The Bitcoin Arms Race, U.S. Strategic Advantage, and a Changing World Order with Matthew Pines

What you're telling me is that music is about to stop and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous extra ever assembled in the history of gutless 1974198792972000. And whatever we want to call this, it's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves. I say when we. Sell, I say, when we sell. We just recorded this conversation with Matt Pines from the Bitcoin Policy Institute, And if you're trying to understand what the world might look like in five years from now, this is the episode to hear. From strategic deals, huge deals in the Middle East to the re monetization of gold and Bitcoin, we breakdown how geopolitical power, money, defense and energy are being renegotiated and ultimately why Bitcoin is increasingly being seen as a tool of US statecraft, not just to store value. We take a peek behind the curtain at what's happening in DC, from the strategic Bitcoin reserve to the rise of bit bonds, to how the US is positioning itself in a global Bitcoin arms race. And that absolutely delivered. We really had to barely talk, and you're about to hear why. But before we dive in, ask yourself, is your Bitcoin secure enough for this new era? Maybe you don't want to think about it, but you really should. And so at On Ramp, we work with individuals who take Bitcoin seriously and need a solution to match that. And that's why we focus on multi Institution custody, a model that eliminates single points of failure, includes insurance coverage from Lloyd's of London, and allows your Bitcoin to be passed on to your heirs without them ever needing to manage keys. And all of this can be handled in minutes, not months. So if your Bitcoin strategy spans decades and then Peace of Mind is not optional, it's really foundational. So go to on rampbitcoin.com. You can sign up in minutes, or you can book a consultation with myself or even with Cam. That's stud on the bottom right side there. And we'll make sure you're taken care of. Now. I hope you enjoyed the episode. All right, it's time for the last trade. We've we're broke the streak this week. We've had five people on the podcast for week after week. This week it's just four of us. So we have Michael Tanguma and Brian Cabela's here at On Ramp, and we're joined today by Matt Pines. Matt, you're only one person, but maybe we could say you have the brain of two people. So we do have 5 people on the podcast today really excited to be recording with you. You're the executive director at Bitcoin Policy Institute. You've been full time there since when? February of this year. Yeah. Nice. So you've been involved with them for a while. I think I caught somewhere in your bio, you were the you published the first white paper for them. And then you've been involved for a number of years, I guess three years or so. So really excited to get a better grasp on what's happening, you know, with federal policy. But this conversation I think will span much more beyond that as well. Talk a lot about, you know, what's happening with state strategic Bitcoin reserves, bit bonds, just budget neutral ways to accumulate Bitcoin, something we've been talking quite a bit about, but I think we'll go into way more detail and really just appreciative of you being on the show today. Thanks for joining us. Thanks. For having me, yeah. I've caught a number of your recent episodes so you guys have some good rips. Thanks for letting me out. Well, appreciate that at least someone's listening makes it a little bit more rewarding at. Least one. Person you know. Yeah, that's great. So, Matt, why don't we start with what's going on in the Middle East this week? So there's the US Saudi Investment Forum. You've had some takes online. And maybe before we get into the details of it, could you just kind of share a recap for the audience of what's going on in the Middle East this week? What have you been paying attention to? And then would love to dive into a bit more detail of what the broader implications are, you know, from a policy perspective or economics, geopolitics, etcetera. Yes, yeah. So just like the. Facts like 10,000 foot level view. This was Donald Trump's like first major overseas visit was received by the the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and he's doing a kind of four day tour of the Gulf countries in the main event that kind of kicked everything off was AUS Saudi investment forum where Menorah was strategic. Both arms as well as technology and diplomatic kind of deals were announced. Kind of a whole bundle of initiatives relating to artificial intelligence, new energy investments, critical infrastructure investments, you know, arms sales and announcements on kind of a diplomatic reset potentially in the region. So each individually we're quite significant like as a package, they, they seem to indicate, you know, a strategic shift in how the US government is approaching lots of different policy domains as part of a integrated approach to statecraft to pursue a different vision of America's role in the global order. Right. So that's kind of my interpretation of of the facts and. I think it's being motivated. By a lot of different separate, separate threads that all kind of come under this this sort of rubric of a global reordering right that the administration and the senior officials were telegraphing, you know, even before the election. Their view of economic policy, of security policy, of technology policy as as needing to go through a decisive phase shift under their under their leadership. And so that's what they're executing. You could say their implementation of that vision, right? Could, could be, could be improved in various ways, But it's very clear they have a, an objective here, which is to reorder that sort of terms of the security arrangements, the terms of the trade system, even the monetary system to a certain extent, as well as to use America's strengths to a certain extent, like our, our technological leadership, our military leadership and, you know, to a certain extent, our, our economic, you know, heft around the world to kind of re demarcate the lines around which kind of America considers its zone of influence in, in what you have to sort of accept as a hierarchical system, right. the US views and lots of great powers throughout history, you know, whether explicit or implicitly view the global arrangement in a hierarchical fashion, where they're at the core slash the top. And there are, you know, powers that exist within a certain set of relationships with that power. And there are, you know, deals, inducements and coercion. So what we saw in Saudi? Is an example of this where. We leverage the fact that we can control the supply chain for for frontier AI models and their semiconductor components to essentially grant access to Saudi Arabia to some chips that they have been cut off from under the administration, combined with the fact that the Saudis and other Gulf countries control trillions of dollars of surplus capital. And so The upshot is to bring kind of the Gulf kingdoms into a tech tariff, trade and security zone with the United States that helps underwrite this sort of techno industrial investment strategy that the US is pursuing to secure, you know, continued dominance in these frontier technologies, which will require access to large amounts of energy and large amounts of capital, while also sort of boxing out China from potentially doing the same play in the Middle East. You know, China has their own objectives to to sort of capture the techno industrial frontier and they have certain advantages on the energy side and the kind of the command and capital economy side. And so this is kind of great power technology, great power network competition playing out. We'll see what the counter moves are. But yeah, there was a lot kind of baked into that one day of announcements that kind of are is a prism by which you can kind of see all these different sort of threads coming together. Yeah, it's really well, well, well said. I think like there's an interesting component of, you know, obviously like on the Bitcoin side, most people are just so busy in their day-to-day lives. It's my reason personal where it's hard for people to understand Bitcoin is 'cause like you're on the rat race. So how can you take off to like just understand, you know, 21 million very similar to what you just broke down. Most people have no clue if this is happening because they're just so busy. And obviously like the the traditional media is not telling you any of this. Curious, like, where would historically we sit if a different administration would have came in or what was happening before this? Right, Because it's obvious that this sounds like this is kind of a form fitting for a new administration geopolitical favor for the US was like the administration before asleep at the wheel and we're heading down the wrong tracks on this. I think we all know that there's a lot of things are asleep on the wheel at but like what was happening in this respect previously and what would have happened if it would have been a Kamala, you know, president. Yeah. And it's kind of to pick apart each particular issue. The two I think most important issues are, you know, among the more salient right now are on the AI sort of technology. So the geopolitization. Of of frontier technology, specifically AI and and our approach to conflicts in the world, I think. It's fair to say. That the Biden administration and likely the Kamala administration would have continued a policy of kind of, you know, escalation right in, in Europe and, and, and likely would not have been, you know, able to effectively defuse conflicts in the Middle East for a, a variety of different reasons. I think there is a lot of institutional inertia and and a certain contingent of kind of the national security wing of the BI administration that kind of preferred calibrated conflicts for a wide variety of reasons. Because they felt like ultimately they would get the upper hand, that they'd be able to out outlast Russia, that they'd be able to kind of rebalance the Middle East in a in a fashion that would secure their their personal interests. China's a whole separate thing, but there was a policy that was in place to kind of act as if we were still. Kind of the hyper power of the 90s, you know, you know, Jake Sol, the national security advisor kind of came up in that era under the tutelage of Clinton and and Blinken. And it's like a marathon runner. Who was like really fast in in, you know, in their 20s and then ages to their 40s but still thinks they can run. You know, like they like they used to and conducts foreign policy in this case, like like we, we, we still wear the hyper power and we sort of saw, you know, us running into constraints. We weren't all, you know, very adaptable. I think we're seeing now it's sort of this uncomfortable recognition that we are constrained in various ways. We still have lots of reservoirs of strength, but we have to be prudent in how we deploy those to secure our interest in a, what will you know is a multi polar at least bipolar system here. I think there's been a begrudging acceptance that China is a peer competitor and that we can't just sanction them out of these supply chains. We can't just sort of try to isolate them diplomatically because they're the dominant trade partner for most of the countries in the world. And they have their own endogenous technological