The Age of Psionics: UFOs, Mind Control, & Global Power Structures (Ft. Matthew Pines)

civilizations and some advanced spacecraft coming here to monitor us curve? Is it time travelers? Is it cryptoaterrestrials? Is it interdimensionals? It does feel like this sort of Pandora's [music] box. You have hope, but then there's like a whole lot of like, you know, bad stuff that comes with it. [music] Not all knowledge is just, oh, this is a rainbow. Oh, this is like forever knowledge. There's no guarantee that the box of knowledge humanity is dipping its hand into is going to be like [music] good knowledge. Bitcoin and and UAPs and AI like these are fully at the center of what's going to drive major strategic

dynamics over the next few years. I'm here with Matthew Pines who is the executive director at Bitcoin Policy Institute. I think if I were to handcraft a podcast guest, [laughter] you would be it. uh you just are always such a deep wellspring of knowledge uh across many many domains and so I'm very very excited to have you here as things get very weird in 2025. Yes sir. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So I mean there are a million ways to or places to start. Um

maybe you know the one thing I was sort of kicking myself for not talking to you about after our last podcast was Bitcoin. Um and now you're at the Bitcoin Policy Institute. So where do you think we go from here? There are chatters of a strategic reserve. You know, obviously Trump has, you know, made promises on this front. He, you know, was was in Nashville at the Bitcoin conference uh uh uh earlier this or last year rather. And um yeah, where where do we go from here? I guess I'll step back and maybe to bridge maybe most

of your audience, right? uh from the UAP community to uh the Bitcoin side of things is some like ironic and and maybe not so um ironic similarities between you know the evolution of Bitcoin as like a sociological phenomenon and how it sort of you know played a role in our in our politics and our and our sort of and the zeitgeist is a symptom of maybe what are these other dynamics taking place right in our in our society and and then the similar sort of evolution of of UAPs like they were both on sort

of the sort of fringes of what's considered acceptable um considered taboo in their respective domains like if you're a financial adviser you know five six years ago it was just anathema to even talk about Bitcoin as a serious investment opportunity right and the folks that were attracted to it were tend to be sort of heterodox thinkers folks that didn't necessarily trust an institutional authority were had a much higher risk tolerance or had a much higher degree of confidence in a particular vision of the future right and so the Bitcoin culture that got started has this sort of um uh you know sort of uh phenomenologies almost of

like a cult religion right it's got this sort of founding uh figure that sort of gifts this protocol to the true believers who have sort of formed this um astrological vision around it right sort of hyper bitcoinization uh they were sort of an outgroup they were kind of you know not the normal sort of uh folks that went through a traditional sort of meritocratic professional track for whatever reason in their background they were attracted to this to this idea of sort of an open monetary network. Uh and so they they sort of went in and and it formed this sort of uh unique uh

culture and it has Bitcoin podcast, it has Bitcoin um conferences and influencers and as you know as social media has developed uh Bitcoin has become this you know this own community, right? And then as Bitcoin became more and more of uh of an adopted asset as a network grew, it [clears throat] obviously grew in total market value. And then it became much more of a political force. And then politicians started to get engaged and there started to be like a regulatory conversation that was triggered around Bitcoin and you know the broader digital asset space. And so that the the sort of the

Bitcoin like concept sort of went from total fringe heterodox somewhat taboo topic and has sort of been on this trajectory towards you know inside the Overton window and now you have essentially president of United States saying he wants America to be you know the crypto capital of the world right so that is a kind of remarkable evolution for something to go through in a relatively short period of time and I think that there's some interesting uh to that kind of trajectory for Bitcoin and the UAP topic right I think uh whatever underlying reasons For that similarity we can explore but just as a

first level set of observations is you know similar sort of fringe somewhat taboo subject. People are attracted to it via some idiosyncratic mix of their personal experience and their you know professional or psychological um sort of you know focuses and it has its own insular sort of canonical lore and and influencers and podcasts and conferences and it has also undergone this evolution right from since 2017 where it was completely somewhat fringe and kind of this um this outgroup culture and then

side. uh and they happened around the same sort of time period and and now we're at this particular moment in time, right, heading into, you know, the first few weeks of the Trump administration where both Bitcoin as a policy issue is pretty highly salient and a and a topic of of contention and focus at the senior most levels of the administration. At the same time, UAPs are also like increasingly a subject of White House level, cabinet level like discourse and um and speculation, right? The speculation in the Bitcoin community is like how serious and how pro- Bitcoin is

the White House really going to be who's who's really going to, you know, what sort of executive orders are going to be passed? What sorts of pro Bitcoin policies are going to be uh put be put forward? The same sorts of questions are happening on the UAP side. How serious is the administration about disclosure? What sort of pro-UAP, you know, cabinet secretaries are going to be confirmed? And how forceful are they going to be in executing on that pro UAP policy position? Very similar, right? we've got potentially pro Bitcoin cabinet secretaries and the question is like how pro Bitcoin are are they really going to be? Um and in many ways often

they're very the same people, right? Like um you have Tulsi Gabbard uh at DNI who's apparently, you know, pretty pro Bitcoin and and and also now I think in her testimony was talking about sort of UAPs explicitly in in her in her. Do you think she'll get confirmed? I don't know. I'm not an expert in handicapping the Senate. Um I don't know. Uh 5050. I mean, it'll probably be decided, but by the time this is like aired, so whatever prediction I make will look I think she's like I think she's like slightly above 50% in poly market or whatever. So

yeah. And I think I haven't seen most of her full testimony or what the reactions were. So I can't necessarily judge because it depends on how how the senators um you know perceived her testimony and and what the media reaction is. Um but yeah, but just stepping back like so I just find a remarkable sort of fact about our our political economy and our and our sort of the sociological process underway that these two sort of outgroup somewhat fringe topics UAPs and Bitcoin also just my personal preoccupation for the past five six years like thinking intellectually about these things in a

very serious way but you know and for me professionally these things started out on like the side just things I was interested in I just happen to be really sort of obsessed with these two topics like not for any particular particular reason or like why they were related to each other just that's just sort of how my my intellectual interests sort of and then they've both kind of been embarking on this process you know the last four or five years of coming kind of coming into the Overton window and now becoming subject of very serious sort of policy um uh uh you know sort of

deliberation and decision now at the highest level um of the US government and so so that's just like the way I would start is just like these are you seem like these disconnected um phenomena. There must be some underlying reason. I don't know we could dig into specul speculation about why the why these two things are all happening at once. Um at the same time you also have AI I think also undergoing the similar evolution you look at right the blog posts about you know artificial super intelligence the sort of less wrong hyperrationalist effective altruist movement was there were kind of fringe

inroup you know internet conversations totally that had their own canonical debates and lore and you know little interneting you know factions etc. Same thing with Bitcoin. You had sort of fa factions split off about the, you know, the core vision about what Bitcoin is. You have factions in the UAP community, right? All these sorts of things develop these same dynamics. And then the AI question has gone from those blog posts to now like again strategic level conversation, you know, stock market swings 10% in a day because one Chinese lab, you know, releases an AI model, right? This is where we are now. And I

think Bitcoin and UAPs and AI like these are now fully at the center of of of what's going to drive major strategic dynamics over the next few years. So it's it's one of those things where if um want to try to read the future and I you know have been obsessed with trying to understand what's really going to what's really going on and what's likely to happen in the future. Yep. And you kind of have to pay attention to these things coming from the tails, these like little bubbles of of of phenomenon, whether it's this idea of AI, this prospect of Bitcoin

monetizing, this the prospect that UAPs are not a total fiction. It's like the what if AI turns out to be a real thing at scale? What if Bitcoin monetizes significantly? What if UAPs are real? Like each of those things individually has massive strategic implications and they all happen to be you know leaning towards the yes right of that what if at the same time and that's what I think is a strategic change that a lot of people that are maybe embedded in a set of mental models that they anchored 5 10 15 years ago

are just not well um positioned to to keep track of and then to anticipate the changes that might be coming in the next few years. Yeah. It's almost like if the total energy of the system equals potential energy plus kinetic energy. All of those things have huge potential energy buildups and it's just yeah it's unclear how exactly it it pans out or you know not to mix anal physics analogies but how the wave function collapses or whatever but but there's uh sort of you know uh a lot of possibilities w with these things and it's almost like you

know the history of the last 50 or so years has been the history of successive bubbles and like like in the 70s you could say like real growth really started to to blow 80s and 90s was kind of like, you know, financial deregulation bubble. Um, you know, early 2000s you had the real estate bubble. Uh, you know, globalization bubble or whatever with NAFTA, you know, maybe in between those two. Um, and then and then in O8 was this big watershed moment. And then 09 Bitcoin, you know, you read

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

reality bubble. And like UFOs are somehow like, you know, like uh uh uh that's bursting. And that's why UFOs are just, you know, this they're not, you know, some deeper ontology, but they're like the first thing to like peek its head out, you know, once the reality bubble starts to sort of dissolve. Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating because my my first sort of hot take reaction to that is thinking about again money is just a concept and it's an embedded concept that's reified in human institutions at a certain scale, right? We have money like things at all scales

of human institutions like social organizations. Like if you don't have human institutions, you don't have money. You just have you know people living you know hand-to-mouth and scraping out subsistence existence. As soon as you get to some basic level of human social organization, you get something like moneyiness as an institutional concept that gets instantiated and reified in different you know technologies right the technologies that can that can instantiate that concept of money whether it's sea shells or yapstones or or or gold or gold certificates you know ledger balances at international institutions like you know everything

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

ledger around the world. Right? It wasn't possible until you had the basic technologies of the internet and and and and um public private key uh you know cryptography. Um, and so this is these were the basic primitives that Satoshi put together and he published in the sort of the the you know 2009 as an open and that's that's a that's a bit we should drive this home because whenever I speak to kind of boomer financial people or whatever they act like that's not a big deal like what what is it the Byzantine general problem or whatever like the double spending thing that's

not a big deal it's a huge deal like the idea that you uh can create digital scarcity and then you There are all sorts of possible derivatives from the digital scarcity, but just the the digital scarcity itself, which Bitcoin is the kind of archetypal example of, is sort of really important because software is doesn't usually operate like that. And so that's like that's like really It's like the it was the first real computer science breakthrough that became a meme, right? And so people have hard time trying to reconcile both the mimemetic aspects of Bitcoin and the

hard technical scientific breakthrough that it embodied, right? Well, they also have trouble swallowing the fact that like our other financial instit institutions are [clears throat] at all mimedic themselves and that you upend the old mimisis with some new mimisis. Well, this is where we get often you get into these interesting debates that turn into philosophical questions of like like what are human institutions? What are these human concepts? Like how real is the state as a concept? How real is the promise of a state to pay back its debts a thing which is essentially what money is in our system? And it's like

these are sociotechnical systems. Not to you get too like jargony, but like in a sense all money is an inter is an interface between human belief and the physical world, right? Which is what intermediates the actions that human beings take as a result of their beliefs. And so that's just what humans are what we do. There's been philosophical debates about how much reality you assign to like these different concepts like money. Is it a thing? Is it just a social fiction? If it's all just a matter of mutual belief, then can we all just decide to believe something different? And but again, it's in interface between human belief and reality. You can't just believe

anything, right? Reality imposes, you know, exogenous constraints on what that belief can do in the world. Does doesn't it all just kind of come down to um you know, who has a monopoly on sacred violence? Who who can who can perform sacred violence? And the government is that at the limit. And so, you [laughter] know, it's like it all ultimates like sort of taxation is like a version of that. If you don't pay your taxes, you end up [clears throat] in jail or something. I mean, you can go to like yeah, the sort of the Max Vber kind of deconstruction view of the state or um I

mean, that's getting deep into political philosophy. Yeah, I don't think it's interesting to have like a particular strong view of like, you know, that build up this tower of institutions that that that anchor um these webs of of mutual fictions that we call, you know, these collective beliefs like the state, the constitution, the social contract. These are all higher level um kind of shared fictions. Yeah. That we all agree and there's a sense of mutual consensus belief that we will all continue to keep believing them, right? states break down when that that that embedded uh assumption that everyone will continue

to basically believe the same thing tomorrow about those you know shared fictions um breaks down right when you don't actually trust that's what trust essentially is at scale right can Bitcoin serve as a hed because I think about the last like five years and this idea of like modern monetary theory like as long as your debt is denominated in your own currency you can sort of like print it away and like once we start to talk in those terms terms it feels like that's sort of the beginning of the end or something like that doesn't feel good. And so is

