and a change of empire. But actually, what's good for one country is bad for another country or good for another region. And so it's not really doomerism. It's just change of flows.

And also, one of the things I try to focus on is actually, is there even a concept of America as a sovereign nation? The reason I focus on that is because, you know, I was born in UK. And I've seen, like, UK, we've had seven regime changes in 10 years, I like to call it. You know, and when I think about our prime ministers and our leaders, I don't see them as people that work for the people or work for the country. I see them as people that work for power in different factions of power, whether it be military power, financial power, technical power. And so, you know, when you engage in these different types of conversations, you see, like,

I see like America as, you know, radical capitalism, but through the central banking system, we've kind of created socialism for the bank. and capitalism for everyone else. Then when I look at China, I see a government that doesn't allow any company to be subordinate to it, but radical capitalism at the bottom, but then a very authoritarian regime that won't allow you to become bigger than the government in terms of capital. So I'm always trying to figure out, I don't see American as a nation state. I see America as a series of powerful interests that uses the nation state in order to

further their interest, whether that be through lobbying, whether that be through allocation and capital. And so people find my framework a little bit different. But then when it comes down to the individual, I'm always focused on solutions. Like if I think certain parts of the world are going to shit, it's about understanding it so that you can decide how to react to that once you know the rules of where you're playing the game, then you need to react. And so then you need a bit of radical optimism.

And so I think it's optimism for yourself, radical realism for how the world actually works, and just really focusing on like sovereign countries, sovereign businesses, sovereign individuals. That's kind of where the Bitcoin ethos came to me, having been around the block with Bitcoin and all the different stories that have happened over that 15 years. Who do you think runs America? I call it it's run by a financial industrial complex, the same complex that we're run Britain, the same complex that run Amsterdam. And so, you know, the three parts of the complex is you tend to have a vehicle for privatizing

gains. In the case of the Dutch and British Empire was the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company. In today, I'd say a more decentralized version consisting of a whole financial industrial complex, Black Rock, State Street, Vanguard at the asset manager level, JP Morgan, Goldman, Goldman, and Sacks at the investment banking level, Chase City Group at the retail banking level, and a bunch of hedge fund managers. Now they tend to partner with global capital.

So just because they're hosted in the country, it doesn't mean that they're nationalistic in nature, they're global in nature. So for them, you have a global transnational capital that consists of China, the Middle East, different sovereign wealth funds and the financial industrial complex in general. Then you have a bit of a nationalistic side, which is the military industrial complex. It tends to be ideologically aligned with the country, but it can be co-opted by capital. And so if a company, a large global company, needs oil, they're able to rent the military and say, go get that Venezuelan oil for me, you know. And then now, obviously, as everything's becoming algorithms and data, the technical industrial complex, which is this global ying and yeah, I kind of spend half my day on this is the most amazing opportunity that we will ever live through in our lifetime versus what does this implicate once we start centralizing all this data like this and what does this global control grid look like?

So, you know, I try and like put on different hats to try and analyze and get a realistic picture. But to answer your question, I believe that the U.S., Europe, UK, the collective West is run by capital, and capital is the financial industrial complex. Does Bitcoin starve the system of capital? It did. So, you know, when I got into Bitcoin, it was all about how can we resist the banking system. It was us versus the banks. And Bitcoin gave us the ability to own our own money and self-custody without a bank,

spend it peer-to-peer without government permission, and have a monetary policy which you can rely upon and you can prepare for with a fixed supply. So that very much is many of the properties of gold, but improved in many aspects. And it was very much, like my memory of the early Bitcoin community, it was always asked for this as the banks. Now, we hit it.

a stage where they tried to, I think, take us out, whether it be, you know, connecting it to Silk Road and gambling and all that type of stuff, then it kind of went through the whole blockchain phase. Let's turn everything into a blockchain. Let's not mention the word Bitcoin, blockchain good, Bitcoin bad. Then eventually it hit the phase where I think they just wanted to centralize as much Bitcoin as possible under the control of asset managers and Wall Street company. and co-opt as much of the ecosystem as possible, which is, I think, the phase that we're in right now.

It exists. There's money to be made. So let's try and centralize as much of it as possible and get everyone to custody it with us. So now we're in a bit of a symbiotic relationship where the individual can become sovereign, but many people will just hold it as an asset class with Wall Street, which will give them equally more power. So it is more at the individual level. A business can use it to be more sovereign. Our company bank to the future, we never needed venture capital because we had a Bitcoin

treasury throughout the whole thing. And at the individual level, I've been able to get outside of the financial system with the majority of my wealth. And we're starting to see, you know, at the sovereign level, I think El Salvador was the first experiment where can you take yourself outside China's Belt and Road initiative and America's IMF and build your own sovereign wealth. And there was a couple of attempts making Bitcoin legal tender. And then eventually the IMF stopped like the Bitcoin bond.