industrial system which rivals our own, in fact exceeds our own in in many ways. And I think a lot of the sort of the the BLOB heads in, in, in previous years that spanned both, you know, parties kind of view that, you know, this would just be the next we could sort of take out the same bag of tricks essentially. And I think it's not working. And that's it's very uncomfortable, right, for the kind of premises in the national security state that believe that we, we, we sort of stand. Astride the the the the world system. And we can, sort of. Like give give rules and not take rules. I think the uncomfortable part about Trump is he's kind of he's he's a bluffer, he's an exaggerator. But fundamentally, I think if you read between the lines of his speeches, he's recognizing that American power is fundamentally constrained and that we don't have the political mandate to do the same types of global policing and rule writing for the global order that we that we used to. And so there's this sort of calibrated re restructuring of what sort of Pax Americana means, like what is the club and fence for that American system? It doesn't clearly expand to the whole world, right? And we're sort of now trying to find where those lines are that you want to get into the club. This is what you have to sort of pay to get a ticket to the to, you know, inside that, inside that, that sort of tech tariff and security zone. And so, but to do that, you kind of need to like squash the beef. And so I think Trump's meta strategy for foreign policy is just to kind of get peace deals, right, maybe on terms it would not be favorable to a lot of people, you know, from the my administration. But he seems sort of like peace Uber Alice, Like, let's just get ceasefires in in Ukraine. Let's get, you know, ceasefires in Gaza. Let's get, you know, the Abraham accord signed. Let's get a deal with Iran. Let's effectively squash the beef with China over Taiwan. If that means kind of recalibrating policy on Taiwan, you know, away from strategic ambiguity like that may be in the cards here, right? So if you can imagine this, this conflict zone around the EUR Asian periphery, which is essentially this major dynamic that we've been facing for the past few years is sort of, you know, EUR Asian autocratic powers that control the marginal supply of commodities. And, and, and increasingly like high value added goods between Russia and China and other parts of South Asia. Sort of contesting a world order that's dominated by kind of liberal oceanic mercantilist capitalism that controls the dollar funding system, access to credit and global trade. And those systems were kind of in frenemy mode for most of, you know, the post 90s, you know, era. And we were kind of, you know, the hegemon that secured that global system. But for wide-ranging sort of set of historical contingencies is mainly the rise of China. It sort of contested that system where it's fundamentally a cog in this larger machine that's run by the US and and and to certain extent Western Europe. They wanted to sort of reset the terms there. Like they're not just going to be like a cog in the manufacturing sort of producing system. They want to create their own system. And and that's led to these kind of EUR Asian conflict areas, right, like the the sort of autocratic Eurasia going up against, quote liberal Oceana. And I think that that basic Geo economic block like that sort of spans all administrations, But I think the Trump administration's view of it is that's how you get World War three, right. If you don't if you don't navigate that, that competitive dynamic, especially given the fact that, well, one, our supply chains are dependent on China. We saw, you know, trying to just flip the switch on rare earths and everyone in in the Defense Department freaks out and, you know, inflation can whip saw, you know, in a matter of weeks. And we're just too interdependent to really pull put guns to each other's heads. And so we we can't fight wars or else we're going to go nuclear and we're going to destroy civilization. We can't even really fight economic wars because within a matter of weeks, like ports get empty and then 10s of millions of Chinese, you know, urban workers go unemployed and then start being protests. And the Shanghai clique tries to do a coup on XI. So everyone realizes it was kind of mutual economic assured destruction. And I think they've kind of played that out now in this sort of iterative game. And they realize, OK, we just have to kind of like settle up, right, We've become some sort of grand bargain. And I think they had to kind of go through certain high stakes Bluffs and like, you know, scary maneuvers and the financial markets freaked out with liberation day. But I think the glide path we're on, it seems again, there's lots of non linearities in this type of dynamic is that sort of grand bargains are being worked out in real time. And I think the, the, the sort of GCC visit is a critical kind of stepping stone to these sorts of grand bargains that I don't think would have happened under Kamala administration. I think it would have been essentially, can we kind of extend and pretend and kind of maintain the current system of international. You know, there's a certain cohort of folks that manage these these systems and that have gained a lot of status and, and wealth from the flows of, you know, overseas development money, military sales, kind of the think tank military foreign policy ecosystem that was kind of a self working, self licking ice cream cone. So there's a lot of grift in that system. There's going to be new grift in this new system, right? Like grift doesn't go away. This is a different type of grift and there's different people winning and different people losing. And I say we've had gone through like maybe a kind of a quiet like a cold civil war in the Western political economy, right? Kind of existing factions of, of, of say, institutionalist that have developed these bureaucratic control structures that allow them to kind of skim off the top of their societies. And you have kind of counter elites coming in that finally, you know, reject that system, But they're not necessarily coming in with like a, you know, a demos mandate. I think that's a bit more of like a mask that's worn ultimately, right? Political leads do what political leads do. They just want to get themselves access to, you know, those privileged positions. So I, I'm, I'm, I'm in favor of kind of the overall strategic approach that Trump is taking, but I'm not like, I'm also like a realist, right? I don't understand like the structures of the power and human relations. And ultimately this is we're going back to more like a 19th century style, kind of a court Geo court slash, you know, homeless, like pre W family and style like state system where it's like very personalized. Here's why Trump goes in. He has like becomes best friends with Mohammed bin Salman and. His personal. Relationships with these national leaders is like like basically what tips the scales? It's not you know, you know, office floors full of pH DS writing white papers on foreign policy. It's like literally like does Trump like the cut of your jib? And this is where we are right. So anyways, that was a bit of a rambling riff, but I think that's no, that's a funnily very. Different type of approach then you would have gotten under Kamala. That was, yeah. I mean, it's a summary in my view. I look, it's like checkers versus or chess versus checkers in the sense of like you're just having to think about counter positioning where you sit on that, that board and that hierarchical structure. It sounds like a very similar structure except for they're more defined to your point and there's less like fat bureaucracy of how it's going to be managed. Checks. I don't know if you wanted to take it somewhere. Yeah. Well, we'd love to stay on this topic, but shifted more into the monetary perspective. So Matt, you mentioned on Twitter the Riyadh Accord. So there's just realignment of trade, tech, security, money. So how would you tie in what's happening in the Gulf now to the broader balance of power between China, Russia, BRICS countries in the US in the fight for dollar dollarization or de dollarization? So how does this all tie in from a monetary perspective from this global reordering? Yeah, I mean to adapt a line from like Zoltan Pozar, who may have himself adapted it from from from Perry Merling. You know, payment chains are supply chains in reverse. And you could say that like the AI supply chain is a capital flow chain in reverse arms sale chains are capital flow chains. So all of these deals where there's AI security arrangements, you know, explicit access to our, our domestic markets, you know, behind tariff walls, they fundamentally flow through capital markets and, and the offshore dollar system, which has been, you know, the main vehicle for international commerce in this era of globalization. And the fundamental collateral of that global dollar system is U.S. Treasury security. And so. There is a lot of stress being placed on that market and that, you know, set of balance sheets that intermediate to the, the flow of, of, of global commerce and collateral in a, you know, in a secured global dollar system that uses Treasury securities as as funding collateral. And we're printing a ton of Treasury securities and we're we've been forced in the last few years to kind of print more at the short end because there doesn't seem to be as much endogenous demand on the long end. And that was a form of liquidity expansion under Yellen called activist treasury issuance. And so we are in an era where we have a lot of strategic strengths. We also have a lot of strategic vulnerabilities. And I think the Treasury market, our fiscal position are our need to refinance our debt loads post COVID at sustainable rates is, is an acute weakness right now. And we saw that as part of the Liberation Liberation Day reaction when the 30 years started hitting 5%. That was when basically Besson got the upper hand inside the kind of court politics around Trump and basically took control and steered things back to kind of a forward guidance, geopolitically tiered approach to, to to, to tariffs as opposed to the Lutnick Navarro punch everyone in the mouth, you know, and just collect trillions of dollars in revenue kind of idea which blew up in their face. And this is where the monetary system is critical to these strategic dimensions because it's it's a fundamental boundary constraint on what they can do, right? I mean, the, the guy really like Marco Pappich, he has this, you know, this sort of quip. It's like, you know, preferences are optional constraints or not right. And so politicians want to do lots of things. They want to be re elected, they want to be popular, they want everyone to be rich, right? But like the world imposes material constraints and ultimately politicians, what they'll likely do is going to be dictated to 1st order by what their constraints are. And so the US government and our leadership, the fundamental constraint is the treasury system, right? And so they recognize that. And so it's constraining them. And so it's leading to a lot of these deals where the treasury market is a part of the deal. And on the other, on the other side of that deal are countries and national, you know, balance sheets that now recognize explicitly how constrained the, you know, the US is buy it's that position and buy the instabilities