Bitcoin like is it you know this fully decentralized thing or you know presumably Trump wouldn't get behind it if it was and is it actually like a hedge you know as far as like ensuring you know uh uh uh uh solveny from you know United States perspective on a go forward basis. Well, again, those are trillion dollar conver uh sort of questions. I don't have a, you know, high confident answer to how it's really going to shake out, but I think it's important to think about Bitcoin as an emerging

institution, right? That is a novel type of institution that we haven't really seen before, right? It's a global decentralized um open, meaning there's no gatekeeper to access, you know, your your ability to to transact or or hold it. um doesn't require a third party to sort of validate your transactions to uh to secure your your rights in the network. You can essentially do that with essentially math and open source software. So this is a kind of um you

know novel technology that can form as a predicate for an emerging institution that [clears throat] started off fully peer-to-peer again kind of crypto anarchist internet forms, dark web markets, you know, forward-thinking investors, etc. and is now [clears throat] engaging at the level of nation states. And so we're seeing this, you know, quite dramatic and for me just fascinating interplay between these existing state institutional structures and and superstate institutional structures, say like the ECB or the bank of international settlements and the sort of international norms between central banks as well as major pools of

international capital which are you know these are institutions themselves right and they they formed as a result of decades sort of evolution [clears throat] right within a certain global context especially in the post-war era especially in say the post 1990s um kind of neoliberal sort of capitalist uh sort of US sort of dominated global system and then in comes Bitcoin as this kind of thing from left field that is now you know as again it's sort of emerging to first order just as an asset that like those existing institutions can buy right so black rockck has their ETF and they're

now pitching it to their to their to their clients and saying to soy wealth funds it's prudent for any institution to hold between two and 5% right so they just view it as it's an asset you can hold it it provides diversification ation benefits because it's volatility it's you know correlation is is adds overall kind of say um uh like improves the sharp ratio of the of of the median portfolio. So they're thinking that from a purely investment asset it's like there's it's a novel asset. It's now gone through this hypers speculative phase. It's now in its institutionalization phase. Therefore it's a safe thing to sort of prudently

diversify into as part of a you know a portfolio uh sort of allocation decision. But that belies like what's really happening underneath the surface which is okay you have this weird it's not just an asset it's this network and [clears throat] it's a network that no one really controls right that's the that's the secret right there really isn't some there's you can't just go to the Bitcoin CEO and get him in a room and say like do something different right it's [laughter] like there's nobody to bring in there's no there's no throat to choke right you can get the head of Coinbase you can get the head of of uh of [clears throat] Black Rockck

you can get the head of you know any company and you can bring them into a room and be like we want you to do something different there's literally nobody to go to is is is the one um sort of devil's advocate argument there is like the identity of Satoshi but even there it's like he can't do anything to change the network I mean he has a certain cult of personality so you think it's a he I mean [laughter] I think people recognize it in his correspondence is most likely male um I think that's pretty accepted do you have any theories oh man the whole so who is Satoshi

question to me is kind of bal um I don't I mean I find it fascinating. I mean, it is fascinating again as a historical question. I think though it's really, you know, I think it's dead to be honest. Whoever it is, it's best for people who are pro Bitcoin to say [laughter] I mean it's you can go back to like the early history of Bitcoin like Bitcoin didn't come out of nowhere, right? In fact, Satoshi even cites, you know, like like David Chow and and we die

Nick Zabo and Nick Zabo. Uh and so you know he's he was taking different pieces that had already been put in place and trying to stitch together this you know it solved this unique problem right the double spend problem um and uh took the proof of work uh sort of concept as well and so added in difficulty adjustment so it was this kind of malange of things that no one had put together in the just the right way um and yeah I mean the most relevant there's like two main things that would be relevant if Satoshi was still alive and could like intervene sort of DS DSX Machina right into the

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

talic who's the charismatic singular founder personality who's very active and makes his opinions known and the rest of the community defers to his opinions. In fact, there was this recent shakeup, right, with the Ethereum Foundation and a kind of, you know, acrimony between developers and debates about this very complicated development um roadmap that they've laid out. And that's that would introduce new risk, right? Like the basic um risk profile of Bitcoin as an open source uh uh sort of software project essentially that

operates on this sort of rough consensus mechanism is it's very hard to change. It's very resistant to change. it takes enormous amounts of time and broad consensus to make even relatively trivial changes to to to the protocol because it's functioning essentially as as digital gold, right? It just doesn't change. And so um that that is a that's that's you know this debate that actually is really interesting um within Bitcoin is a sort of oidication debate, right? There are some folks that think Bitcoin should really just never change like at all. Like literally no tweaks like anything you change is a risk. And

there's some people who think well there are some long-term things about the nature of the protocol these like little additional features that would really unlock a whole bunch of additional capability for say time lock sort of um you know sort of sort of very constrained smart contracts right Ethereum is kind of a more turnmplete language uh and so there's some issues with that but it it gives a much more open expressivity to what you can do on on on the blockchain whereas Bitcoin is very much a very uh discreet if it's trying to be a gold analog I don't know if you need to do much more

than you know what what what what you've already done. I mean there are a few design I mean the design was pretty pretty perfect but like there are some flaws you could point at like the you know I don't think he anticipated A6 chips for example or like you know like extreme concentration in the chain itself you know I mean it's held up well I mean from when he was mining on a laptop to when now you have like you know massively capable special purpose you know integrated circuits that have been designed just to run that algorithm. Um, and the difficulty adjustment is the true genius, right? Because it doesn't matter how much energy you throw at it

in two weeks, it's going to automatically adjust. Take into account any breakthrough in in in in the hashing technology. Uh, and so that is, but the interesting thing about Satoshi is that if he if he was still around and he decided to say, "Hey guys, like I was just chilling out, but now I'm back and I've got all these great ideas about how to improve Bitcoin." Right? That's been the story of Bitcoin for a while now, especially in those first few years where it was like, "Oh, Bitcoin's great, but like, you know, it's too slow. the block block size is too small. I want to add these additional features and I'm going to fork it yada yada yada. There's always like Roger Val all these

additional the block size wars were all about this Bitcoin Cash is the true Bitcoin. [laughter] And so that was part of the whole risk of Bitcoin in the very early stages as you know like which which Bitcoin would win right and it's been this you know process of historical accretion over and consensus over time a kind of this sort of like a physics process of kind of um uh sort of condensation where it's like you have something that's really hot right and it's floating between many different states and it's cooling down right it's like a phase transition and then it starts to lock in right and we haven't I would say we

haven't fully locked in there's like still pockets of you know where the the the lat like the crystal lattice is still somewhat funible, right? I mean, there's like, you know, small little bips that could be added here to add additional features, but it's clearly in this process of kind of cooling down, right? It's like the big bang, right? the big bang early on, hyper, you know, you know, plasmas and maybe even the like the forces themselves are like all unified in this big soup and the boundary constraints of the universe were pretty wide and as it cools down like you know gravity splits off and then electroeak force and then it's like

you get the phase transitions down then it you know becomes um transparent to light you know 300,000 years and then boom you've got basically most of the degrees of freedom are now kind of locked in for the universe and then the rest of the story of the universe can play out. So I feel like bitcoin is it's like there was the big bang of the bit of bitcoins like a launch and then there was this process of kind of cooling and condensation that took place and you know was uncertain at that point exactly you know whether the block size wars would turn out in one direction or the other whether Satoshi would really be

gone with you know any given year the probability would go down but it was like pretty high early on like is he going to unmask himself is he actually going to just say hey got you I'm the CIA guys or something and every year that goes by it's like this process of cooling thing and and accretion and that has yeah as that happens it sort of it takes the risk off the table and then you know as that occurs if you take the risk off then its value goes up as it val as it value goes up its volatility generally will come down because it doesn't take a whole lot takes marginally less new capital to change the price the volatility comes down

the risk tolerance of the next marginal buyer right is now triggered and so then the value goes back up and that's basically been the process we've been going through to the point where you've got black rockck now essentially you know shilling it to to their clients, right, and talking wealth funds. So, this is this fascinating process, but unless you're really paying attention to it closely along that path, all that you really see it is like when it hits the media narrative and it's and its characteristic sort of hype cycles. So, you see it, you know, going through these 2013 bubble, 2017 bubble, right? 2021, 2022 bubble, right? And maybe now

we're in another bubble cycle, right? These are these characteristic sort of four-year cycles that we've seen Bitcoin go through. So the person who's just observing that kind of passively through whatever media filters there's like an activation function that it's now Bitcoin pops up on their feed or whatever. It's like oh it's a it's a it's in the it's another bubble thing, right? And it just keeps coming back an order of magnitude bigger. [laughter] It's like you know some people early on saw this as like a trend and they picked up on it and they've been handsomely rewarded for seeing this trend. Others catch on later. Um but like it's it's

clear there's a structural uh dynamic playing taking place here. Uh which I think is now like impossible and really sort of a matter of strategic malpractice if you ignore it. Like there are presidents and national leaders and chiks and kings having active discussions now about what should they do about Bitcoin? Like how should they approach Bitcoin? Like that is that is just a fact of our geopolitical and a monetary state of affairs. Um, and so you could just be like, "Oh, that's absurd. This is another bubble." Okay. But it's like sort of like the UAP

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

know, nation state adoption? But it's, you know, when you're early on and you only have a few data points, it's like an absurd extrapolation to to confidently predict an outcome. But more and more data points are essentially aligning onto that trend line. And that's going back to the very start of the conversation. That's the thing that I've been intellectually very fascinated about is just paying attention to those initial data points sort of off the curve. You know, speculating on what trend that might represent and then paying ever more and more attention as more data points start to come in that confirm the trend. And it seems like both in terms of

Bitcoin going on this sort of global adoption now becoming a geopolitical trend and then UAP turning into like this is a real thing and like now we may be facing a much more salient public discourse on the reality of UAPs and not human intelligence. Those are just things. Do you ever notice that the best gifts in life are the ones that you don't just receive, but the ones that fit seamlessly in your day and make them better? Whether you're enjoying the latest American Alchemy content on the move, or just tuning out the world for a moment, Raycon's Everyday Earbuds are

the perfect pair. I've been using mine nonstop. Whether I'm editing, making calls, out for a walk, they've become my go-to. The 32-hour battery life means I never have to worry about scrambling for a charger. And with multi-point connectivity, I can switch effortlessly between my laptop and phone. No more reconnecting every time I change devices. But here's what really makes them a gamecher. Active noise cancellation. Whether I'm working in a noisy cafe or trying to focus, these earbuds let me zone in on what matters.