And now it's kind of going very stable coin at this moment. So it can be... Is the answer no? I think it's how you utilize it, but I think Bitcoin, just like gold, will be co-opted through custody. But if you use it self-custody peer-to-peer and you understand the properties of its monetary policy, then you can use it to exit the system. What about the people who bought into self-custody, all of the, what I would consider like the hardcore Bitcoiner, ethos, values, talking points, and cold card happened. Or there's like, you know, I almost think of it as one of the most sensitive things and disastrous things that could happen in America would be a strike in New York City, somewhere to the Twin Towers in 9-11, the Pentagon, the White House. You know, there's four or five kind of like strongholds of American both perceived dominance, but also they're running up the country.

They're running of, you know, the government. Bitcoin, it's decentralized. But definitely one of the most kind of sensitive, catastrophic things would be a, quote, unquote, theoretical strike at the hardcore Bitcoiners who believe in self-custody, who then start to question, how was I doing this? I thought I did everything right. You know, there was this issue that I was outside of my control.

It's not my fault, but I still lost the Bitcoin, et cetera. And so we kind of just like, we're living through that right now, where I think there are a lot of people who say, hey, I took the time, I learned, I figured out self-custody. I went and I got this thing, but I still somehow got hacked. How do you think that impacts Bitcoin and maybe the broader, you know, kind of view of Bitcoin going forward? Yeah, I think the cold card hack was tragic. It was a very niche community.

It was hardcore Bitcoiners that wanted additional control over their self-custody, so they got the wallet. so they got the wallet that many people were recommending, but they didn't go all the way in terms of understanding it. So, to simplify it, there was a, if you relied upon the wallet to generate your seed phrase, then it was the ability to compromise it existed. Whereas if you generated your own seed phrase, then those people were okay.

So that was, I think a lot of people learned from that. I think it was tragic for many. And I think it was weaponized to really attack self-custody. So a lot of people immediately would start saying the benefits of custody. Now, there's you as the individual sovereign, and there's you as protecting yourself so that you're never financially ruined. And so to protect yourself so you're never financially ruined, you know, you'd have an allocation of Bitcoin that would protect yourself from you losing your key.

You then have a strategy as your wealth grows. You'd have multi-signatures. So it's a bit like as Bitcoin grows, it's like your own wealth, right? Initially, you just invest in a few stocks. Then you start setting up a trust structure. Then you start looking at offshore vehicles. Then you look at different insurance. It grows in complexity as your wealth grows.

And that's the same with Bitcoin. But I think if the lesson is I can't store a key, that's a decision. And it comes with consequences. It means that I think we're moving. into a world where there's kind of two types of people. There's as we all start using more AI, as we all start using more social data, as we all start centralizing more and more into these, you know, very centralized, more powerful companies. There's going to be, and it doesn't have to be all or nothing, but, you know, there's people

that are going to be able to secure their key and secure their data and those are going to give it to someone else. And some people, it might be the right decision, give it to someone else. You know, that's not a judgment, but it comes at a cost. And so people should understand that. And it is going to be people that own their keys and learn the cold, hard lesson of how to secure them. Because the best practices of how to secure them are still valid, despite the cold card

hack. A lot of people didn't know that. So they need to learn from that. And if they had all their wealth on the line, then it's tragic. They have to start again. But the practices of how to secure your key, I think is the most essential. skill that anyone needs to learn in the next couple of decades ahead. And so if you can learn it through trying to secure some beer coin, and then later that becomes

your data, your decentralized AI, your own LLMs and hosted environments, like there's only going to be two options. You have to embrace this technology, and you're either going to do it in a way where you control the key or you give the key to someone else and they can weaponize your data. Today's episode is brought to you by Figure. If you're under Bitcoin, you already know. Selling's the last thing you want to do. But at the same time, life happens, man.