associated with the treasury market. And so they're looking to see how they can both hedge as well as take advantage of that opportunity. And so I think you've seen re monetization of hard assets, recognizing that, you know, ultimately at the end game here, and this is, you know, old bromides from from Luke Roman and and and Len Alden for many years now, essentially is the end of the day, like indebted hegemons. When you get past a certain point, you print and and or you do financial repression to force certain, you know, sort of capital pools to sort of eat those losses via financial repression. And then as a, you know, big political bargain and geopolitical bargain is who who's going to eat those losses? Is it going to be domestic bondholders, you know, everyday American savers, pensioners, people, you know, insurance companies, you know, bank balance sheets, or is it going to be, you know, overseas holders of those bonds? Is it going to be the foreign central banks, you know, foreign solid wealth funds, foreign insurance and pension companies? And I think, you know, the, the, the order of operations for U.S. government is to sort of first impose the losses on like our friends and allies who we have a lot of like, you know, coercive ability to force, right? Like say, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the UK, Australia countries who won like rely on us for security, intelligence protection and who, you know, have a lot of treasury securities, say, sitting at the short end. And we want them to swap those out for longer dated issuances. This is kind of the result and pose our Bretton Woods 2 point O thesis that will sort of force a series of swaps, force them to sort of extend out our duration and maybe even give us some of their gold and give them 50 year bonds, century bonds, etcetera. So in that environment, which is effectively, you know, a combination of, you know, monetization, you know, backdoor QE using foreign central bank's balance sheets. I mean, I'm aware of, for example, that the Japanese were sort of requesting politely a backdoor dollar swap line to sort of fund long term debt, long term debt purchases, right? Essentially backdoor QE. So the Bank of Japan's balance sheet expands instead of the Fed's balance sheets. So this is the regime we're in. And The upshot is, you know, central bank's balance sheets are going to have to expand to sort of finance the hegemon's military, you know, expansion to secure this this this new zone, this massive technological industrial reinvestment and reshoring. Objective bonds are going to have to eat. It's question is whose bonds eat it first? Anyone that can is going to flee into harder assets. You saw first in gold and I think you're going to see it in Bitcoin. So that's like a pretty simple macro thesis. And I think that's that's where it's very much a case by case. And I think it's also why you see maybe Japan getting almost the worst deal in China at the moment, right? Because you you would think, right naively, oh, well, Japan's like an old ally of ours. They're a friend of ours. Like they should get a better deal than China, right? But if you're from Trump's perspective, you're like, well, no, like Japan is like basically de facto colony. So of course, I can impose a lot more pain, and I can, like, twist their arms a lot more than I can twist China's arms. So, you know, then the inference is, well, China is going to get a better deal than Japan. And that's a fundamentally different way of approaching this than I think the Kamala administration would have been, which is just like, well, they're our friends. We can't, like, insult them. We can't force them to, like, eat pain. Like, there are buddies. And I think Trump's, like, I have no permanent enemies. I have no permanent friends. I have only permanent interests and if you put yourself in a national position of subservience with respect to me, because you rely on me for your security protection, you're embedded in my global trade system. That is, that is I secure for your, you know, if your if your economy. Well, guess what, now I've got you over a barrel. Like Trump is just a guy who's, you know, a bit sociopathic in that sense. Like he's, he has no sense of like, you know, oblige to these folks. And it makes sense from a rational perspective, like if you're in debt and you can pay your brother back slower or whoever is related to your family versus the guy that's going to hit you in the kneecaps, like you kind of pay the guy in the kneecaps first. It's a rational like move. So it it makes complete sense where you would. Again, it's all about positioning it sounds like. Yeah, How does, how does? So there's $9 trillion of federal debt that's rolling over in the next 12 months. And so, Matt, you laid out that the foreign central banks will probably have to take a nice chomp of that, but I'm sure the Federal Reserve plays a part in monetizing or or you know, printing the money for some of that issuance. But the Fed balance sheet, I guess is only what, 6 or 7 trillion today. I don't know how large the the balance sheets are of the other global central banks, but 9 trillion is, is kind of a large number of debt to be rolled over in the next year. So how do you think about, you know, the balance of central banks taking that down in terms of just the capacity to do so? In theory, I guess capacity is unlimited because you could always create more currency. But what's the constraints of the treasury market breaking and loss of faith in in the US Treasuries versus maybe using hard assets to make some of this issuance more appealing? Do you think that's something that we'll see this year or is it something more so and further down the road? Yeah, I mean, there's, there's a, there's two different dimensions that one's like the stock and the, and one's the flow, right. So the, the refinancing is essentially the stock problem, right, which is we have a stock of debt, it's retiring, we need to refinance it, right. And so that's, that's just doesn't necessarily expand the size of the balance sheets that have to take that up. But it now means that the US government has to pay a higher interest rate right on the next tranche of what are those tenders are that it's going to get refinance. So maybe they issued it COVID at one 2%. Now they have to issue it at 5, you know, four and a half 5%. So that's like the the marginal refinancing cost that takes a hit, you know, downstream on everything. You know, we're paying more than our Defense Department budget on, on on on interest costs. So just squeezes out fiscal capacity. That's a federal government problem. The, the, the flow issue is just the deficit itself, right? The fact that I think whatever the annualized run right now for our deficit is something like 6 and a half, 7% of GDP, 1 1/2, two trillion. Dollars just sort of ballpark numbers now. That's a lot. So that's the flow. That's like, OK, those are new. That's like net new treasuries that are going to be pushed into the market just from the federal government sort of deficit. The question is who's who's going to absorb that balance sheet, right. Who's going to absorb that in the balance sheet? And so if it's all at three month tenors, well, there's probably a lot of buyers for that, right. Lots of people will take that as a money like instrument, not a whole lot of duration. Risks, but the US government. That's effectively you're like payday lending, right? Like you're like, you gotta get the role like every three months and you're much more, you know, much more exposed than necessary Fed monetary policy decisions, right. And you'd rather not do that. Like the the the government tries to target a certain sort of average duration. And the last few years have been front loaded because of this very issue. And Besson's now kind of stuck with it. And, and so he wants to issue more at the long end, But I think they know that they can't without either finding a, I'd say a non, a non market buyer, right? Like a such central bank that can be geopolitically coerced in order to, to, to buy it. And I think we effectively have yield. We know we're going to have yield curve control somewhere above 5% on the, on the 30 year. That's, that's about like the mark plus or minus. We're almost there like as we speak. And so I think this is where the intensity of these deals gets more significant because, you know, it's hard to go, you can't really with rule of law domestically go to, you know, JP Morgan and say, we need you to buy more 30 year paper, especially after, you know, Silicon Valley Bank and SVB, right? Where they realized, oh, like our whole our, our, our HTML portfolio, like once we had the mark to market went, you know, zeroed out our, all of our capital and then we got wound up by Elizabeth Warren's goons. And so it's, you got to go overseas where there's no rules, right? There's just pure power. And maybe that's part of the Saudi Gulf deal there. What was interesting about that is like this is a bit of a RIP, but like the traditional Petro dollar system was all commodities, mainly oil and gas are sold in dollars and then those countries accumulate dollars surpluses and then they, you know, redirect those, recycle those into our treasury asset and that helps finance the security protection that then we provide and secure their one party state regimes. That was a good deal. Now it's like they realize they have better leverage. And so, you know, they don't want debt positions. Now the Saudis want equity positions, right? And so they're, they're moving up the value stack because it's a new multipolar system, right? If we had all the juice, then we would just be forcing the Saudis to buy more 30 year paper. Instead, we have to do this deal where we allow them to, you know, essentially invest $100 billion in our AI stack, get 18,000 Blackwell survey units, do Co investments and all sorts of breakthrough energy and, and, and, and, and biotech and AI, you know, corporate financing deals and sovereign wealth funds, you know, going into our private equity venture capital markets. So that's, that's, that's a funnily, it's like a, that's a funnily different environment where, where they are, you know, able to acquire more valuable assets and equity essentially positions. And so the question for us is that, OK, how does that, you know, what, what's the mix of debt and equity there? OK, You get investment in in U.S. equity, right, strategic equity, but we also need you to help, you know, finance the fiscal balance sheet here. So I don't know, a lot of stuff is not being made public, right Like that, the flashy stuff, the sexy stuff, the billion dollars in AI and whatever that's public. How much of this is like, well, you have to take down another 25 billion in 30 year paper every quarter? Like they're not going to announce that, but some Saudi, you know, balance sheet will show up there, you know, when the time comes for those auctions. So I think something like that's part of the deal here. I just don't think it's going to be made public. Yeah, it makes complete sense. I mean, this ties in to this that also as long as the landing can be stuck and there's not, you know, crazy World War or, you know, too large of a conflict, you can see how this is. I don't know if equitable is the right word, but more productive society, right? Like once you actually have tie in, you hear like equity in certain aspects of our country, but you think about like the the relationship and building and just