And they do so in a way that's honestly better than any other earbuds I've used. I've also been loving these cool protective case covers. Check out this design. It complements the earbuds colors perfectly. It's cool that Raycon offers different designs so you're not stuck with something generic. You can actually pick a look that matches your style. Not only do these look great, but the new quick charge feature gives me 90 minutes of battery in just 10 minutes of charge. That's huge when I'm in a rush. And they also support wireless charging, so I never have to take the case off

when charging. And listen, Raycon gives you premium sound at half the price of other top brands. If you haven't tried them yet, now is the time. So go to michaels. Again, that's by i ls to get up to 20% off sitewide. That's 20% off everything on Raycon's website. That's right. You'll get up to 20% off everything on Raycon's website, including 20% off of all headphones,

too, when you go to buyracon.com/jesse. Click the link in the description or go to byracon.com/jesseminichels now. Well, where good segue. Where do you think that goes? Today I'm releasing an episode with Jake Barber, who's this firsthand UFO crash retrieval witness is probably not even doing him justice. He's an operator. But the one that, you know, he describes is is well, he describes two. One is an eggshaped UFO and the other is an eightgon like kind

of like an not quite an octagon but like like eight eight sides on the surface and it's sort of you know this black metallic thing. What do you think of his I thought that was a remarkable. Again, we've been kind of on this ratchet where like every few months something something new clicks, right? And it's an it's an it takes the overall conversation again people that are paying attention to every little data point here on the on this curve. I think there are some people that were you know again this is where the debates come in like what sort of disclosure are we

going to get and also like what is the curve that you think is like behind these data points. Is it the non-human intelligencees alien civilizations and some advanced spacecraft coming here to you know monitor us curve? Is it time travelers? Is it cryptoaterrestrials? Is it interdimensionals? Do you have a leading theory? I mean, I know you have your like, you know, uh, wolf rim physics stuff, but like do you have like a a theory ontologically? Is cuz this is really interesting like what is disclosure? I think for a lot of

feminine sort of feel and it made him emotional. And then the other thing that he says is that they use psionic assets in the government to basically uh you know and we should probably change the wording here maybe you know whoever is doing this should change the wording but summon these UFOs into people's sort of field of consciousness and then and then presumably these things at some point land and material might be used or something. The whole thing is so Yeah. And this is where ironically like

the Bitcoin thing is like trivially easy to model by comparison because like the stipulated phenomenon that you're trying to model and understand is just the adoption of this asset like essentially a collective belief that this is a real thing that other people will continue to believe it's a real thing and that you know different layers of PB institutions wealth funds institution pools of capital governments national leaders etc will just continue to basically believe that same thing over the like into the future. So it's not like a you have to construct a whole bunch of crazy sort of second and third order sort of underlying hypotheses for what's going

on. It's sort of just out there in your face and you're just making a prediction about that continuation of that trend. With the UAP thing, it's vastly more complicated and vastly more fraught because just to that point and back to my point about like what sorts of like when you're trying to interpret these different data points if you're, you know, assuming you don't know the truth, which is almost everybody here, maybe even everybody like you don't really know what's going on. All you see is what people are saying, right? And you have assigned degrees of credence to these different statements that are coming from apparently credible people. And I think he's extremely credible. I think he's got the professional

bonafites. He is who he says he is. I think he's being entirely truthful in describing his experiences as sort of essentially a delivery man in his crash retrieval program. Um, and you got but then you've got to cons but that doesn't answer really the object level question of what's going on. Yeah. Right. It just gives you a data point that you need to stitch together into a comprehensive model that you need to put together with all these other sort of highly fraught and inherently uncertain pieces of information. And so this is where this is what it gets extremely difficult for for almost everybody to to construct such a model because you have uh these

two main questions here which are the most foundational questions of human existence which is like are we alone and like what is consciousness right like separately enormous like unknown questions that are like almost at the core of who it is to be human like what it is to be human who we are like what is our history what is the nature of intelligence in the in the universe are we unique are we special is there a great filter all these sorts of questions. To answer that question, you have to, you know, put together a lot of disciplines of existing science and speculative sort of, you know, frontiers of physics to understand well, what's

the structure of reality, right? Is there a multiverse? Is there just this unfolding of time? You know, what are the boundary constraints of physical reality that any intelligence is going to have to be, you know, is going to be constrained by? And then the specific kind of contingent processes that give rise to intelligent life. How how common are those given the population of stars etc etc. How can we ever get high conviction in any given model? Like you know your idea that there's like branchial space that these UFOs might be able to hop across or whatever and we're in you know sort

of this more constrained reallyial space like how how is that at all? I mean that's the process of science, right? Um but how does it become falsifiable? Like e even you know and by the way I think I think Jake's testimony is completely beyond reproach as well as far as like the the details. And I find him to be an earnest good good person. Um but like it was a question of like you know yeah what are these things like what when they're coming down what are these things and is falsifying or corroborating this even seeing an object

like is that even you know that like what do what is that then? Yeah, you know like you're probably going to have no idea what it is. It's going to be emitting some radiological stuff and then you might get a little hurt and you might have you know put it in a lab and it might exhibit some weird properties and then and then at that point what do you do? What does that mean? I mean this is where I mean I studied physics and philosophy as an undergrad because I was fascinated if not obsessed by this sort of the boundary layer between science and philosophy right which is essentially philosophy is what we really don't have systematized theories of knowledge for right so the philosophy is sort of scouting out in the forest just

trying to find the path right and then you find the path and the scientists come and sort of clear the path right and so the frontier scientists are the first ones into that like overbuilt highly you know you get thorns everywhere right but at least the philosophers have sort of said yeah I think there's a path here this is basically the conceptual almost map of definitions that we're going to analyze these more foundational concepts almost create new concepts, right? Philosophy is often organizing human thought and systems of concepts to just help even ground hypotheses that then scientists can generate and have to go out into the world and refine as like real systems of

knowledge, right? So this process of you know exploration into this dark dark unknown that that humanity has found itself in. And so this is this basic you know uh challenge of reality is what it is and we are just you know flesh puppets with some with some uh with some you know higher cognitive capacities and this like being itself what it's like to you know feel in sort of phenomenal first-person subjective awareness that sort of lights up the machine inside and and it's like okay well we're clearly like on first on a first principles

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

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

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

there's well like what is consciousness in reality, right? Is there is it a universal field and we're just fragments or shards? Is there some sort of more, you know, sort of pansychus interpretation that you would give? Um, and what's the sort of psychophysical relationship between consciousness and the physical world that could be, you know, intermediated with advanced forms of technology, right? Um, and then there's this question of like, well, like is it just computational functionalism is true if you just instantiate a certain pattern? Is that all you get? Is you just consciousness or is it consciousness is actually the

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

are the rules that any rational mind would have to obey. And so the universe will then reflect itself in a regular organized way to that person to that you know subjectivity but that doesn't actually imply that like reality what he called nomina is actually that right that feels so important for understanding what science is and like you mentioned Jonathan Gerard uh this Princeton researcher that works with Wolf Rammers kind of taking up the mantle there and has all sorts of interesting ideas that might actually end up applying to UAP. Who knows?

universe and I would just say that I think he's right but I would also say that like all of these things are like maps and they're not the territory and so like you know yeah you you have these sort of huristics for how you understand the world and then maybe there is something more fundamental about consciousness itself and like it's going to sound so cliche and trite, but like the UAP stuff points to this like going within, reconciling with, you know, the ugliest parts of yourself, your

subconscious. You know, Carl Young would say until you reconcile with your subconscious, you call it fate. And like you have these mystery rituals for, you know, thousands of years where like the top thinkers like like Plato, like all you know, all these guys like went did these mystery rituals. And and it seems like it was to gain access to knowledge of their primordial soul, noises. And so it's like, you know, we can have these mental models and like we can we can, you know, draw stuff up on on on chalkboards and then we can like, you know, uh, falsify it in a lab or

whatever, but like maybe there's something extremely fundamental about like go going within and like I don't know like that the Monroe like the gateway stuff like like there are different paths, but like it's sort of Yeah, there's there's something actually really important about like you know um confronting oneself in this sort of Joseph Campbell style heroes this journey. How do I slay? How do you slay that dragon in me? What's the journey I have to make? You have to make, each of us has to make. You talk about something called the soul's high

My general formula for my students is follow your bliss. I mean, find where it is and don't be afraid. The lesson of most faith traditions in general and even, you know, modern day say newagy contemplative um transal meditation etc. um they've all tried to grapple with the the nature of like what it is to be a human subject right and the language the vocabulary the conceptual frameworks have evolved it was you know a certain structure in terms of like the human soul you know

kind of this is the um embodied sort of light of of god or whatever and then the material world is this sort of you know empty again kind of just uh stage of sort of lifeless objects right and then there's this um a lot of people have this sort of folk metaphysics where what's in my head or kind of consciousness is sort of this unique substance that is you know somehow more primitive and then there's the physical world which is just sort of lifeless stuff um I think it's a primitive metaphysics I think there's a you know to go to like a gardhead

uh sort of syncric view is you have this dynamic computational process that's unfolding in his way it's a multimputational process that's unfolding um and you can describe that in a formal way a hyper precise way to make you know predictions about, you know, extensions in physics and that's what physics and science is about. But they have to give it a metaphysical interpretation of that, you know, model, right? And to account for phenomena that aren't going to be um that aren't going to be amenable to the same sort of mathematized formalization that say a a hyperraph rewriting system allows you to do. And so there's a aspect of reality

that is what is it like to be a person like a thing. We all have a first person subjectivity um that seems very real to us. And there's certain people like Daniel Dennett and sort of Patricia Churchland in that sort of school of philosopher of mine that just deny the reality of first person subjectivity that qualia aren't aren't real, right? It's all just it's all just words we say. We don't actually have anything that's like to be us or there's no such thing as redness. Um I think that's dangerous. Yeah. But that is a very strong philosophical view that has in and it has it it's been very successful because of a technological paradigm that seem to

you know seem to support it over time which is you know this idea of just programming right this idea of just writing down abstract instructions on a computer can unlock huge amounts of complicated behavior and like you know what looks to be now in these AI systems like approaching human level you know output right or sort of mimicry in some sense um and so that has from a certain naive perspective Well, if we can construct, you know, purely computational systems, you know, just, you know, big weights of numbers, right? Sort of doing matrix multiplication, uh, and they can spit

out, you know, yeah, this is the touring test. They can spit outputs that are fundamentally indistinguishable from human output. Well, then maybe maybe we should just believe that that's all that we are, right? And, you know, but of course, at the end of the day, to get this philosophy of mind argument, you have to go back to like if I punch you, it's going to hurt, right? Like, that's not something I can write down in any sort of system of formal equations. there's just an irreducible feature of existence that only is uh accessible to a first person uh you know subject that is real and you know that's be like the first branch of

the tree that philosophers of mine diverge in and then there's different branches that people have taken over but I think this is where I for me again I come from this somewhat analytic philosophical tradition and but at the same time there's been a I think a weakness in that tradition that's been very um austere and it's obsessed with hyperformalism and sort making these very restrained and couched arguments and then the rest of society just wants to understand and gets like get to a first level understanding of what's what it's what's really happening in the world. Yeah. So you have these other you

have these different traditions right that are you know go under like sort of new age philosophy that goes back to you know kind of Hegel and Shelling and kind of the the German romanticist um you know have sort of been reinterpreted over over many decades and give birth to this sort of modern um sort of metaphysics. It's very popular in the UAP community, right, which is consciousness and light beings and meditative practices and um it's like we're rediscovering a lot of like ancient sort of knowledge, right? It's just being reinterpreted through our modern frames and belief systems. But even then, it's like those ancient belief systems were just those were just

the new age philosophies of the day. Sure, right? Like I again I maybe I'll just this is my training or disposition. I like to have I want to try to take that as a guide to then try to systematize and formalize as much as I can well what does that say about reality right we're just using words when we say you know consciousness or light energy or look inside right those are but like you need to stitch it together in a cohesive um worldview that is on the one hand scientifically

rigorous and formal and the one hand you know philosophically speculative and exploratory but you need to always have to like try to pull pull those threads Well, it's always funny when people say, you know, aliens are just angels and demons, and then I ask them, what's an angel and what's a demon? They have that that descriptor is in no way helpful, you know, more helpful incrementally you compared to an alien or whatever. [laughter] And so like you're you're equally completely clueless in both cases and you're just sort of like it's almost more of like a political pmic that you're trying to say, you know, it

all just goes back to a tradition. But you're right, in many ways the tradition is just as impenetrable as this newagy veneer that you know we we we have or And I think fundamentally we need to create new concepts, new worldviews that are based in a scientific practice but are uh not uh restricted by the prevailing what I would call sort of metaphysical assumptions. Right. I I so I think that's right. And then I also think l you know the concept of Yeah. you know, like, you know,