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If you want to check it out, I've got a link in the description that you can go to or you can go to figuremarkets.com slash pomp. So this idea of a token I've become fascinated by in terms of Bitcoin, there's a token, cryptocurrency, there's a token, tokenization, there's a token, stable coin, there's a token, but there's also, how many tokens do I consume from an LLIP? How many tokens do I consume

in just the digital world more broadly? And so it does feel like we are moving towards this like token-based society. I think that if you came at this from Bitcoin or crypto more broadly, you thought about it as like Bitcoin, Staplecoin's tokenization. That was generally what the limiting, you know, kind of maybe the boundary

of tokens was. When you expand your mind to bring in now compute tokens, it feels like everything becomes all about, you know, this idea of a token. And so you're talking about self-sovereignty when it comes to your money, your data, your intelligence, all of these different components. Maybe fast forward 20, 30 years. I'm sitting there. What does my life look like? How am I, what am I self-custody? What technology am I using? How am I protecting myself from, you know, some of these potential threats that are on the horizon. Yeah, well, I think we're moving to a world of radical centralization. If you look at the entire history of human civilization, whether it's, you know, whether it's

capitalism, communism, whether it's dictator, monarchy, whether it's democracy, the rich and wealthy and powerful have always centralized power and had disproportionate more influence over the system. So that's never going to change whatever system you live under. And there is a Pareto principle and there is a, you know, the minority will actually do this. The vast majority will do what everyone else does here. So we're moving to radical centralization. We understand.

So I think if we start from the top, you've got the geopolitics. At the moment, we live in, or through most of my life, we have lived in since the fall of the Soviet Union, a U.S. dominated hegemon. On the large geopolitical stuff world, I think America's becoming more regional. I think we're moving to a multi-node system. I think the world is going to be divvied up into regional blocks, regional security, regional sovereignty, collective sovereignty. And that's what the world looks like on the geopolitical side with this ginormous manufacturing base in China, radical financialization within America and the Collective West.

And so what is the future of financialization? Well, it's securitization, which is now tokenization. So if we're moving to this blockchain-based world where everything is going to be tokenized, and then there is centralized tokens and decentralized tokens. And so it all comes down to the same thing. On the macro side, I think you often talk about, we talk about similar things in terms of a K-shaped economy. If you don't own the assets to outperform, you know, the fact that your wage isn't increasing at the same rate as inflation, then you're falling behind. And, you know,

most people own their assets via a 401k. So that's like delayed wealth. It sorts out your retirement. But it means you're working your whole life, contributing to that. What can you do with those assets in the meantime? So those that are able to build wealth. outside of that, access it. They're getting closer to leverage. The closer you are to the money printer, the more you're on the right side of the K. If you're not using any of those tools, you don't have savings, you are the product, you know, you are the debt, you are the mortgage, you are the credit card. So the K shape is just accelerating further and further. And at the individual level, you know, you need to own more assets every month, whatever those assets may be. And

If you are that, then you need to be working on your sovereign freedom. Now, most people will see this and get very overwhelmed. Sovereignty is a spectrum. You know, it's a lifetime job. I think one of the tragedies of today is that I think when I look at my algorithm, my algorithm is telling me to be scared, fearful, there's no future. Things are getting worse. It's never been worse.

You know, my algorithm is telling me that. that drives people to short-term thinking, gambling, short-term decision-making, like bad decisions. The worst decisions you make is when you believe there's no long and prosperous future. And so, you know, that's driving people to a lot of short-termerism, doomerism, and that type of stuff. If you have a long-term plan, you'll wake up every day, every week, every month, and you'll say, am I more sovereign, less sovereign? Am I making better decisions or worse decisions?

am I growing or am I shrinking? You know, am I getting, is my mindset better or worse? Is my health better or worse? You know, and these types of things. But that means that you're looking out a lifetime and you believe there's a prosperous future. So when you have that kind of mindset that there is a prosperous future, then you will be building a sovereign strategy along the way because there's only two ways about it. I think that we're definitely moving towards just.

just look at technology dominance. You know, we've got this AI alleged war between America and China, but they very much fit together. They are one system. America can't produce a weapon without China, so there's no World War III in my map of the world. You know, it doesn't work. There's no such thing as World War III today.

There's just compromised diplomacy and bounded escalation in order to try and reset the world order, as it was. were. So everyone's got to, everyone's got to navigate that, but I do believe that technology is this ying and yang. You have, I mean, I'm never more excited than when I wake up in the morning I don't need to look at my emails anymore. And, you know, I can just build shit and I can just have like, and I've got the best PA I've ever had ever. Like, you know, but you start to think about what's the implications of that. That's just less and less humans, you know. And, and, and And so I don't think anyone really knows what the world looks like in 20 years.