not being insular. And you know, there's been a lot of you reference drift in our existing, you know, Fiat or the the dollar based system. But curious like as much as you're comfortable in talking about where there's been a lot of things that have aligned and that don't necessarily look organic, but they don't feel organic, like right when you go back to tethers origins and where that sits and the amount of like demand for that. And you can this goes back to like DARPA and the Internet, right? And the Amazons and Googles and Facebooks of like the notion of public private partnerships and how they just naturally beneficially, they've naturally like, like ended up working out for everyone. And so you go to like bitcoins origins and, you know, post OA crisis and notion that this system is unsustainable. Let's see smiling because this is like some of the fun stuff to to potentially chat about that nobody gets to and the guys don't even know. I'm going here with it. But so you have like these origins of Tether, but then like the one that nobody talks about is you you reference it on this last part was Shapiro about it's this easy math of, you know, US take it as roughly 10% of all the gold, right? Where China has like 40%. And I believe that was what the numbers you had quoted where it's kind of like the opposite or maybe it's not that China has 40%, it's that US has about 40% of the BTC. And so in this hard money repricing world, it's in our best interest and the natural version as well. Then the the version that everyone knows is, well, you know, you got these loud bitcoiners, they had money. Kamala didn't take the money, Trump did. And maybe that, you know, there's a portion obviously that's true. And then the sense like, I need other tools and bitcoins, the tool. But then you go back and it's like, this game's actually already been working for five years because Sailor came in out of nowhere and he's been effectively, I like to joke, he's like the white hat, white hat SPF. Because while SPF was here to like work on behalf of these other parties, this guy's here evangelizing BTC and bringing it into the corporate structure and onshore and effectively Bitcoin to the US that nobody talks about. And then 23 happens with the ETFs. And Groman's the only person that's picked up on this. And the reason why I've been thinking about it is because I've been having conversations with institutions since back then where nobody wanted to face Coinbase, right? No institution wanted a web 2, web three company, i.e., FTX, Block Fi And then on a dime, everyone pivoted and were like, and they referenced GBTC in the lawsuit, but it never sat right. And growing will cite that we knew we were going to onshore and have a natural inflation environment. So individuals and citizens needed assets to preserve their wealth so they can actually buy things in that environment. So it feels like some of these things have already been like layering in from the corporate treasury to the ETF exposure and in this just like helped push it forward. But I'm curious like how do you think about that as it relates to the past, call it, 6 to 12 months versus past basically five years? Yes, yeah. So first I'll say like there's a from a strategic perspective, there's a kind of a set of simple if ands right. Like if you're going to reorder the global security trade monetary system and you're going to impose financial pressure and essentially those who who you can impose it on. Well, that means that like the the natural buyer of U.S. Treasury security is going to have to be like geopolitically conditioned. So the folks that are inside that zone, they're going to be sort of forced to buy your debt. But the people outside that zone that you can't force the buyer debt, they're not going to be your marginal buyers anymore. And so you should expect in that type of system that harder assets are going to be monetize. And that's kind of this kind of gilded Bretton Woods concept from from Zoltan that I know has been, you know, in the Moran, you know, Besant orbit for for for a year plus now. And in that world, essentially you have a dollar treasury zone, right, the dollar treasury sort of standard, like contracts from a global standard to like a more securitized zone, you know, with, you know, our friends and allies and some of the Middle East as well. And then the rest of the world, you know, essentially needs some neutral reserve asset to settle the payments and and trade between east and West essentially. And then this simple minded system, it's gold. Gold gets re monetized. You have as, as Luke would say, the Shanghai gold exchange. There's now gold exchange is popping up, a cash level futures exchange now looking to open up in Singapore. You've got obviously Dubai is a major entrepot. You've had a lot of gold moving, you know, at at pace in the three months before the election, they sort of did this sort of tariff scare to sort of create that arbitrage in the futures market to actually force physical settlement back at New York away from gold and sort of emptied the London gold vault. So there's a lot of strategic movement of monetary metals, gold specifically, you know, in the last 612 months accelerate in the last three months. So in that world, it's all about re monetizing gold, right? That's like the the sort of baseline central bank kind of normie BIS play. To your point, if that's your play, then if you also at the same time have Bitcoin in the mix and if you are going to be a pro Bitcoin, you know, administration, well then what would you do and why would you do it right? Well, Bitcoin we happen to have through a variety of historical narratives that you could, you know, tell that you just laid out, we have developed a pretty dominant position, just the physical ownership of Bitcoin. And I did that math on the podcast. I think, you know, it's a guesstimate, but if you add up apples to apples, the Bitcoin and gold held by individuals, say custody to ETFs and on government balance sheets, we have about 8 to 10% of the above ground gold stock. You know, in the US, it's collective, you know, ownership and about 35 to 40% of all the Bitcoin that's available. And so if you're going to run this play where scarce assets, hard assets are going to be re monetized, you're going to take more of an official position in the global monetary and trade system. Well, you have at least a four to one advantage by allowing Bitcoin to monetize relative to gold. And we know Bitcoin moved much faster than gold in such an environment. So you can probably get a massive multiple on that. So the region upside to you is much more like asymmetric there. And OK, like this is where you put on your conspiracy hat. Like, did they see this coming? Like, how far down the line did they see this coming? And was this all kind of like a sophisticated plan? I mean, I was been writing about it for a number of years. It's like, am I the only person that thought this would that this could happen? Like it seems a bit hubristic. I don't know, though. If they were like as as I don't know if like you could say, how could you forecast that Trump would win, right, Because if Trump didn't win, then this play may not work as well, right? Like Elizabeth Warren's army comes out and you know, sailor, sailor gets hit with all sorts of investigations and and what not. So I think like, like all things, there's competing power structures in our in our US political economy. There's not one sort of sort of high table master planner that's, you know, running the show. There are, but I believe there are and there have been a contingent of folks, quote in the deep state, you could say that we're, we're watching these dynamics play out over many years, right? Our dependencies on China for our military industrial supply chain hollowing out of our defense industrial capacity, kind of the enrichment of Wall Street at the expense of Main Street and the rise of China that was sort of facilitated by Wall Street. And so there's a schism right between you could say DoD and Wall Street and and Bitcoin to certain extent aligned more with the DoD elements than the Wall Street elements. And I think you're, you know, you're seeing that now play out along with a lot, a lot of other realignments here where Bitcoin is just, I think it's, it's, it's like Chekhov's gun, right? It's like it's on the table there. And you kind of know it's going to be fired, right? Like, like someone put the gun on the table, right? And it wasn't quite sure where it would play a role in the plot, right? But the story's playing out. A lot of things are happening and it's just sitting there and people that are like autistically obsessed with that gun are just staring at the gun. That's us. And they're like, what? Is he gonna pick it up? Is he gonna pick up now? And no, no, he came in, left the room, Okay. Yeah. Yeah, so, but then you just wait, but you just know the guns gonna get picked off the table at some point. And there's a few things you share here. And then on the other pod, which I'd occurred people to listen to, is the thing that makes a lot of this like ephemeral and hard is that there's no they there's no concrete like individual doing anything. So there's different factions within different countries that are always competing. And so to your point, it's like nobody knew Trump would win, but you had these different things happening in parallel. And then this is one of the routes and one thing to call out, I think as a mental model, because it existed was like Bit Max and then FTX. They were effectively the same thing. And it always was weird in my own head that like Bit Max was villainized back in the day, while FTX was the same thing. And it was like allotted and you had Clinton and all the stuff. And it was always like a weird notion. And this tied into the, you're referencing on how you can lean on certain parties that need you. And so Tether probably started organic like somewhat organically. But it's the notion of nobody ever talks about back in the day that when you're putting that much capital through the banking system, you literally have to be working in behalf of like the banking system to make sure that capital flow. And this was when I was getting into the space professionally was an 18 when NYDFS sued them late 1819. I might get the dates wrong, but it was basically where they started looking at the capital flows and they seized the 500 million, I think in Latin America and that's when they launched Leo. But point being is like that could be a line of demarcation where it's like, well, wait, you actually this we need to work this out together because this is to your point that demand for treasuries. And it's interesting because they talk about it now where they're like reference point of the that nobody can compete with them is that they're close to the dollars like, or like physical Fiat in the countries. And it never hit me until listen to that pod you're referencing that there's always existed these like black markets for capital that are funding other things or no, is a different pod that you reference on the, the Carlyle stuff. But it was like, it's starting to all like wrap around where you can see all these like capitals flowing into the system and nobody knows where it comes from. And it's doing these things and you need mechanisms that can be leaned on by the US government to make sure it affects their their how they want to express their view of the world. Yeah. And the Defense Department now