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

understanding of this stuff how we've interacted with it and it doesn't you're not throwing out any progress that's made in the past as a result of you know whatever interactions we've had with UAPs or you know these things or consciousness or whatever. So I do think you know it's like Alabiades was like was killed for like you know talking about the the mysteries at Elus or whatever and traditionally I think some of these things that we're touching on now in the UAP context you if you if you attempt them in some sort of like

willy-nilly way like things go very bad for you and so like you know I think I think it's actually kind of important to know that and to not just like wholesale you know democratize like Steven Greer who I this was a total mixed bag. I think in many ways he's being vindicated now actually for his really good investigative work. But he's of the mind that you can just like sort of try to call these things in and it's like I I don't know about that. I don't think that's a good idea. But what do you think? Well, this is why I think a greater

than the like alleged legacy program technology secret science secret physics crime is this what you could you could some might interpret as a spiritual crime. I would view it as more, you know, essentially a philosophical crime and people be like that's a trivial but for me a philosophical crime is the highest crime. It's like what is the highest pursuit of humanity is to understand reality. And to do that you need to have as much access to whatever clues reality will provide to you to then stitch

together in an ever um evolving and and uncertain basis like a picture of the world, right? what is really happening like what are the core phenomenon that I need to uh account for right in a coherent picture of of of existence and if there's an entire set of phenomenon that the US government or other entities have just been you know uh intentionally withholding um that would provide you know ammunition for or or ingredients to construct a much more uh integrative and

holistic view of reality then then we're all impoverished fundamentally and almost spiritually metaphysically in my sort of more neutral language and that is that's more for me of like a um an abrogation of an insult right than like withholding classified physics like that's a problem but that's like that's like a it's it's a it's a it's a problem underneath this larger problem right it's um because then I think that's what you need to move you know overall human civilization forward is you need to have everyone operating on as close to a

basis of truth as possible y like systematic you know error compounds over time and leads to pathologies and usually catastrophic failures and like proper institutions are always always about trying to get as close to reality as possible, right? Like ultimately if you want to have an effective, you know, organization, a company, a product, a belief system, it should be like you should be trying to get it close to reality. But is is is not the biggest sigh up of all the idea that the government has a greater

metaphysical or ontological understanding of reality at all versus these locally useful techniques where they can like you know derive certain benefits from interactions or whatever. Like I think those are two very different things. Yeah. No, 100%. I don't think the government has like a secret sort of scroll of of of knowledge, right? That's like we are the truth keepers and we're holding the truth back from people. It's more like they're they're withholding basic basic facts, right, about like apparently something like uh human capacities for uh conscious engagements

with advanced technology is a thing that's like a real phenomenon in the Do they have like a fundamentally, you know, grounded ontologically, you know, close to the metal, you know, theory of physics and metaphysics that accounts for all of that? I'm highly skeptical. Right. I think they're just like they got they figured out some tricks and some protocols. They realize that there's certain individuals that have an inherent predisposition for this. They maybe have figured out genetic, you know, lines that are just naturally disposed for this. They figure out maybe some cocktails of drugs to give to

people in a training regimen when they're young and then they get them into these programs and they, you know, I basically adapted almost on a like trial and error basis. Let's dive [laughter] let's let's dive a little into that because that that does also seem to be coming out now and it's not it's it's really strange and it's not something you can like really paint over it's hard to put lipstick on that pig. That's a it's a weird thing that the fact that the government has been systematically finding high sigh ability you know mind

over matter capable children across the country for decades and basically doing parasychological experiments with them where it's like collapse a sine wave or you know look at this material do you react to the material and then like yeah inducing certain stress states so they can you know be more functional as far as these out-of- body experiences and trying to garner es esoteric information from them. What do you make of all of that? And do you think I mean how

prevalent was that? Is that how you know is yeah how how big of a thing is that? If you put a few things together and you're trying to construct like a scenario here it is interesting right? So imagine for the sake of argument this the psionics um capability is is real right? Okay. Well, then you're going to have to ask some basic questions like, well, what's the effective range, right, for a given psionic asset to perform a certain operation, whether it's to summon down, take control of, pilot, engage, communicate, you know, whatever. Like, it's, you know, it's,

you know, again, your assumptions there could be everything from they can they can read across the universe or they have to be within line of sight within like a kilometer or or somewhere in between, right? So if you assume for the sake of argument that there's some uh there's some constraint right there's some physical distance uh where the operational effectiveness of the psionic acid is is is constrained then okay you have a global say you know operation you need to have a global footprint of those assets to perform activities where you never you know who

knows maybe there's certain activities that you need to have in certain parts of the world to detect uh UAP like NHI craft but if it's true that there's some ability for humans to control this technology. Well, then you also have to build into this scenario, this hypothetical that um we haven't been able to like fully reproduce like reproduction vehicles, right, that are, you know, all these crazy metamaterials or whatever. But if we have our own say fully intact craft and we know how special psychic pilots

can fly them well then you have to build a scenario where there are non-human craft being piloted by humans and then you have to build in that scenario well if American or contracted associated American groups can do that well then maybe adversary groups can do that and so then if you're in this this scenario where there are actual non-human craft at you know whose maybe operational locations you're trying to monitor or you know you would just need to have a presence around the world because you don't really know what they're going what's going on and or you have you know

human groups that are you know piloting using psionic capabilities uh non-human craft that they've recovered and then start to operationalize and then then it's like so there's this crazy exotic scenario built in here but then it's really not that different from a traditional military ISR global sort of you know competition right where you try to get as close to your adversaries operations as possible to monitor what they're doing, right? With as much of a deniable presence as possible. So, you would use your covert special stuff to do that. And you would get, you know,

that's based on those facts, okay, you can you can come up with a plausible explanation to that inherently implausible scenario. Well, it's funny. I said I was like, you know, maybe it was this like human trafficking psionic asset transfer operation. He was like or maybe you know the program was like running out there and they were like trying to get out because the earthquake had hit. So it's kind of like what you said like they were like you know evacuating and they sort of ran into Herrera's unit. I mean again just taking the facts issue and trying to construct a plausible story that's consistent with these other pieces, right? If you don't put the

other pieces together it's very hard to tell a plausible story. Y um but yeah, but that that's the part that's I think people are increasingly hinting at. Uh right, you go you could go back to GR and Carl subroa cold war to retrieve or reverse engineer this stuff. Well, the psionics part is a part of that retrieval program and reverse engineering program. Well, then there's going to be a subroa cold war for psionic assets around the world to retrieve and reverse engineer and control, you know, human intelligence. That's just that's like the that's just

like a slight modification of the original brush. Yeah, totally statement. Well, do do you have a base case on how far we've come when it comes to actually reverse engineering these things or I am I'm I'm open to the possibility that a lot of technology has been that would be considered very advanced uh from the say like what's in the open um different parts of the tech tree advanced materials I think you know would probably be the most likely candidate. I also think the psionics thing is certainly probably the most you know most people wouldn't think about that as reverse engineering but for me

it's like in clearly inspired technology right like there's a certain way of of activating engaging training enhancing certain human capacities to perform operational capabilities you know that are military and intelligence you know related like that's that would I don't think we would have gotten that potentially without these things um if that's true uh which seems increasingly likely to be the Um, anti-gravity, the whole Thompson Townson, you know, Brown stuff, uh, is it's a tougher thing for me to to

stretch to at the moment. Um, like could we have sort of inspired prototypes like the like the PI stuff that we have drawing board ideas on? Probably. M um do we have the engineering acumen and materials to operationalize or even develop prototypes for that like you know on our own tech tree without you know grafting something on from a non-human craft. I'm skeptical of that because I think you

know even if we have a theoretical foundation for say vacuum polarization or this sort of um you know uh extended electronamics you got these like this this coupling with high like extremely high magnetic field sort of frequency variations and you're doing some crazy topological insulators right with with the sort of missile man stuff like there's like I think we have hints of where we can explore you know potential next moves on propulsion materials but I just think we're you have to build a whole stack of technologies and stacks

of physics and engineering knowledge that I just don't think we're anywhere close. So even if we think we have like the physics, the theoretical physics worked out, I just don't think we're close to having like the engineering like materials stack built up yet to to realize that. But this is where I think there's an interesting middle ground scenario which seems to be lent more credence by what the Skywatcher folks like Jordan in particular was saying. Um if you take if you take a story which you know I have no evidence one way the other but I think he's a credible person. Um but he

says explicitly it's like the psionic activity isn't it's it's like a mind meld with this conscious craft and effectively there's like control modules that you essentially take over. Mhm. And it's like this sort of, you know, this orb that's a conscious sort of AI, you know, super super craft thing that's just it's just waiting to be kind of like, you know, not hijacked, but kind of like, you know, if you're ready, you can sort of, you know, take me for a spin, right? Like, let's do a little mind meld and then I'll show you how to like zip around with your consciousness

here. And if that's, you know, again, hard pill to swallow from a certain scientific and metaphysical perspective, but if you just take it at face value, well, that would then make more likely a scenario where, you know, we can control non-human craft without having the ability to make them, right? Which almost would explain why the retrieval program is so important, right? because we actually have really no hope of truly reverse engineering our own, you know, super luminal, anti-gravity, whatever,

right? But, you know, the real constraint is whoever gets the most of them has the most of these things, right? And so, it's like, you know, the production rate of F-35s versus Chinese hypersonic missiles is like a, you know, it's like who's got the most the range. It's always about par, right? And if nobody really has the ability to manufacture them, then the only strategic uh you know measure is who's be able to get the most train the mostic assets and then operationalize as many of these craft as possible. Well, then that would put an intense

strategic pressure on these great powers to do that, right? uh and would also I think create an immense competitive pressure within these state institutions and their associated contractor ecosystems because it's like this is also would explain the whole weird parts of the barber story where it's implies there's like contractor teams and mercenary you know you know like retrieval units all kind of competing over this stuff. Yeah. in that sense like you know Lockheed and Northrup or SACE or whoever that you presume is involved in this