I do think that there's going to be people that have navigated this well and people that haven't navigated it well and the ones that haven't navigated, they're going to be more and more subordinate and controlled by an ever more centralizing system. And then there's going to be those that resisted it. And I don't mean resisted it in terms of not using technology. I mean, you are using your AI, but you're also building your kind of own infrastructures and services and data. So to me, everything comes down to.

If you can learn the skills of storing your private key, understanding what it's like to run a note, this may sound like really geeky, pointless things, but that's going to apply to everything in the future. So now is the time to learn those skills. And if you don't feel that you're at an age where that's right for you, then you just need to have someone within your community or circle or family or whatever that's going to take that on.

Because if you don't take it on, you're going to be controlled by the system. And that's the decision. How does this change when you think of, you know, AI is one thing where if I type on my computer, I'm giving it data, I'm doing these things that I think are fairly well understood at this point. But now we're living in a world where people are freaking out about flock cameras.

They're freaking out because they think self-driving cars are recording all this stuff. Humanoid robots are supposedly going to be in our homes. You know, if I go and I try to log into certain things, they want my fingerprint or my iris scan. Like, if I walk on the street in New York City, there's cameras everywhere, right? Like, it does feel like the quote-to-quote surveillance state or technology.

On one hand, the flock camera data objectively shows crime goes down. They find kidnapped children. Like, there's a ton of positives. But then people are worried about, hey, are you reading my, you know, are you filming me or, you know, whatever the thing is. And in New York City, though, you don't see anyone like protesting or blocking the cameras on the street corner because it's kind of of just like, that's the way of life. How do you balance sovereignty in a world where also, you know, defense, security, like, all this stuff has become so important as well.

Yeah. Well, I think the first thing is there's an element of submission I have to things I can't control, and I don't think there's anything I can do in the world to stop this police and surveillance state being built. And so then you're faced with a choice. Do I opt out? Do I go off grid? or I go find a ranch and bury some gold in the ground and figure out how to earn enough income in like some kind of community.

Some people might be able to do that, but most won't. Most don't want to. And most don't want to, yeah. So then what do you do with that? Well, the answer that I've kind of come to is that you have a split personality. You have a ying and yang. You have a sovereign life, which you're building. And then you have your control grid life.

And, you know, I need a bank account. That's part of, I know that I'm lucky to, if I put too much money in a bank, I know that I'm going to be asked a bunch of questions. I know that there's going to be restrictions on what I can do with that money. I know that I'm going to have to provide all the data, source of funds, source of wealth, K. It just is what it is. But there's also a part of me that knows how to purchase Bitcoin on a peer-to-peer exchange and manage, you know, via a coin join into new transactions for every single.

So there's my sovereign life and then there's my subordinate life. And I think you have to get that mix. And this one initially, probably for most people, your subordinate life is significantly larger in terms of value than your sovereign life. Your job is to get more of this and start pushing and learning new skills, pushing more and more of your life over there. seeing if you can invest in sovereign assets, see if you can start running your own LLMs and stuff. But to me, there's an element of submission.

And I don't think there's anything we can, I mean, to me, is it a good use of my time to start, you know, tearing down data centers? Is that a good use of time? Well, what's the impact? Well, they're probably insured and they'll probably make a bunch of bankers a load of money as a result of it and a company more subordinate to the financial industrial complex. you really work through the money is this productive use. This episode is brought to you by Lava.

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Well, I wouldn't even argue tearing down the data center is the opposite of what they're trying to accomplish. Yeah. Right. Like, we know that prosperous countries consume lots of energy. There is no prosperous, low consumption, you know, energy country. Same thing, I think, is with compute. In the future, there's not going to be a prosperous country that does not consume a lot of compute. Now, how do they do it?

Where do it? How is it powered? Is it in your neighborhood? Like, there's a lot of nuance, right, in details that, frankly, are not part of the conversation. It's pretty much, there's two groups in America. Data centers are good, data centers are bad. That's pretty much it.

But it is very clear, whoever has the most data centers and consumes and processes the most compute, they are going to be prosperous in the digital world. That almost is not part of the conversation. Yeah. It immediately goes to like, I don't like data centers, take them down. Yeah.

Well, it's kind of like, what if the future of your children, is dependent on our country having these. Now, you still may not want it in your neighborhood. You still may not want it down the street. You still may not like, you know, X, Y, Z thing about it. But at least let's all agree that as a country, we need to win the race. We need to be the largest consumer of power and compute.