explicitly has an Office of Strategic Capital. I know some of the folks that helped run that office, and they have sort of venture capital funds and private equity companies that sort of are officially deputized by them. And this is above. There's some stuff that's covert and some stuff that's just, you know. Normal. Normal stuff, but you can imagine, you know, the, the, the, the battlefield strategic competition is not just about building carrier groups and, you know, setting up military facilities and, you know, strategic deterrence. It's who controls ports, who controls airfields, who controls strategic mineral deposits and refining supply chains. And those are economic entities, right? Those are privately owned, incorporated, you know, LLCS that own and operate this infrastructure and these resource supply chains, which are, you know, between US and China now. Like that's the battlefield, right? And so if you do nothing, China's going to just own all those ports and facilities and rare earths is the US government, U.S. government doesn't really have state owned enterprises that operate in the same sort of like state controlled, like go and just buy this on behalf of the US government, right? But we do have aligned capital, right? That if given financing incentives and you know, patriotic encouragement, we'll we'll go do those things. And so there's that dimension of this which is just. Strategic competition how to ensure the US government's interests and and equities are. Are are manifested through the financial system and there's the more dark side, right, which we've seen manifestations of that go wrong, right, where you have covert activities that you need to finance themselves and they don't want to ask Congress for for money. And so, you know, you need to compromise a hedge fund guy or you give a hedge fund guy access to non public information and he trades on it and makes a a ton of money. And the deal is he gives you 80% of it. That's a pretty simple way of financing covert operations. I can tell you like multiple intelligence services in multiple countries do exactly that. That was actually one of the guys that we did a prisoner swap with for Russia was a guy that was doing that for the Russia insider trading fed information from the SVR. And you know, the deal was he would route those profits back to them. So, you know, financial markets, global capital markets are not just like, you know, the, the idealization of it's all, you know, private sector competing agents here doing arbitrage. There are all sorts of multi level games being played to exploit those systems. And you can go back to like BCCI, the Bank of Commercial, whatever Commerce and Credit International, which was, yeah, essentially CIA front group and is very connected to like Deltech Bank at the time. We know, you know, with Deltek's connections into the crypto space where early on. And so, yeah, it's like doesn't take, you don't need to be like Charlie with the red yarn to like come up with like a pretty plausible hypothesis here that U.S. government is not dumb, right? Like, like they, they know about this stuff, right? The question is, OK, what's the, how much is the long term play versus how much of it is just taking advantage of the balance sheets and the capital flows, you know, and the mechanisms that are available to you at that moment? I think it's more likely the latter, right? Like most bureaucrats just want to find, you know, like, like water, water finds its level, right? And so if you're like, I need to do a thing, what's around here that I can use to do that thing? And if, you know, stable coins exist, oh, I'm going to use that thing to do a certain thing. I think now it's more recent. The strategic element has come into play where when, when Tether is five, $10 billion, it's useful for covert operations. It's not useful for strategic things now when it goes from 200 a hundred to 200 billion to a trillion dollars. Now it's much more useful as a strategic tool for US, you know, dollar dominance and and sort of expansion of demand for our debt. Then you know, some pass through for some covert operation. But at the end of the day, this is the give and take between the security state, which is always amorphous and driven by people and people change and those people come Bitcoiners, right. This is the this is the other thing that I've noticed is like when I first got involved with BPI wrote this white paper, Bitcoin US National Security, like an initial assessment and I learned it had been circulated inside the CIA. And actually two of those individuals that read the paper, I don't know if I was the single tipping point for them, but they both left the agency. Actually, one was a a ground branch kind of tier one special operator guy who would did some work with the agency. There was a case officer and they, they, they were tired and they started Bitcoin mining companies and started working in Bitcoin. And they're just like, like it wasn't like an OP. It was just like, this is more interesting and more compelling and more rewarding to me. And I have certain skills and I can apply those, you know, it's in my business wherever it might be. But like people are people, right? And Bitcoin is compelling to a lot of different sort of sort of personality types. You know, our director of government affairs is one of these guys. He was a career CIA officer. He was like deputy in their cyber division and he's going to Bitcoin meetups and just like and then retired and then wanted to get involved in Bitcoin. But his skill set, the closest he could get was for a blockchain, a legs company, which he really didn't like, right, because it's not really the same thing. So the first opportunity were like, hey, man, we would love to. And he kind of all our all our PPI stuff and he's just like, I died in a little bit corner. Now you're saying, oh, is he just like playing the part, you know, is he is he doing? And you know, it took some we had to like we had to put him through some tests, right? There's like, you know, you stick your hand in the thing, right? The beauty, but the beauty of that is the all the incentives are always aligned. Like it's where your story really resonated because we see this at folks we hire and I mentioned the investment fund we operate and it's called early riders because it's literally built on. It's the early riders are going to rebuild the world that are forced out of the the sector that they're in because the bureaucrats won't listen to them. They've just tried as much with the carrot and now it's the stick time. And the stick is, hey, I'm just going to rebuild this faster, more nimble, what a better unit. And so that's, yeah, ultimately if he's holding a Bitcoin bag, he's it's his interest to actually make sure it works with you or he just kind of like self defeating. Yeah, go. Ahead, jump in. Yeah, I was just going to say I wanted to go back to the the analogy of the gun on the table. I love that. And like, I'm curious in your mind, what is the tipping point to someone picking up the gun? And because I think to the to the layperson, perhaps the United States creating a strategic Bitcoin Reserve was like nudging their hand towards the gun. But there hasn't been, you know, to be fair, like a ton of follow through on that idea. We still haven't gotten the audit of how much Bitcoin we own, which was promised, I think 30 days out and now it's, you know, two months past that. So curious your thoughts on, you know, the the follow through on the strategic Bitcoin reserve one. And then also like, what is that tipping point for picking up the proverbial gun on the table? Yes. And that's where we go from the sort of more abstract discussion of like the brass tacks here because, yes, the executive order, the history of the of the street Bitcoin Reserve, fascinating kind of case study here. So, you know, some of this is not entirely public. But so back in August in Nashville, you know, Trump gave a speech, BPI was asked, you know, if we had policy suggestions to send to the speech writing team. We had some ideas, threw them down. One of them was the SPR and we were pushed back. This is like, there's been nothing written about the SPR. This is like, it's like a meme, like somebody just made this up. That's not a real thing. And so I wrote, wrote like a little memo. I was like, no, no, it's a serious thing. Like this is the reason why it should, you know, it's like a strategic element of our, of our, of our Bitcoin policy and our, our approach to statecraft. And that got in speech and, you know, so first domino, right? And then, OK, well, then he has to get elected and then do the thing. And then it's OK, we have to draft up a bunch of white papers now to like reinforce that idea like this is a serious thing and then draft up like a notional executive order. Like if he gets if he gets elected, well, here's a way you could do it right. Like, you know, using existing funds, existing legal authorities. There you go. Now we didn't go strike the executive order, but we put ideas on the table. Executive order gets signed, established. The SBR declares Bitcoin the strategic asset digital gold 21st century, you know, important for us to to lead. And then specific instructions are given to the Commerce Department and the Treasury Department to identify budget neutral ways of acquiring additional Bitcoin for the SBR at no marginal cost to the taxpayer. And that has been, you know, given as instructions. We are waiting, you know, from the public's perspective to hear back. Well, what are those ideas, right? Because what does budget neutral mean, right? Like there's no like technical definition. It's a matter of interpretation. And therefore it's on, it's a matter of interpretation, depending on the bureaucrats and the senior officials that are now given this White House mandate to follow through. And that's where it requires kind of in the trenches, you know, analysis and and advocacy to sort of tilt, you know, this machine of state in the more bullish direction relative to the more conservative direction. Because a more conservative bureaucrat who gets that mandate could say, well, budget neutral. Well, almost nothing is budget neutral, right? Because I could always take any, any available, you know, set of assets, liquid or illiquid. And I can always use it for some other thing on my government's program of record. So anything is, you know, by definition, like an opportunity cost for the government's budget. And so I should spend almost nothing on Bitcoin, right? An alternative interpretation is that budget neutral means, well, I can't take existing, like congressionally appropriated funds for my, you know, FY25 budget and use it for Bitcoin. But that leaves a lot of other sources of funds to acquire Bitcoin. Tariffs, oil and gas realties, spectrum auctions, existing assets that are held on the government's balance sheet that are not Bitcoin, that could be liquidated for Bitcoin, whether it's federal land, you know, leases for federal buildings or ownership of federal buildings, existing non Bitcoin digital assets all the way up to like revaluing gold certificates. And so like the span of interpretation bureaucratically goes from like buying almost no Bitcoin to buying like a massive slug of Bitcoin, right? And so the executive order doesn't really tell you where they're going to land. And the White House themselves didn't say where they're going to land. And this is now like a person by person issued