transistor uh you know um or maybe maybe it's not just the transistor maybe it's like some sort of thing essential to integrated circuits and fiber optics like all these things are derivative of these materials from Roswell. Do you believe that? I mean it's hard like I haven't done the the deep analysis of that but like as far as my shallow understanding is there's no major like gaps if you tried to like retell the history of that tech tree development from transistors to

fiber optics like it's there's no like mysterious you know oh like all of a sudden we now have this new thing that like nobody has any idea where it came from. there was like patterns of individuals working in discrete research units with like a tech antecedent that then was modified with a certain technical you know breakthrough that then was merged and you get this you know what seems like a characteristic tech development tree and isn't there a patent on transistors from like Munich in the 1930s or yeah I mean there was I mean a lot of people since the beginning of electricity and the knowledge of basic

circuitry and and um and related equations was like okay it's just an engineering question like can you do this in a cost effective way and you know to get the right materials and then start building some of these devices. It wasn't like oh we don't know how to make a integrated circuit. In fiber optics it's like oh this is crazy advance. It's like okay you just need like sufficiently transparent crystal glass and you just need to like you know protect it and then have a way to generate you know a photon source that's correlated to some analog circuit and you can just generate generate signal

he's like writing about it in this sort of benol way like of course there's a UFO phenomena let's figure out how to kind of operationalize it against the the Soviets and so yeah do you think that that's been done in the past. Yes. I mean, I think the best cover stories are based on a germ of truth. That you distort and you you mix in with a bunch of, you know, untruths. Um, and that's that that's what makes it a good operation. That's what makes it effective and enduring counter intelligence operation.

Do you think Bob Lazar is an example of that or like what's your what's your belief on Bob Lazar? So Balazar for the claimed to have worked at S4 which was uh you know a special compartment of Area 51 and he was recruited there because he I guess slapped like a a ramjet on the back of a Honda or something and then he met Edward Teller serendipitously and he gets recruited to this program and he claims that he was working on you know uh a craft that looked like Billy Meyers who's a Swiss

material or Yeah. Yeah, I think it's the same sort of thing which is there's probably a germ of truth in what he's saying and he was but I I think it's very very hard maybe impossible to carve out is it 10% of that 80% of that like I don't think it's 0%. Yes. Like I think now that I've had to sort of update my prize very significantly to the reality of these of these programs and the reality of non-human intelligence and these related technologies then it seems somewhat irrational to be like oh well the the first guy to say that is just wrong. Yeah. Right. Right. [laughter] you kind of have to be rational and sort

of reset your your assessment, right? And take all the kind of cruff and the the personalities and the different narratives that have been shaped over decades and just kind of like go to first principles be like, well, without anything else, it does raise the probability that he was telling the truth, right? If like it turns out these programs are real, like then you know it raises the chance that he was involved in some capacity, but it doesn't at all endorse or force you to raise your credences in all the other things he said, right? which clearly have aspects of embellishments and and kind of changing changing changing sort of

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

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

puzzle you' probably come up with a total [ __ ] and make me story for it, right? Cuz they don't need to know, right? But you need to tell them something. So you say it's mouse and you say it's gravity A, gravity B. You tell them all this stuff. It's like okay like but he's got a very narrow thing. He's like more of a technician. He's just got to lift certain things and go to certain places and just, you know, there's certain physical things that have to get done, but he's not the grand genius that's supposed to figure out the basic physics here. He's just being told a story. Um, again, that's just like a hot take. Uh, I I think what's interesting is in the

Jacob Barber story, it's like, yeah, like he he knows what he saw. He knows what he experienced, but he's delivery guy. Y So he can kind of tell you with a high degree of fidel with a high degree of fidelity like what was under the cone of light from his helicopter. Yeah. Yeah. But like he can't tell you what was happening under the bunkers. He can't tell you what was happening in these research institutes and this, you know, sprawling disconnected compartmentalized archipelago. Yeah. Right. And so there's an elephant here and each, you know, these individual, you know, cases comes out. It's like, oh, this is the toenail. This is the

you're just like oh is this one puzzle but it's like it turns out somebody was screwing with you and just mixed in a bunch of other puzzle pieces in there. It's like well you're going to have trouble. Uh, and that's what that's what they think this is, right? Like somebody just mixed a bunch of puzzle pieces from different puzzles together. And you know, some people will just be like, "Oh, it's all there's no one puzzle here. This is all just noise." Right. And then there's some people who are just like, "Oh, wait a second. I think this this is this is the one puzzle I need to figure out, and I just need to throw these other pieces away." Right. And that's a lot of that's a lot of work. And you never really there's no

guarantee of success because you don't know what the ratio is. Like you can be there all day. Uh, speaking of puzzle pieces, you're one of the few people who spent in-person time with this guy And Harold uh was a top presidential adviser for the four presidents for, you know, uh, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and Ford and did various other amazing things just in a kind of, you know, prosaic governmental context. But he's also just been dropping bombs on the internet saying all sorts of really interesting

stuff around, you know, his investigations of, you know, he says that he he meets Lawrence P. Gis, who's, you know, Jeff Bezos's maternal grandfather by adoption, who runs, you know, the Atomic Energy Commission's Albuquerque branch, and, you know, he's sort of briefed on, you know, UFOs and that there was a UFO that came out of this, you know, blue bluegill triple prime test from the Marshall Islands tests. And so, you know, you spent some time with him. Did you learn anything interesting by just just being around And did you find it Yeah. Did you find

it credible? Oh, yes. I mean, that I can start with for sure for like 100%. Like, yeah, he he is like a living legend. He's probably done more for America than like anyone I've ever met, right? Just in terms of just the duration of service as well as just the the level of impact, right? like holding Curtis Slimy back from potentially nuking during the Cuban missile crisis. it's a big deal. Big deal. You know, not somebody and he's not a guy who's gonna like humble brag about that, right? He just did it when he was like 27. It's just part of

his, you know, he's like he's a quiet kind of uh civil servant sort of technocrat um by nature. So, he's never won to kind of pat himself on the shoulder or kind of, you know, be a braggadocio about his achievements. Um and it was never title obsessed. was never he probably could have been multiple different cabinet secretary type roles. and he was never you know about the ego. So I think that's just yeah I think there are people like that. I'm not sure there's that many people like that but like those are unique special people and it's a rare breed. Yeah it's a rare breed and it's also why I

he was trusted by so many different you know presidents and senior leaders over you know many many years. Uh and it's why when he says things, it's from a position of like being in a uh a uh an enduring role in enduring roles where he's given a huge amount of trust by multiple presidents and he's an enormous cache, enormous reputation. like he spent his life serving the national security state um you know from the early sort of cold war anti-bballistic

missile sort of defense planning all the way to like international trade negotiating you know trade treaties being the sort of the back channel with the Soviets and the Chinese and just you know playing at the geopolitical level at the highest at the highest uh the highest level um and so he's got an amazing reputation he was international consultant like this guy could have just you know could sail off into the sunset never say a word about UAPs and you know his name would be in the history books. He's written books. He's yeah you know his legacy would be um secured and the fact that he's you know very insistent

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

think should should draw attention, right? Should have people perk up and and and take notice. Um yeah, and he has these, you know, arresting uh you know, anecdotes about talking with Yeah. Lawrence Pis who told him like of their efforts to retrieve UFOs out at out at um you know in uh you know around Los Alamos. Uh and similar with Richard Bissell who told him of their efforts to retrieve and figure out other world technologies and Richard Bissell was number two at

the CIA and helped form Area 51 and was kind of like I think CIA liaison to skunk works because they were doing a lot of work together. So yeah, and then you know Harold has been a trusted confidant to multiple presidents. Um you helped you know and I think there's an interesting part of that cold war history especially under Kennedy which uh you know who knows we'll see what if we get more information on those on those uh Kennedy uh related records. Yeah. Um, which interesting sidebar, I found it noteworthy and people should go

back to the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump where Joe Rogan is talking to him about the Kennedy assassination records and, you know, prompting him to commit to whatever disclosures of those records, etc. And then Trump leads the transition of the conversation from like Rogan talking about JFK records and how many people are are interested in them and then Rogan go and then Trump goes many people are also interested in the people coming from space. and he and he looks up at the ceiling and then Rogan who's like huh goes like you know you

know about that and Trump with a somber look goes I know a lot about that ton and then Rogan tries to prompt him and you know Trump kind of I think realizes he kind of said too much and then he sort of pivots to talking about how Area 51's a tourist destination and the most beautiful pilots come to him and talk about seeing anomalous things pilots with crew cuts yeah crew cuts most beautiful most handsome pilots got the greatest pilots uh the greatest the greatest tourist you know uh secret research projects in the desert. Um what do you think Trump knows? Well, that was a fast. So, I think he he said

many people are interested in the people coming from space and he looked up and then he sort of I think he tried to walk this back. He said, "I've never been a believer." You know, he sort of tried to dial it back. But that was an odd turn of phrase for a president to use and immediately after like without any like you know apparent prompting by Rogan like in his brain there's a bunch of neurons that have JFK you know associations and apparently those neurons are like really close to his UFO neurons and they just they just fired and they sort of you know in his free association the UFO subject is just

close you know in his cognitive matrix to to to JFK. So that that if you're trying like what does Trump know? Well, that's telling me like what sorts of concepts and memories are embedded in his prefrontal cortex and his amydala and whatever or his hippocampus actually. Um, and it seems like through his verbal utterances that JFK and UFOs or specifically people coming from space are connected in his mental Can you can you fathom as to what that relationship might be in Trump's mind? Well, that that is that is a really

calendar you know entries and diary entries and there's some interesting overlaps there. Jeff is obviously much more attuned to those details, but they overlap with this sort of period of time where there's a lot of just immense and we talked about this in the first uh interview of just like that period is there was a certain power structure in place in the US, right? It was extreme like you know go back to the Fukyama institutional lot sort of like the these guys were climbing to the peak of that kind of institutional creation energy power the Dulles brothers you know kind of this this whole system right that

kind of won the World War II and then created this post-war architecture and then allegedly had access to these advanced materials like at the sort of that was their that was the core of this kind of um potential strategic advantage they wanted to they wanted to amplify and they were they were a small group right they weren't like and they thought of themselves as like the the guardians of American, you know, strategic interests. Like democracy was kind of a second order concern for them, right? They were there were higher order strategic considerations for ensuring that America

dominated the global system. That was what was in their interest, in their institutional interests, that was their focus. Um, and to the extent that if Kennedy was threatening that, that would be a challenge to that power structure. And you know that's that's the allegation is that that power structure you know retaliated. Um and that's yeah we'll see if we get information on that but like there seems to have been the sort of increasing arrows pointing in that direction. Um and so you're just implying that that power structure in the world in which the UFO thing is is real and there's a lineage of you know

government relationship with that UFO you know phenomena. It would probably be that power structure that would kind of uh hold hold the the keys so to speak. It's like there weren't that many presidents that you could say were like independent of the system. And here comes Kennedy who's this kind of, you darling media guy. He's, you know, pretty boy. Um, who the power structure, right, if you want to use a general term to refer to a whole constellation of different actors and and institutions at the time that that, you know, wielded influence and dominated American politics and our economy and the global