And then we can figure out, do we go put them in space? Do we put them in the desert? Do we put them in a neighborhood? All of that stuff is almost secondary to, like, let's just all get on the same page. We've got to win the race. And I don't actually don't think the country country is in agreement there.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think this comes down to the K-shaped economy. You know, there are people that want to tear the system down. They're not happy with the system. They want real estate to crash. They want stocks to crash. They want an opportunity to get in where the boomers got in. There are people that...

Do you think they want to get in, or do you think they actually want to see the world birth? And it's hard to generalize an entire group. But I do wonder how many of them. Because it would be understandable, as I said, I would say, I would say, I would I wouldn't mind another global financial crisis where housing prices crashed, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50%, and then I could go buy a home. Okay. Again, I don't know if I necessarily agree that that's the best way to do it, but, like, I at least understand the economic incentive to buy a home at a more affordable price.

What I worry, though, is that a lot of the people who are cheering for, you know, basically destruction, they don't even want to own a home. Like, they actually just want to rent or, you know, be mobile and kind of travel and all stuff. But, like, they also want to see home prices go down because that means that somebody that they, perceive as successful is suffering. Yeah. What I think they want is that they're communicating their dissatisfaction with the system. They're communicating that we are a, you know, we, we are the majority of people. They're, I think advocating for, I probably haven't worked through the detail in terms of

like more socialistic ways of trying to redistribute wealth. And yeah, they just don't feel like they've, that they're participating in the quote-unquote American dream at the moment. Now, here's the interesting thing that I've, is I found that there's polar opposites in terms of country sovereignty. I always say that sovereignty. I always get that wrong. Country sovereign, they'll be in the comments, everyone winds me up about that.

Country sovereign, most important word to me, and I can never get it right. sovereignty sovereignty and individual sovereignty. I'd argue that China's the most sovereign country in the world today. But a sovereign country can also exercise a lot of authoritarian on the individual. And so if you live in... Maybe the two things are intertwined. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. And even if you look at it, if you look back at the history, the countries where real estate is distributed to the highest degree is a country that had communism, came out of communism, and then there was radical privatization where everyone got to own their own homes. And so if you look at like Eastern Europe and you look at China, like, you know, you've got like 95% home ownership.

Even a country like Singapore, when it went through decolonization, it had a scheme that before it became a global hub, a massively important decolonized port, you know, it had a program to make sure everyone gets their real estate. And so there's radical authoritarian, I mean, if you've ever been to Singapore, it's a beautiful place. Like absolutely pristine, perfect, beautiful in every way, even too perfect. But very, very strict government at the same time as being a global financial center and hub for global trade. So it's a very interesting type of country. But everyone feels like a shareholder in the country because they own their property, right? In the case of America, I think that's more stocks. In Europe and UK, it's very much real estate property.

But in America, it was the concept of the 401k and everyone owning stocks. And you got higher stock participation than any other country. If you're not a part of that, you're not benefiting from the system and you're getting further and further away. And they can't understand why the price of everything's going up, but their net worth is just going in the wrong direction. So you're going to be pissed. And if you can't figure out how to solve those, what that tends to lead to is more of a movement towards redistribution, socialism. And when you start getting the breakdown of come to America, the American dream and all that stuff, there is no shared ideology anymore. And then everyone gets extractive and everyone's trying to extract what they can.

And this is the cycle of empires that we've always seen. But there's no doubt in my mind that one of the most important, let's call it, commodities, before it was energy, now it's still energy, still oil, you know, choke points and trade routes and all these things. But, you know, whoever owns the data is going to control the control grid. And China has got loads of data centers. America has got loads of data centers, and everyone else is trying to use their sovereign wealth to fit in that side of the ecosystem, whether it means working with China, working with America, getting Nvidia chips, or whatever it can be. But every country needs the data centers if we're moving to a global control grid, and I'm no doubt we are moving to a global control grid.

What has to happen for you to change your mind on all of this? I think I just, one thing that I find incredibly useful is I don't listen to politicians and I don't listen to media unless it matches capital flows and monetary flows. So I spend a disproportionate, really almost obsessive, weird amount of time trying to study monetary flows and figure out whether we're being lied to by politicians or, you know. So whenever I, so to me, I'm looking at, I think ETF flows is the new currency war. So it used to be the city of London used to launch currency wars, which would determine the future of military intervention. That still happens. You know, that partnership between the city of London and Wall Street, I think, still exists. You know, we've recently destroyed Iran's currency to do a civilian target to destroy all their wealth so that,

we could, you know, we could regime change. But I think now we've entered into a world where I look at BlackRock a lot in terms of ETF loads because they created artificial intelligence technology at the financial level way before everyone else. They were the main beneficiary of the global financial crisis. They have, you know, 15 trillion, 15.3 trillion dollars of assets under management, that's a significant influence now, whether it's ETFs and other people, you can debate or that. But they've also got the technology through Aladdin that sovereign wealth funds, central bank, treasuries, endowment funds, pension funds are all using.