inside the White House, like who who wants to lean in which direction or the other? And This is why there's different camps, right? Some more conservative, some more aggressive. And the way the Trump policy apparatus works, this isn't like there's like a, you know, a whole bunch of like hierarchical set of studies, right? Where there's like committees upon committees upon committees. And then there's a bunch of Coas. They have the president's working group of digital assets chaired by David Sacks. Bill Hines is running it as the crypto advisor. And he's trying to like, essentially quarterback this. So he's critical to this. Now he's taking these ideas, but then he has to kind of work by consensus from my committee, cuz ultimate has to be recommendations from the Treasury Secretary and the commerce secretary lot, Nick and Besson. And they're doing lots of other stuff, right? Post Liberation Day chaos, Middle Eastern, trillion dollar deals. And so Bitcoin is just not at the top of their paper stack, right. And so I don't think it's for lack of it. It's like, again, we're the autistic people paying attention to the to the, to the, to the checkoff gun. But there's like, you know, five other people in the room and they're having fistfights and there's a fire in the corner and there's like, you know, someones like there's other things happening, but we're just like, no, pick up the gun guys. The thing where the guy's smoking the ball while they're fighting, they're just like. I think it's less this like we're now at the point where it's less this geopolitical exogenous sort of monetary game. It's much more like the inside the court of Trump and these very specific number of finite people that have certain authorities to make decisions, you know, in the next few weeks. And and that's that's harder to predict, right? Like it's easier to model like state relations to a certain extent than like these five people. And like where they stand in this particular question. You need to get inside their heads. And even if you talk to them and they say I'm going to do X, that's like not necessarily like a strong predictor of what that person will literally do the next week, right? So there's lots of people who get, who get told by some of these people, oh, no, no, X is definitely not going to happen. And then X happens a week later, right? And so there's just, you know, I, I have enough hubris. I have enough humility. I would say sorry, say like I've been told various things again, like Grapevine that like, yeah, yeah, yeah, like this is going to happen. And I just go, OK, like, we'll be great, right? But like, I, I don't know how, how, how much of A leg to stand on there. I would say just like finger in the air, the vibes, if I'm going full vibes, Capital Management here, like the vibes are tilting. Like a month ago, post liberation day, it would have been more bearish. I would have said they're distracted. 5 long fire bitcoins not on their agenda. They've got other things to do. You know, we are one voice in this like hurricane trying to like advocate for this thing. And we're being drowned out by stable coin bills, you know, shenanigans with the Dems on market structure and all this other stuff that the most of the crypto lobbies are, are obsessed with because that's what they've told their bosses they're they're going to get done this year. There's not much of A national constituency prioritizing Bitcoin SBR really, except for us. And so, you know, we're we're scrappy, but like we have, we don't have a megaphone. So I was a bit more bearish, I'd say a month ago. I'm like, you know, they might just like throw us a bone here, but I've become increasingly more optimistic again, more vibes per SE than anything like definitive because you have to like, you know, put a large discount factor on all sorts of the rumor mill. I don't know, but I'm I'm increasingly of the opinion that they're going to buy a significant amount of Bitcoin. Trump and Lutnick are like just pure vibes capital, like Co founders, right, like where Trump, you know, literally just wants to own all the bitcoins. And then Lutnick has been talking about, you know, bitcoins price and obviously Cantor and what's going on there that if you had to make a bet, it's just the incentives also align or is like, why don't we just own all the Bitcoin in the US? Let's figure it out. And Trump leans in a direction that way and. This is where like, there's two ways of interpreting silence, right? You can interpret silence as they're ignoring us. It's off the radar screen. It's not a priority. That's the bearish interpretation there's. No interpretation, which is like, it's so serious. They're like, shut the fuck up, right? Like, like, we're going to go hard, but like, you better not, you know, you better. Not even. Like smirk at the direction of a mic. Right, like like this is this is this is this is high stakes. This is for real. Like this is not like a little, you know, side thing anymore, like the bit the big boys are now involved. And it when that happens, it gets serious and you just shut your mouth and you maybe even lie about what your plans are, right? So there's two ways of interpreting, you know, what's going on here, I'd say. The alternative is MicroStrategy could end up just being the US government's coins at a certain point, and then they already had a big stock ball. But that's a. It's a different. I mean, I know that's kind of like, yeah, I mean, that wouldn't be at the top of my list. Like the government can acquire Bitcoin from other pools without, you know, hitting domestic balance sheets. Like I'll just put an example, right? The defense gangs and the, you know, Trendo Agua and other South American and trans trans criminal, transnational criminal organizations were designated as terrorists. Officially, it's by executive order. When you designate those entities and those those leaders as terrorists, there's a whole bunch of national authorities and natural capabilities that you can now point at those people and they're using a lot of crypto. So wouldn't it be nice if we could just go after these fentsimal gangs and these and these cartels and Philip America's SPR with no marginal cost to the taxpayer. So there's there's other ways that you can go after that without, you know, I think sailor has lots of lawyers and we still live in a rule of law country. Like if we're in a situation where the government is seizing micro sailor's Bitcoin stack, like a lot of things have gone horribly wrong in America and you know, we are in there's lots of other things that you should be worried about at the same time. And so you should be your contingency plan. There is more more your citadel and your guns and your self protection. So I know we like to plan for lots of worst case scenarios, but that's not the top of my list. I think there's other the government wants to buy some Bitcoin. It can go buy some Bitcoin. It's got the money printer and you know, athletes resistance always, right? Like constraints determine action. But how do you how do you square or balance like the the perception of like, you know, if they went full, just like we're going to print money and buy Bitcoin, I think there would be a natural tendency to then question the dollar system more granularly. And so I think that's part of the dance too, is like they can't get too aggressive and and, you know, really forcefully grab the gun. They they kind of have to do this, this quasi dance and and not be too over in what they're doing. Would you agree with that? A. 100% yeah. I mean, all Fiat currencies stand in a superposition of positive value and 0 value and there's nothing in between. And so you as a hegemon who issues Fiat paper claims to your future tax revenues, would not want to undermine the confidence in the global markets, you know, you know, sense of the value of that Fiat claim if you have to. You know, essentially it's it's calibration, it's communication, it's forward guidance, it's proportionality. So if they were literally saying and executing on a plan of acquiring as much Bitcoin as they could by printing money, well, then everyone's just going to sell what they're not buying and buying what they're buying. And then you're a Bitcoin, you know, hybrid bitcoinization overnight. I don't think that's in the cards. I don't think that's in the cards anytime soon until, you know, we're literally, you know, on the precipice. And so you know, but I think I want to buy. In a in a budget fashion, a few 100,000 Bitcoin for, you know, we're talking from the government's balance sheet perspective, you know, like, like less than $100 billion of anything is like it's like kind of you know, it's like a it's like a it's in the rounding of of the national of the national GDP. So but it's also signal, right overall, I mean, my argument has been with the bit bonds idea is that if you're going to do a pro Bitcoin strategy, like one way you can mitigate that risk essentially is synthetically graphed on that hard asset that you're monetizing into your debt issuance, right? So this is, you know, maybe not phase one, but maybe phase two, phase three for going down this particular Rd. here is, you know, bit bonds, right, which is basically that right and gives gives exposure to kind of a volatility controlled, you know, security that has, you know, relationship to Bitcoin and actual Bitcoin payouts. The government gets to essentially take proceeds from that debt issuance, fill up the, you know, the SBR and they could potentially issue that bond at a lower coupon. And so they get to borrow cheaply relative to what they otherwise could. And so they think there are clever mechanisms, you know, government could go go about in terms of acquiring Bitcoin while still servicing its debts, while still maintaining confidence in its debt markets at the end of the day, right? Like sort of recapitalizing itself right over time, right. With like with hard assets, which is, you know, people speak about this in monetary economics, like very casually when it comes to gold is because that's been the thing that we've done before with gold, Like we've gone on and off gold standards as different countries over different times. So it's like not like a conceptual, you know, like new thing for that to happen. It's new to think about it with Bitcoin, whether we I don't think we would go on a Bitcoin standard anytime soon, but diversifying your national balance sheet, acquiring a hard asset that you can asymmetrically monetize relative to say Chinese gold and use that to also help fund the strategic techno industrial investment projects. Say you use some of the SPR to to to act as seed capital for sovereign wealth fund and do energy and AI build out instead of relying on Saudi and Gulf money? Right. Like, like if I had to like pick, you know, KOA A KOA B, Hey, let's like go and kind of like buddy up with a bunch of gulf kings to like beg for their, you know, trillions of dollars of capital to flow into our AI. And therefore we have to give them access to frontier a models and maybe even AGI gets born in the desert of Saudi Arabia or the Emirates. Like wouldn't it be nice if we could actually capitalize those investments without having to go to these autocratic regimes? Can we just, you know, put some high-powered digital gold inside wealth fund, run that up turbo, turn 50 billion into 500 billion in a few years and then boom, bring in public private investment, leverage it up. You've got $2 trillion in in in dry powder to to fund your techno industrial domestic renaissance, and you've got no foreign entanglements or obligations. Hope you're enjoying the episode. Just a quick break, tell you a little. Bit more about something we just launched. On Ramp Trade is our new account here built for individuals who are ready to start accumulating Bitcoin or want a simpler, more secure way to grow their position. Think about your friends and family. Maybe with Bitcoin crossing 100K again more recently, perhaps they're asking you questions or they might be soon and so they need a secure place to buy Bitcoin. Whether you want a dollar cost average make one time purchases, we have designed On Ramp Trade to give you very low fees. 