system. uh you know thought that essentially his daddy got him the presidency there was a deal made the mafia the sort of you know the machine in Chicago etc and that you know if there was a basic implicit understanding that the president was there to serve a certain set of interests and that if you deviate from those interests well that essentially you're betraying the deal right and if you go too far say to do a dat or denuclearization or even cooperation on space and these alleged

potent potential UFO technologies. Well, that would cut straight to the core of that apparent deal essentially. Oh, you reneggged like deals off. You don't get to be president anymore. Um, that seems like conspiracy theory, but like that seems like like more and more of the evidence seems to be pointing in that plausible if you look at the historical record that that's that seems um yeah and that might be part of what you know there the reason why like uh Trump had this embedded in his in his brain is like JFK and UFOs are are linked is that

uh yeah that might be part of it that that there are records apparently uh that would that would link those two Yeah. So let let's touch on the Jeff Krookshank is this Australian intelligence officer and he's reviewed the footage from these Johnston ATL so Marshall Islands tests specifically of these uh I think ICBM it was actually defensive interceptors and they were uh they had X-rays in the nose cones and uh you know one went off I think it was around it was October of 1962 I think it

was around the Cuban missile crisis and it was November. Yeah, maybe it was November. Yeah, I think it was directly after and it was it was at midnight and the thing goes off and out of the plume you see this material like tumble out and there's video of this that you can see today and then there's also video of that um you know uh material tumbling out being uh superimposed with a white triangle sanitized and so he's done this deep dive where he shows that uh Harold Malgrim actually ends up you know in in uh uh Los Alamos getting uh debriefed uh

by Lawrence Geese who's the, you know, Atomic Energy Commission's Albuquerque director and then a month later you have JFK come out himself. And so that's not really that normal for for JFK to come just check on this like, you know, it is Los Alamos, but it's like why would you why would you go out and visit? And so, you know, maybe, you know, if if if Malgrim's saying that he's learning about UFOs from Lawrence Geese, presumably, you know, the guy he's advising, the president of the United States is coming, you know, that that timing is not the is not a

coincidence. And JFK is probably learning about the UFO question as well. And then the other piece of evidence is you have, you know, Howard Hunt is Yeah. He's the sort of CIA, you know, wet works guy. Yeah. Wet works guy. Agent provocator. and like all but admitted he was like involved in the JFK assassination and a whole host of other things but like you know wouldn't implicate Dulles cuz he was you know so quote unquote loyal or whatever and his lawyer I think it's a guy named Douglas Caddy and Douglas Caddy in an interview says that you know

he would persistently question Howard Hunt like what was why did they actually take out JFK why did they take out JFK and at the end of that questioning uh Howard Hunt says it was the alien presence and So, what do you think? I mean, well, and yeah, I think even Harold has tweeted, you know, you always got to have notifications on for Herold. Um, you know, he he just drops these things. He just like, here you go. Uh, and yeah, I think he explicitly referenced how he had gotten reports from the the triple prime test. uh which

yeah was I believe it was the gold encased they took a lot of gold out of Fort Knox and they just basically put it around this nuke to do the um I think it's BM Shalong or basically generates a sort of X-ray burst which you know creates amplifies the ability essentially fry the incoming the incoming ballistic missile um and apparently got reports of this object that had fallen out and was retrieved by the Navy and then Harold like requested more information was denied that and then goes out to Albuquerque to get

ground truth and then a month later roughly I think JFK goes on his first visit to that same lab essentially it looks like he was doing the advanced you know wait we're not getting we're not getting the full story here in Washington like Harold you're my guy on the ground like figure out what's really going on here right um and at the time there was a lot of inner service rivalries I think between these different you know branches of the military which you know I think Curtis Lame had his own vision for like nuclear everything he had like crazy plans for some doomsday weapons and just he wanted

to go whole hog, right? And he had, you know, and he had his whole power base and the Navy, you know, wanted to have their own power base and so they would have an incentive to kind of hold this as their trump card. So, I think there's a lot of institutional rivalry and of course the atomic energy commission, division military applications, GIS was there to kind of be the the main belly button on all things nuclear and the military, but like more fundamental research. So they would they would ultimately be the and I think Russ has alluded to this too like they would be the ultimate custodians for any sort of R&D effort right but there's probably a complicated bargaining position between these different services and and the Atomic

Energy Commission. Uh but yeah I think this is part points to a part of American history where these you know very very you know conspiratory uh sort of conspiracy fodder material is all tied together in a tight knot. Um, and here we are, you know, coming up uh, 70 years, 80 years later, and it's like still like a pressing matter, like what happened. Uh, and who knows, like Trump has signed this executive order to get a plan written in the next like week or so about, you know, to disclose more JFK

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

should have been I don't think I actually did this you know baseline assessment before I was forced to now like create a posterior uh belief but it's like I think my prior for the reality of sci phenomenon should be higher given my metaphysical sort of um commitments to something like as an integrated metaphysics underlying a certain theory of physics uh than the prior for the reality of non-human intelligence coming from another star system because to motivate that prior I have to account for a whole bunch of you know inter interrelated hypotheses in my

model about the uh processes of intelligence and the history of 13.7 billion years of the universe and then number of star systems that are nearby potentially panspermia in a you know a local uh ring around the galaxy of of maybe 10,000 stars that were all together in a stellar nursery and we had, you know, asteroid bombardments. And so there's maybe like, you know, a one a one in a thousand chance that like there's an advanced sibling system to us that was like, you know, born around the same time that gave us, you know, primitive uh genetic material, but you know, was correlated then to our

approximate neighborhood in the universe and would also have a reason to engage with us. And our cosmological models themselves are just patchwork upon patchwork. like there's like a scaling problem of your physical model of reality. And so like if you get it's like a you know rocket that's like 2° off course you end up like you know 99° off course very soon. And I think that's basically like our understanding of like cartisian space you know and like you know space overall and the planets and stuff. It's it's pretty shaky and it's very recent. Yeah.

And but I guess my larger point was I think if you just ask the average person on the street what's more likely aliens are visiting us or uh psychics are real. I think people would go well they're both crazy but I think aliens are probably be more likely to be real cuz but I think that's purely just an availability bias. The psychic thing is there's so much more evidence like you're saying. Yeah. Availability bias is what what sorts of media narratives we we have. We've seen a lot more alien movies and some psychic movies. That's right. And so people just think, oh well, you know, the only ambient facts I have to form that priority if you ask me that question is it seems like aliens are a

thing that people talk about and it's in movies all the time. And yeah, like the universe is big, but like I've never read anybody's mind. I've never had my mind read that I can think of or I've never moved an object with my head. That seems, you know, and and then the funny thing is I think if they were to truly audit themselves, they'd be like, "There was that one time I kind of read somebody's mind." But well, and in a certain if you're most people's folk metaphysics is physicalism, right? which is essentially you know a branch of that would be the computational functionalism of you know Denna and Churchland which is just almost at a metaphysical level eliminates the reality of consciousness. Therefore the basic idea that then there

can be other degrees of freedom in reality associated with just pure conscious you know uh consciousness as a phenomenon are is just ruled out like by assumption right in your model of metaphysics that's just not a thing right and so anyone claiming that to be a thing is just like it's not an empirical question of I need to look out into the world to see is this a thing that's true it's just it's ruled out by my metaphysical assumptions right therefore it must be absurd to even claim such a thing so you need to that question forces you then to inspect your metaphysical commitments about the nature of consciousness. Whereas the question of aliens is it's you know

people that are physicists computational functionalism uh you know adherence. It's way easier to then motivate oh well yeah like we exist like we create rockets somebody else could exist and create rockets. There's no metaphysical question at issue there. There's just a question of time and complexity and propulsion systems and you know the probabilities associated with star systems that could you know uh you know incubate life interacting with each other on time scales relevant to our civilization. So that's a somewhat of a scientifically grounded question and this is why the UAP question, the Jake

Barber story is very confronting to a lot of people because it forces you to really intellectually and very seriously engage at this metaphysical layer that even most people in the in a lot of the say like the semi-serious profession professional commentariat on UAPs that take the story of anomalous UAP objects very seriously. you know, button themselves up as being, you know, sober journalists or or rational people who inspect the evidence and look at, you know, government reports and, you know, they go, "Oh, well, there's lots of evidence that we have anomalies, but it

could be hypothesis X, Y, and Z, but the size stuff, oh, that's off the table. That's crazy." And it's like, well, that's not really a rational approach, right? Because a rational person starts with their metaphysical assumptions and then builds up from there. I I was into the size stuff before I got into UFOs. So, I mean, winding roads. Yeah. Yeah. Uh but that's to your to your other point about um you know how do we have certainty on on any of this? We really don't right. We're always trying to hold together a lot of what amounts to very noisy and hard to anchor together pieces of information. It's why

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

was a tower of knowledge that took a lot of time and effort to create and it was like difficult experiments some smart person noticing something and then being like huh like Galileo with the telescope or you know um Newton and figuring out okay we can use calculus to look at these you know the the sort of planetary uh sort of observations and this you know basic tricks of oh we formalize knowledge with math and then we construct experimental apparatuses this is the enlightenment project and that's what we've built civilization on and the thing about the AAP question it's like

if it turns out that all of a sudden since maybe the 30s the 40s you know allegedly we got some material magenta crash into the post-war eras when we got subsumed to these larger systematic industrial academic bureaucracies and they were hypercharged as our civilization got you know more and more technology. It's like, oh, okay, you've got this potential accelerant, right? But it's like a nonlinear thing. You've got access to craft and beings That's just like a nonlinear like we don't have the systems like our systems

of knowledge have not been built to like to to deal with that, right? It's like this it's like this lump, right? And we've been trying to maybe absorb it or chip away at, but it's probably just this rock sitting in the middle of this of of of the snake. You you you know what I I worry about a little bit is the idea that in the 40s and 50s the US government stand these aerospace prime contractors started to [ __ ] around with this stuff and um they couldn't get it to work and it's been this sort of like

really hard cumbersome process you know from from from now from then till now and we were never supposed to have it in the first place and uh whatever beings exist on the other side of this you know I don't know if you saw this Jason Sans, one of these whistleblowers who was, I guess, part of the counter intel, was, you know, perimeter security for the program and he sort of saw this like blue alien being at Nellis testing range in Nevada and he was part of James Fox's the program. He just went on Joe Rogan and I think the maybe the most important

part of that interview, he says, uh, they want their stuff back and they're going to kill everybody involved in the program if they don't get it. And, uh, that's pretty freaky. And so I, you know, again, I have no mental model or understanding of any of this stuff, but like what if we weren't supposed to have it in the first place and what if, you know, they're going to come back for it? Again, it's one of these hypotheticals. It's hard to know like what to do with it. Um, but I I do find interesting. It's like people like the leg, you say

that like we use the term legacy program and it's now become like this term of art. But we're sort of referring to is like a particular pathology in a modern state institutional structure, right? That it maybe became pathological as a result of coming into possession of some of these materials and then the sort of you know some threads of knowledge that were sort of teased out of it, right? that maybe the the the psionics knowledge or maybe inspirations of metamaterials or or novel propulsion systems and potential weapons that could be could be created and that that like

hyperpathologized a portion of our military intelligence system that essentially delaminated. We talked about this in the thing in our first interview and it sort of delaminated and kind of it's it's like it's like the ring of power golem, right? It's like starts off as happy, you know, welladjusted uh creature and then as a result of having access to this, you know, totem, this sort of, you know, this metaphysical object almost of of of super advanced capabilities, it it it completely distorts them into this golem