And so when everyone right now, as we move to programmable investment, like 60% of all stock trades are robots. And everyone, all the sovereign wealth funds are using the same technology and treasury departments to scenario plan. and you put in Aladdin's technology, you know, what happens if the straight-of-homboose closes for X number of days? Then the bots are all being fed, the same type of trades and the same type of data. So it's allocating capital in somewhat of a coordinated fashion. And you can see, you know, this control grid is being integrated with financial technology grids. and now military is becoming drones and humans. So this is where we're heading.

What does it look like? That's what we're all trying to navigate. And so what would change my mind? Well, when the capital flows indicate that America's 25% of global GDP. That used to be 60%. So the world's saying we're moving to multipolarity and capital is saying, I want cheap factories in China. I want rare earth from Africa that go via the Chinese rails.

And BlackRock's assets under management is going up and up and up. So that means hyper-financialized, securitized, tokenized, and a multi-node system. If we get back to all the flows going back to America, the currency strengthening relative to all other currencies, then that can falsify it. What does the Bitcoin price tell you? Bitcoin price to me tells me that there was a period of trying to centralize as much Bitcoin as possible into Treasury companies, ETFs. And we still have approximately 70% of Bitcoin in self-custody, you know, 30% in Wall Street wrappers or exchanges. So we're still healthy there.

If we've got an interesting Bitcoin mining industry, I think a lot of it was privatized via the US stock market, about 40% of the hash power came through there. They've been pivoting a lot to AI. And so there's an interesting, we may have hit, you know, we may have heat like the peak in terms of the security behind Bitcoin. That may have adjustments from here. I think there's evidence to state that countries. Like if you look at who's mining the most Bitcoin, you've still got a chunk in China,

a load in Russia, a load in Kazakhstan. You've got Iran, I think, was using it with nuclear power. UAE was building. I think El Salvador is trying to build. So we've got a lot of countries that are very geographically diversified, engaging in mining. And then we've still got about 100,000 nodes as long as we recently, we recently went through a Bitcoin war, like where people were questioning corruption within the developer community. I think all of these things are very healthy. So a lot of people are looking at making

sure the development is uncorrupt and open source. I think we've got a lot of geographical diversification in terms of the mining side. And I think we've got, you know, we've still got anyone can run a node and people can verify their own transactions and remain sovereign in that side. So, Bitcoin price seems to be a lot of inflows into institutions right now. I think a result of a lot of hacks as people started to say, I'd like someone else to custody. This is, I think, the interesting thing about Bitcoin from here. The price is very much institutional flows. But the value in Bitcoin is remaining, you know, keeping to the original ethos of what Bitcoin was created.

Because if it all ends up in an ETF, all in Treasury company, and centralized mining and no one's watching developers and no one's running nodes because the block size goes up or something, then you can enter a situation where some radical policy of increasing the supply could come through. So we're nowhere near that right now, but the Bitcoin price is telling me that central banks are choosing gold, which is good. I'd rather central banks don't choose Bitcoin. They will eventually, I believe, but the longer they don't do that, the better, as far as I can say. But Wall Street and institutions are loading up.

And they're making a lot of money out of liquidity and trading and products and stuff like that. I have, as long as I can maintain owning my Bitcoin, sending it peer-to-peer, and the supply doesn't change, then I have no doubt about the price will reflect that. decades into the future. Mm-hmm. Where can we say we able to find you on the internet? So I've spent a lot of time on X. I try every Friday to kind of like follow the money in these long three, four hours.

It's more for me, but I do it in public as a discipline. So you can listen in if you really want to sit through that. And then I'm kind of setting up, you know, my own decentralized setup on Simon Dixon.com is where I'm backing everything up in case the algorithms don't like my content or anything. in the future. What is your X handle? At Simon Dixon, Twitter. Amazing.

From when it was Twitter. Well, thank you for taking the time to do this. I could talk to you forever. I think we agree on much more than we both realize. So it's going to be a fascinating, you know, two or three decades here to see how this all plays out. And I think Bitcoin, AI, sovereignty, decentralization, all of these themes are going to be very important for people to continue to embrace going forward. Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Pomp.