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You can do that from the home page as well now. Hope you enjoyed the rest of the episode and all the best to you. See you later. I think no, it makes it makes sense. I think like from the capitalistic opportunistic perspective, I think everything you said, it ties into this notion of the traditional 6040 and how, you know, individuals all the way to sovereigns have preserved capital inequities and bonds is completely everyone in the gold camp, as you alluded to, is like known this, the hardcore gold bugs, but there's never really been a viable path, But also kind of from the powers that be signaling it meaning like gold and Bitcoin become money and everything else is a credit instrument. And that's a huge like still taboo to talk about today, even though big gold sit at whatever $30,000 a Troy oz and bitcoins, it's over 100K. And so as that repricing happens, there's just going to be a lot of people left holding bags of kind of like, you know, they're going to slowly migrate over, but they're going to be left holding bags, real estate, you know, bonds, traditional equities. And so I think that's just like an overarching theme. The other aspect, and I know we're coming up, we got about 20 minutes. I don't know, Jackson, if you want to take it in different direction that the thought that Matt brought up is there's something interesting I think you've been talking about in this convergence of multiple like taboo or things that are just so kind of like wild that they're all coming together, which is the AI AGI component. There's Bitcoin and then there's the natural like UAP conversation and they all like kind of tie back to energy in my mind. I haven't thought deeply about this, but curious how you think about where Bitcoin's almost like this Canary in the coal mine for finding the cheapest source of energy to mine. And then you're seeing like the existing miners or the compute going in like, you know, crap picking that up. But then even again, just limited knowledge on the UAP side. It's like a lot of these sightings or at least a big portion or around nuclear and around energy. How do you just think about like that world and where this like UAP conversations coming up? And I know it's something that you're you're known for the talk about and I think a lot of people aren't familiar with a lot of these concepts. So just maybe starting at the very high level would be good for people to tiptoe. We'll sort of tiptoe in here. The water's warm. But to your point like, well, one like Bitcoin I think is a anti fragile asset that has asymmetric option value relative to global disruption. And we've talked a lot about the disruptions coming from the geopolitical and monetary kind of fragilities and shake UPS here. And we think Bitcoin has sort of, you know, asymmetric upside relative to those disruptions, right? So you want to own Bitcoin because you think, you know, indebted government's gonna have to print their way out of it. A fragmenting, A fragmenting global system is gonna inherently rely on, you know, decentralized cross-border, you know, trustless means of settlement. We're still a digital civilization. So we're going to want to settle in a digital, you know, reserve asset doesn't have all the physical and transactional and verification cost of gold. The the typical bromides full case for Bitcoin that gets Bitcoin to, you know, parody with gold right and I think that's probably gonna happen in the next, you know, three to five years bearish, but that's that's like OK, the normal like again, kind of like most of what I focus on and there's other disruptions coming in right A lot of focuses on on the accelerations coming out of these frontier AI model labs and there's been a lot now of the discourse inside the Bitcoin community on how that will intersect with Bitcoin right, Whether an agent based digital economy is going to use Bitcoin as a you know, I mean of exchange as a as a store value for their own economic activities. You know that don't have bank, they don't have bank accounts, so they need to have a digitally native, you know, currency to to hold and to transact, you know through and and in which seems plausible to me. Obviously Sam Altman has his has his druthers. It'll all be world coin. So, you know, we need to nip that in the bud, but this is another convergence of kind of these accelerating technological disruptions that are gonna have like cascading impacts on our monetary paradigm. So I think there's a strong positive like loop between AI and Bitcoin in many ways. There's like maybe other macro level questions about AI that are more about how it affects, you know, the the the social fabric and division of Labor and where the surpluses are concentrated or diffused in society. Are those just like hoarded by a bunch of, you know, techno oligarchs? Is there some Ubi? How is that man? Is there's a whole bunch of other questions and that that might have spillover effects on how we think about Bitcoin over that, you know, 3 to 510 year time. Ryan, you know, the way P question is another one of these questions I think people don't pay as much attention to because it's been shrouded in a lot of historical taboo and stigma intentionally so on the part of the the relevant government interests at play. But it's it will come in to the top to this discourse sort of shift that we saw Bitcoin go through like over the window moved. Talking about Bitcoin seriously inside DC was like a fringe thing when we got started at BPI. And now we're hosting events. And I'll tell you the people that you're going to see at our policy summit on June 25th, which by the way, sign up btcpolicysummit.org. You can go to my Twitter accounts, my pin, tweet. You can use a statecraft for a free ticket. So people listening if you're wow. And you can stay. To get a free ticket, but you gotta sign up. I might, I might change that discount code, but you know, the next in the next week or two. So yeah. So, so sign up because I think the people you'll see at our policy summit will, you know, align with the topics we've talked about here, like the level of people that are gonna talk about Bitcoin and it's very serious fashion from a strategic standpoint will surprise people. I'll just say that we haven't announced some of those people yet. So that's, that's, that's this track here, like this Orbison window shift can happen pretty quickly. And in our particular domain, it wasn't a surprise to us because we're like, of course Bitcoin is going to, you know, go to the moon. Of course it's going to be a strategic asset. Just the world doesn't recognize it yet, right? We're the in Group that shares a common set of sort of shibboleths and sort of canonical lore and kind of a bit of religious, you know, belief system that there's going to be some future redeeming event, you know, hyper bitcoinization, where I'll be proven right and the no corners will be proven wrong and the world will sort of bend to my to my vision of things that may actually objectively happen, you know, with Bitcoin. But we think that's normal because we're in that in Group and we've seen that over to window shift in real time AI. Similarly, you know, folks that are in that in Group have seen this move from less wrong, less wrong blog posts talking about the AI super intelligence takeover existential risk. Nicholas Bostrom, you know, Elijah Yakowsky, all the sorts of stuff. I wrote a whole novel actually a number of years ago on quantum AI, super intelligence take off scenarios. So I was in that in Group as well. And I was like, oh, this is a thing. And that's now moved to the center of the discourse there. There are now lots of high level policy conversations happening as we speak on, you know, the timelines for AGI and what that means for geopolitical competition. We're having these multi $100 billion, you know, deals done with Saudi Arabia to box out China. It's driving geopolitical decision making. UA PS You know, I've seen this play out and it kind of I've learned to sort of look around kind of the corners here and see those little moves on the on the on the the like the tails of the distribution to see those, those shifts. And this is this is coming in. It's coming in faster, I think, than even some of those other ones did. There's a large, you know, that's a multi hour conversation, like what's exactly coming in? But the, the basic premise is that, you know, we will have to accommodate ourselves to the fact of non human intelligence, advanced technology that's a product of that non human intelligence. Israel is interacting with humanity, is has been interacting with humanity for some time. And there are government programs that have been dedicated to this for many decades. So those are just facts. People will have to accommodate themselves to, you know, some will accommodate themselves to those facts. Sooner, sooner, sooner or later, it will be uncomfortable in various fashions. But then there's a lot of downstream implications of that, of accommodating yourself just to those bare facts. There's other facts associated with that, you know, that are that go in lots of different directions. The most relevant you could say for Bitcoin, it's like a hedge is technological disruptions to our physics paradigm, right? And a good thing about Bitcoin is the difficulty adjustment is that even if we have breakthroughs in in energy production within two weeks, right, the hash rate will adjust. Now the question is more about security concentration of whatever that new production is if it's dedicated to ASICS. Ultimately, you know, concentration of energy goes through concentration of compute. And so you know, it's more a function of who gets who has access both to the energy and to the compute. I think The upshot of the NHIUAP story is the technology component and the physics component will be far down the line of public discourse and disclosure for a lot of non proliferation and existential risk concerns. There's a reason why they've kept that secret for so long. There's, you know, certain things you could pull out of the black ball of of science that would be, you know, we we pulled out nuclear physics and those give us nuclear weapons. And it was the fact that it's somewhat difficult to create high purity uranium and plutonium and then get the the triggers right to make a nuclear weapon that keeps that risk somewhat constrained. If there was aspects of physics that were easier to weaponize, while those would be dangerous things to spill into the public domain, I think that's part of the consideration. I think there's also lots of other things going on associated with the evolution of these programs over time. And it's part of the geopolitical bargaining that's taking place right now. Trump is alluding