institution, right? So, it's like the rings of power, they that's what they do, right? Um, and it it's an interesting counterfactual of like and passing the test is never taking up the ring and thinking that you are above the corruption of it. It is just not holding the ring, not putting the ring on. That is that is the test. Th well this is well again this is where I'm again I always weigh these antinomies of like like you could go that direction but if you take that logic then it's like all of

technology is almost like the Kazinski thesis is like technology is inherently corrupting for civilization man in a modern technological civilization is a contorted distorted pathized exploited socialized yeah version of it's a like we've all become Gollums regardless of alien technology from a certain philos philosophical standpoint and therefore to deolmize humanity we need to return to a much more agrarian you know primitive state of nature some people can make an argument for that but like you're going to give up a lot along the way right

yeah I don't believe that so for me it's a spectrum it's not like a binary and like for example hypothetical is think about some of the more very different institutions that humans have created over the world over world history say you know um Socrates Plato's agora or um you uh high councils of scholarship in in the in the scholastic era in in medieval Europe, you know, enlightened, you know, or or sort of, you know, circles of of of, you know, sort of Buddhas um sort of inheritors, people that were committed

to uh spiritual transformation, intellectual scholarship, you know, they weren't connected to warfighting institutions and state bureaucracies or, you know, sort of financial institutions associated with some some sort of elite They their institution was focused on knowledge, wisdom, you know, higher higher purposes. If you had if you had systems of of of sort of secrecy and reverse engineering that like were guided by those people, would you get the same sort of, you know, blue beings being like, I'm not dealing with those murderers and

barbarians on the other side of the hill, right, in Area 51 that that that Sans alleged? Would you get a much more enlightened interreationship between, hey, this is a really interesting technology. We love to use this to further our civilization and bring humanity, you know, to a much higher plane of being and and fulfillment and instead of creating platforms for nukes, I believe that. I think I think seek and ye shall find and [ __ ] around and you'll find out and sort of you know if

if you cut to the core of the parasychological stuff like you you can instantiate it in its most primitive form in this random event generator experiment and it's just basically the random event generator is like how much can you affect a random quantum mechanical process right and the more heart-c centered and aligned you are like the more you can and I don't think you can fake that so you can create a program around like try and get people quote quote unquote more heart-c centered, but your like meta, you know, objective is to like weaponize all this [ __ ] and to like be a billionaire or

whatever. It's just not going to work. Like it's going to fail on you in the end. And so like you could lie to a bunch of people about it and like you know it's just you know it'll be the myth of FA or Prometheus and like you'll blow up. And so like I do really believe what you just said, which is like if you really want the good stuff to happen, you actually do have to look within and and change yourself if you're buying into this sort of model, the parasychological model where your ability to render reality, you know, um

is commensurate with some sort of, you know, again, this is really loose, but like internal coherence or growth or whatever. And you can't really like operationalize that locally but for some like like like you know kind of dystopian objective that's just like not going to work. So let me throw a hypothetical at you right like this is the let's say like I'll create like an SAT uh analogy here is like um exercise and diet is to ompic as you know alien say psionic inspired

practices is to like Buddhist eskeeticism right it's like is this a shortcut is this is this a yeah or the point is there are no shortcut like in this model are no shortcuts. So yeah, you're shutting down your pancreas of, you know, like Yeah, like the Zimpic, it gets you what you thought was an outcome, but there are there are side effects that acrew that essentially undermine the value of that outcome that you thought you were aiming for, right? That's right. Yeah. Yeah. No, I I think

that is a a good analogy with higher cost on the UAP side than, you know, whatever organs malfunction due to OMIC. Yeah, I but there's like maybe again this is where I stress and again this is almost like the Skywatcher thing is like this is the inherent tension is like there's a certain folks like you that have been paying close attention to this have gone down again this variety of rabbit holes and come to this realization that it is that is you need to sort of have this

orientation that there's no one weird trick or shortcut to enlightenment or whatever. Um, but the average person doesn't even know that that's even a thing that they should like care about, right? And do you need to have uh essentially what amounts to profit motivated or or or finan or financed um efforts to sort of broaden awareness of that of that of that thing in and of itself, right? That stimulates and catalyzes a much wider swath of humanity to on that journey. Yeah. Yeah. that's the almost like what is

disclosure? Or is disclosure just this sort of yes non-human intelligence is real like deal with it or is it a hey there are now vertical clues about the structure of reality and the nature of human consciousness that you know everyone needs to be aware of in order to pursue their their existence in in the in the world in a way that ideally brings more flourishing and fulfillment right but it it unlocks that's this is the tension between technology and pure spiritualism right? Is is I don't see

this as like a binary or is like a trade-off like there there technologies clearly upleveled humanity to the point where you and I can have a conversation that we wouldn't have able been having or be able to get access to knowledge and inter and social relationships and you know is again kind of personal satisfaction that would otherwise have not been possible without the predicates of modern technology. And so again, I'm I'm fundamentally maybe I'm I'm a fence sitter is like there's always a there's always a gray zone of you can go you

like the ring of power can always corrupt. It's like the question is is it really a ring of power or or is it like reality ultimately is just what it is and humans are trying to understand it and that process of understanding doesn't is not guaranteed a good outcome for humanity. Like we we can put our hand in the box in in the whatever is it um is it bowrumm right? It's like there may be knowledge, dangerous knowledge, right? Like not all knowledge is just oh this is a sunshine, this is a rainbow. Oh, this is like forever knowledge. It's like this is world destroying knowledge,

right? Like there's no guarantee that the box of knowledge humanity is dipping its hand into is going to be like good knowledge. Um does that mean you stop dipping your hand in the in in the box? I don't know. No. No. Well, so I think that technology is you can't go back. You can't do the Kazinski thing. Um I think it's a forcing function and it's a sort of a generic template and there's there's a forcing function in that like you you're like uh ability to like manifest results in reality as you know a result

of the technology is like like the latency is like you know much lower and so and like the multiplicative effect is much higher right like you scale these things and so I would just say you know like the you know it's like the Peter Teal went on Joe Rogan he was like you uh uh these things have to be angels or It's not that they might be demons or angels, they must be demons or angels if you have faster than light travel. And both of those seem pretty crazy to me.

So I I would just say um if your intention is not like you know updating or or or you know growing or you know being being molded in this sort of positive way and there's not this like in introspective feedback loop commensurate with advancements in technology or like putting your hand in the box then you're [ __ ] But I don't think you know keeping your hand you know out of the box at all times is like that's like the right answer. So that that's the way I would put it. But and I don't know who's I don't think there is a master plan for this, but I almost

think the psyionics thing, while it's maybe more indigestible for the media and consumer, it's critical to try to steer whatever chaotic disclosure path we're on, you know, towards the maybe more beneficial outcomes because if it if that aspect of this whole story was like continually suppressed and always just pushed off to the side and was just always, you know, only centered on, you know, metamaterials, anti-gravity, vacuum, polar ization Einstein Carton torsion terms like how do we engineer spacetime how do we develop you know

that's effectively you know that's only one half of the story and it's the half that's the more likely to go wrong in the way that you're you know worried about right it's like we're more likely to try to develop faster weapons and missiles and you know let's go colonize let's try to take an asteroid oh wait you that means now somebody could create an anti-gravity device that can move an asteroid and blow up the whole earth like that's a problem that's blackbox that that's a black ball technology. But on the other hand, the consciousness side, I think I don't know like because

people haven't necessarily treated it as seriously as it needs to be, I don't know if as much analysis has gone into like, okay, you dip your hand into the consciousness jar, like what black balls are in the consciousness jar, right? Like if there's, you know, secret physics jar, dip your hand in into the secret physics jar, you know, oh wait, we get to have maybe positive energy sources that, you know, we don't have to burn fossil fuels. we don't have to exploit the environment, but oh, but now we, you know, anyone can just like, you know, zip around and take an asteroid and throw it at the Earth. It's like that's probably bad, but maybe we can

have better defensive systems. But now you've got this a whole new game theory of kind of the the capability space that you have to reparameterize. Consciousness though, because we haven't it's like no like, you know, at least with aerospace technologies and space war and space economy, we've got models, we've got, you know, the game theoretic dynamics, the state and non-state, you know, kind of uh capacities to try to operationalize. is and it would it would be highly disruptive. But it's like we can even we can sort of start to create The consciousness thing, you know, because we've put into this wooy jar of

into. I know you you've interviewed her. It's like okay imagine that. Imagine you were able to essentially, you know, take that capability but activate it in in not a non-verbal but like just, you know, somebody else and slightly more with a slightly more neurotypical um sort of cognitive setup. And what does that do for for social norms, right? If you're if you can read each other's minds like like I mean that would probably be ironically the one failure mode for Bitcoin is if it turns out remote viewing is like hyper accurate. Y

then like the security protocols for private keys needs to change. You've got complete birectional transparency. You know, people would be able to remote view the Q codes like it would be there'd be all sorts of, you know, countermeasures and there'd be yeah, second and third order changes to a lot of things if our basic assumptions around what humans can do, see and know or communicate is very different than what we I just I think we're in the stone age on this. I I always go back to that this one line from the Kai Dickens telepathy

tapes where one of the kids, I'm forgetting exactly which one, says, uh, "Mom, you don't get my powers if you lie." And like there's there's something so profound and important about that. And like it's like this, you know, it's so easy for us to kind of, you know, um, import our own, you know, oh, let's just isolate, you know, the technique and turn it into a science and make it repeatable, turn it into math somehow. And then there's something actually about like the the deeper ontology when you like hear what they're saying.

They're talking about God in this like extremely intimate way. And by the way, you were you were earlier than anybody on the telepathy tapes. But um yeah, like that that seems more important than uh you know this this sort of like need to just turn it into this like locally repeatable science as far as actually even making the thing work. But then even me saying that like I'm not helping anybody by saying that like you literally just have to like fix yourself before you like get into this stuff and a whole another thing that you have to like bridge yourself into these different scenarios. like if something like the Jason Sans scenario is true and

there's essentially like like part of our technological exploration of these phenomenon whether it's the you know more technical aspects or the you know the psycho techchnical aspects um that that's essentially like a semi-regulated human activity regulated by non-human intelligence per at least to my perspective like unknown norms right of sort of behavior like what's a permissible experiment that we can run with that technology like are there it's like in in a in a certain sense you could interpret that cautiously

optimistically that there is some sort of regulative framework that we're that's that's unknown to at least to me that uh is keeping guardrails on our exploration like we dip our hand in we start to pick up the black box and some NHI hand goes nope right or we start to try to weaponize consciousness in a bad way and they're like nope you get turned off right like I think there's even been accounts in the toilet I think they can do that I think it's a threebody problem they can just shut us down whenever they want so in a certain sense it's like, okay, well, how how many tries, how many runs at that fence, right, do we get, right,