to breakthrough weapon systems that nobody understands how they work. And he is, you know, dangling that out there for a reason. There's, you know, a lot of reconfigurations happening behind the scenes associated with these historical conflicts that are being, you know, snuffed out quite quickly. You know, at least that's what they're trying to do. And this looks like setting the stage for, you know, if you're going to be forced to accommodate humanity to a reconfiguration of its place in the universe, you want to kind of maintain, you want to kind of get to a stable position as possible as quickly as possible. I don't have a particular timeline. I think there's a lot of if fans embedded in this, but we are, we are on a trajectory where I mean, the sooner it's like with Bitcoin, it's like, you know, the sooner, the better you will comment yourself to what's to what's happening, the, the more you'll be prepared for the, the change that's coming down the line. Yeah. I appreciate you running through that and especially in that framing because I think for a lot of individuals, a lot of this stuff has never even brought to the table. And so helping through the lens of, well, Bitcoin was insane until it's not an AI is insane until it's not because we've heard it since we grew up watching, you know, Terminator and stuff. And then ultimately just a little bit of a tease for individuals to go down. Personally, it's interesting because I've always thought about Bitcoin is incentive alignment is just too perfect. That had to come and we don't go in here, but it's like it's too perfect for it to be created by man Into your point where I think you're kind of going is like, well, if it's naturally tied to energy and the reflexivity of the difficulty adjustment, it keeps the constraints tied in effectively. And I remember when the AI stuff was picking up in 21, I had this, I know exactly where I where I was at when I was like, oh, well, like Bitcoin actually protects us from AI because you have to plug in those systems and pay it with something to keep the energy. Like the energy has to come from a foundational, you know, constraint of the society. So it's all fun and like not even fun. It's just it's, it's constructive stuff to go down. So I appreciate you running through it. I know Jackson. I was just going to say like, it's, it's, it's hard to kind of, you know, bite off a bunch. It's like trying to explain Bitcoin to someone the first time. It's like you're fucking crazy magic Internet money, cryptography, you know, game theory, the history of money. Let me talk to you about calorie shells and da da da. And then people go, there's like a tiny percentage of population that goes like, oh, that's interesting. And then then they go down the proverbial rabbit hole and they self educate and they they come to some conclusion about the risk weighted probability of this Bitcoin thing being a serious thing and then making a life choice to invest substantial portions of capital. I think there's the same sort of epistemic and personal, you know, dynamic at play with this topic. There's a lot of initial rejection and taboo and kind of resistance to the, the apriori, you know, premise, right, that a lot of people just reject out of hand. And then some people that go home. That's interesting. There might be something there and they pay attention to what's happening in the government side and other areas and they follow the threat and they self educate. Yeah, and it's all objectively true. The the crazy part is like, I think it might have been one of the pause you did with Danny, but it was something that was said it like it ended in the most kind of like ominous, like if this is true, it changes everything. It was something to that effect. And it was referencing the disclosure book. And so I went to go start listening to that and there's just like all the accounts, like it's just like we can objectively say that the debt system is unsustainable. Most people be like, no, it's fine. And you're like, no, no, there's just there's like enough proof here. It's very similar to what you're describing and it's all out there, but I did want to give some more burn to BPI because I know you touched on it. We don't have to. We can, you know, in the last kind of like 7 to 10 minutes. Incredible work you guys are doing. Like we deeply not only respect, but have been in the space for a while and have seen how hard it is from like, you know, from the venture side and crypto coming in and just getting people to support all coins and go out on the, the risk curve and just blow their businesses up all the way to the quote, UN quote lobbyists that are, you know, have all the dollars to spend. And you guys being in a, in a doing things the right way on the think tank side, but also having natural constraints. And so anything you want to share about that and where people can reach out or get involved or allocate capital to help kind of further the cause on what you're working on? I think it's super exciting because you've been a a leader, Speaking of the space outside of the space, like from a, from a, where you're put, you know, put food on the table. Now you get to do both, which is really exciting because having your mind focus on this, I think we'd all agree, is super impactful for kind of furthering Bitcoin. Yeah, I know. I mean, everyone at BPI, like there's like an implicit filter or self selection, like they have to kind of get the bit right. And they're they're all finally there to like, you know, self actualize, you could say, right? Like a lot of think tanks, they get set up in DC to kind of be self licking ice cream cones. You know, they want to do the same summit every year, kind of the same panel discussions. They keep coming back to their donor base and be like, ah, we need to do the thing like we're like here to kind of like super Dova. It's like start with a bang, expand as quickly as possible to like have the strategic impact in this relatively limited window. We think we have to like decisively shift the future trajectory of the US and the global adoption of Bitcoin and then potentially do something very different, right? Like it's like Bitcoin needs like maximal support, like in the next, you know, 12 to 24 months, you would say, right? And then just be like an implementation tail. But you know, we've kind of came out of kind of a glorified blog state, you know, three years ago. We now have 8 full time staff inside DCA, total of 10 full time staff. We've got a bench of 23 fellows, National security experts, Energy. Policy experts, philosophers, economists, former deputy governors of central banks, right? We've got a deep bench of people, but honestly, we're still, I would say 10% of the policy advocacy crypto community inside DC. And you think about a coin is maybe 65% of the market, right? Right. If you throw out a lot of, you know, explicit nonsense for like 9095%. So like we're completely inverted relative. And I think you see those that, you know, reflected in the outcomes in inside DC. It's like, why is stablecoins the first priority and then market structure and then the SBR, right? If you were like objective, you had no inside analysis of how much sunk cost there is from all the sort of crypto industrial complex there, you'd be like, well, of course the SPR is the most important thing. Do that first. That's like the foundational neutral reserve asset that floats everyone's boats and also aligns more explicitly with U.S. National interest here. And our values around the world isn't just like special carve outs for a certain crypto business model, but it's instead it's the inverted and that's a direct function of just how, how things are portioned inside the DC, you know, sort of ecosystem. So yeah, we are, we, we want to essentially scale proportionally to Bitcoin and Bitcoin's impact and try to make sure that at least the policy environment inside inside DC is at least like market weighted. And it's we're at least, I'd say, you know, 6-6 times away from that in terms of our current budget to where that would be market weighted. And so, yeah, we're, we're aggressively looking for supporters in expansion. We're also looking for thought leaders, folks in the community that have insight and curiosity about, you know, intersection of Bitcoin, the energy system, Bitcoin and AI, Bitcoin, national security, Bitcoin, geopolitics, Bitcoin and blank, right, basically. And there's a lot of Bitcoin and blank things out there. And so we're always looking for people, folks to come in with ideas, suggestions on, you know, white papers or events that they would like to help host, you know, expertise that like to add in. We we, we bring on visiting fellows to support particular projects. So yeah, we want to act as like a, an intellectual and sort of cultural hub to a certain extent inside DC on Bitcoin and these larger questions. So, yeah, we're going to be opening up a full time office in partnership with Pub Key downtown over the course of the summer. And that'll be like one of these third spaces to host these sorts of events. And we'd love, you know, once we're a full operating capability to have folks that are in DC just like a spot to hang out, grab a burger and, and, and hanging with the BPI crew. So yes, you can go to btcpolicy.org to, to check us out. And you can e-mail me Pines at btcpolicy.org if you have any questions or you want to get involved. And that's. Star cracked in the in the subject. I wouldn't short change yourself too much in the sense of like you, you Bitcoin's going to get the SBR. It's just a matter of when, not if. And you know, nobody else is going to get that from the crypto side. And then also appreciate, you know how much fun you guys are having. You see it on Twitter and it reminds me a lot of what we're building here in the sense that like as long as you're on the right side of history and also you have the passion and energy, it doesn't matter how much capital somebody else has because you just are able to counter position. And that's kind of like how I think about us building this business and it ties into the custody stuff where we're, you know, talking with you guys, I'm trying to help on just some of the multi institution aspects of like what does an SBR actually look like? And this was from building self custody solutions for hardcore bit corners and realizing like, holy crap, trillions of dollars going to come into this space and it's all going to go to Coinbase or proxy coinbases. And that's how gold failed. So we naturally need to leverage bitcoins properties from a decentralized perspective. And I think that's now starting to become mainstream. We're like bit bonds or any kind of sovereign exposure to the asset. It can't be held on plastic devices and desk drawers. And it's also can't sit at Coinbase because we know what happens when, you know, hard money centralizes. So you can just do things just like you wrote a paper and now Trump is doing stuff. Yeah, exactly right. Like never underestimate the power of of memes, right. And you know, an organization starts as a meme and it becomes a real political force and you can just do things. So I would just go do things. I love the inspirational end to this show. Well, Matt, appreciate you joining. For those listening, check out btcpolicy.org and maybe join the event in June. Thanks again, Matt. Thanks, Matt. This is awesome. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. 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