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

then removes the existential risk. And it means that okay, as long as we recognize we're in this fence that we can sort of continue to develop ourselves technologically and maybe, you know, psychically uh in a in a in a in a garden essentially, right? And then when we reach a certain level of, you know, maturity where we're let out. Well, that is I think the garden or the fence is like materialist reductionism. And like you see like with saints, for example, as they sort of like lose their own like materialist reductionist worldview. Not that like many of these

people existed prematerialist reductionism, but like as they start to ascend into like higher kind of, you know, again, I'm using really vague words, but like interactions with the celestial or whatever. uh they it it sort of freaks them out and they like h they have to like look within they have to reform themselves and it's a sort of like two steps forward one step back process and so I do wonder on some level like you know I've for example been so pro discislosure up until now and now it does feel like this sort of Pandora's box and Pandora's box in the sense that

like you know you have hope but then there's like a whole lot of like you know bad stuff that comes with it. I mean I think this is where we're you know We need new institutions which are fundamentally just more accreted more formal structures of norms and and human sort of uh collective beliefs right like this is a phenomenon that we need to construct an entire new institutional framework around right not just a you know not just a you know an LLC right you need like you need actually novel institutions to confront this novel

phenomenon I think the institutions that we created or kind of that we you know we sort of wrapped around this information, you know, were essentially our military and scientific institutions wedded to the state apparatus in the post-war environment. And those are certain institutions set up by certain people with a certain mission and mandate and psychological orientation to the state and their class and their military and scientific and intelligence proists. And so that you know that institution was what was what was now sort of absorbed this technology

or this this phenomena and had to understand it, try to apply it, etc. But if you were like starting from scratch like that would not be the ideal institutions you would want to give like that that mandate of like how to level humanity up right by minimizing risk and maximizing opportunity for collective success and flourishing right given whatever constraints that might exist. And that means like you truly do need like blank sheet of paper new Right. From the bottom up, right? new institutions to study it, to finance it,

to organ organize around it, to diffuse it, to create new norms around it. Um like that's a massive human project that we haven't even because nobody who has a collective acceptance that disclosure is a thing coming, but like the big project of post disclosure is going to be, you know, creating new institutions or adapting more likely existing institutions or some combination of the two to carry forward that project. So you think we should build a Bitcoin exotic physics and spiritual development foundation? Is that what you're trying to say? You know, this is the game [laughter] is is take all your side quests and turn

them into the main quest, right? If it's like, you know, I've been on the geopolitical and cyber, you know, uh, intelligence sort of, you know, main quest and then Bitcoin has now become the main quest and then UAPs were the side quest, you know, like the the next logical move is just to make them all the same thing. Right. Right. Uh now I don't know how to do that obviously but I think it's going back to the very beginning of the conversation is interesting phenomenon that like bitcoin uh is a socical system and has elements it's a core technical breakthrough it's

a you know it's a piece of software that people are running you know but it is also it's a meme right it's a set of collective beliefs and the interesting thing about bitcoin the reason why maybe it's like have this like hyper acceleration in terms of its adoption and then kind of this reflect reflexivity is that that mimemetic um sociotechnical system has an indogenous asset that uh that essentially gives the believers of that of that of that sociotechnical systems potential more power in the world. Yeah. To to spread that to spread the gospel

essentially, right? And so there's a flywheel embedded into sort of this mimemetic um machine. With the UAP subject, there really isn't that flywheel, right, that's built in. You have podcast, you have advertising revenue for people that are interested in this thing, but it's not like that big, right? Um, but obviously I think in general I mean the Bitcoin committee will like you know cast me as an aostate. But I think ultimately the AP question is more important than the Bitcoin question. Oh yeah, but I think you know the fuel to create the new institutions you need in a post disclosure world I think will actually

come from Bitcoin. Makes sense, right? I think you have and you know my buddy Zel, he was he gave me these numbers. He's like if Bitcoin monetizes to the level of gold, right? you know, relatively on a global, you know, say market uh cap or sort of market value basis, then you'll have roughly equal numbers of Bitcoin billionaires and say fiat billionaires. Yep. In the world. That's wild. Which is kind of a unique historical circumstance. Oh yeah. Right. That you have this new class of very wealthy people that all basically believe very similar things and are also very heterodox thinkers. They're

relatively young and they're they're they've now had success in building a sort of a novel global non-state institution that's now given them a lot of political power, right? And they're probably interested in lots of things, right? They're probably curious about about the world and they're not, you know, wedded to, you know, particularly and they probably want to have an impact with that wealth, right? What do you do? You have a bunch of Bitcoin. Like, congrats, right? Go on your island. Like, chill. Or like maybe you should invest in the deepest secrets of of the universe and like help unlock humanity's potential. That would be cool if the billionaires weren't just posturing

around who has a bigger yacht or whatever, you know, buying private I mean, wouldn't it be like amazing just to endow like a Yeah. like a research syndicate and a institution that is like imagine if you had the philosopher kings of ancient Greece with with alien craft and billions of dollars. That would be awesome. So, yeah, I think that would be really really cool. just like I think that some of the what I worry about, you know, as far as what might be happening now is like this like need to like operationalize like you

have no you have no priors on the history of success on the pro of the program itself. You have very little priors. it's just this black box and you have you're like operationalizing these like little things kind of as an extension like the sort of private you know public partnership de facto thing or whatever and like I I worry about that if you don't have like a good mental map of like what's going on overall just like I would worry about like the government doing things without any sort of mental map just because like your only mandate is like national security and so I do think like having

the you know modern Plato symposium is like a fantastic idea and uh people who are goodwilled and earnest just trying to figure having have figure out a map um and then align and then aligning yourself with the good stuff and then you can like you can you know get a little more operational after that or something. I think there's there's definitely a you know a path dependency here that could go wrong in many different ways like building new institutions that serve their

original say like naive uh original is a is a difficult process right we've seen this go wrong like in many cases where you create something it's really well motivated and then it gets distorted or bent over time or internally corrupted or distracted and it's very hard right and I think that's just there's no one weird trick to do that right um but it's a that uh it seems like you know we're not ready to do that right now but it is a in a post-d

without waiting for big daddy government to give it to you well you have to now do it on your own and that's essentially what I think the Skywatcher team is trying to do is essentially we're trying to collect with you know private resources and our skills and knowledge from our aspects of engagement with the program you know enough information to convince you a marginally more subset of the population of the reality of this phenomenon. And disclosure is not like a you know like oh this is disclosure. It's a it's a process that unfolds more and more people just leveling up their priors on more of these different

hypotheses and eventually you get to the point where oh there's a billionaire here. There's a billionaire here. There's a billionaire here. There's a bunch of scientists. There's a bunch of academics. There's a bunch of policy people and they all now collectively look at each other and there kind of this, you know, preference falsification cascade and they go, "Oh, this is a serious thing. It's real. It needs to be seriously addressed at scale in a novel way that like our existing institutions can't really confront." Like, oh, you got think like Rand, they can do some things. You've got some venture capital people, they can do some things. You've got academic institutions, you've got, you know, Gary Nolan at Stanford. Everyone's trying to

their own pieces of current institutions and trying to contribute to some, you know, initiative. Mhm. Soul Foundation, etc. I think it's it's all necessary and admirable, but it's clearly just these raw individual heroic initiatives, right? And clearly the the ultimate question is so much larger than what, you know, individual heroic efforts are going to be able to accomplish, right? It's a necessary just first step. Um, but like if you're really, you know, trying to put yourself in this post-disclosure, whatever that is, world,

you know, it's going to catalyze a lot of change and a potential a lot of, you know, disruption to existing institutions. And I think it's important that you have the germs of new institutions that can kind of, you know, act as ballast, right, to kind of absorb that. Uh and I think you know I'm not shilling Bitcoin here but it's like Bitcoin is interesting because it has these features of it's it's a global non-state uh you know suotechnical system that has its own indogous network indogenous asset and you know third party uh free sort of you know network

um with a lot of you know people with a lot of capital embedded in it. So it's like it's like a substrate that you could potentially use to catalyze, you know, nucleate different institutions, right? That that are somewhat orthogonal to the existing institutional structures, right? They have relationships, too, right? They're not like completely on an but it's a degree of freedom that didn't exist before and there might be new new possibilities between mixing and matching old and new together that could, you know, provide a basis to do something different that these institutions just hard, right? like the the the classic Francis

Fukiyama um Kerr you can read his book uh political order political decay brilliant diagnosis of kind of human history and the sorts of different um social institutions governance uh systems we've created and they historically all follow this you know similar pattern right where there's um there's uh you know founding founding uh you know partners right of the state or or even religious organizations and they're imbued with energy they've they're They're they're successful because they solved some aspect of of a

novel problem in the environment that the existing institutions couldn't, right? So they they they now have the alpha, right? They're now creating something new and they've figured out, you know, a new niche to expand and explore and they can build something, right? A new institution and it gets momentum. It's get it gets energy. They're creating something. They have a sense of purpose and vision and sort of founding. It's like the founding fathers of America, etc. like those are idolized because there was you know that's like the the you know they were creating this novel institution called called America

and then there's some you know process by which those institutions um start to increasingly formal at the beginning they're very personalized right say Satoshi right everyone knows like that's a person uh Hal Finny that's a person right um you know the founding fathers those are people like their individual decisions made a huge amount of difference like the the federalist papers and Declaration of Independence and these initial amendments to the Constitution. These were like again like going back to the big bane analogy like there was a lot of degrees of freedom and those initial founders were like the

first they a lot of first mover advantage to kind of condense that space down and then create a structure that could could create a um uh a possibility space for lots of other things to evolve. But in in in a political uh kind of evolution like in in Fukyama's terms, you know, that starts to get settled and then the next generations kind of refine, optimize, formalize, depersonalize those institutions. Right now it's like a bureaucracy with, you know, uh titles and roles that get handed down on a result ideally of merit. It's not just

like the brother or cousin or or son that takes on that that role. Um and that's a formal modern institutional structure that usually works for some time until like any institutional structure like software code you know you start from scratch and it usually does what it's supposed to do over time you have to you know edit additional um you know modules or make you know a new programmer come comes in and slaps something different on and it starts to develop you know what's called bones law which is like rot software software tends to rot like on like a mathematical curve and I think the same thing is with

human institutions which are systems of norms and rules basically basically embedded into a into a certain institutional framework. And so you get to this point where the the rules basically start to become overburdened and they are increasingly rigid uh and they can't adapt to what ultimately you know world is chaos, world is change. And so human institutions that go through this pattern eventually start to lag reality, right? And there's then there's inefficiencies, there's costs that start to occur over time. And you get to this critical point in any

institution where the the systems of rules become too rigid and they can't adapt to reality and the lag the gap between essentially their design and the need for their for them to perform given the external environment becomes too great and they're very brittle and then you get a shock you get a war you get a famine you get a you know woo cyber attack now like who knows something happens and it breaks the institution it's like a nonlinear change and then everyone realizes oh this is not going to work anymore right and then you everyone along the line is sort of okay, kick the can, kick

the can, kick the can. This it's worked. It's it's worked well this far. You know, that curve will just keep going. I don't want to have to make the hard choices on my watch, right? Like just make it someone else's problem, you know, in the next election, etc. And that that works, you know, up until it doesn't, right? And then you then the institutions really break and then there's a crisis and then you have to make a call. You either eventually just like it's like posts Soviet Russia where it's just the the institutions are completely demoralized and just taken apart and you

know privatized and the mafias take over and you really degrade society back to a very like pre-state state right it's warlordism essentially factionalism or you you recognize that crisis coming and you realize you need to kind of like bounce right you need to create new institutions right that can sort of take that crisis energy and direct it you formalize it and then create new founding, you know, teams to sort of, okay, now we can build something out of this crisis, right? And so if you think about, you know, the disclosure as being this kind

of recognition that the legacy program is rotten basically in more ways than one, maybe bureaucratically institutionally, maybe also morally and it it may be in the process of breaking basically, right? Everyone's defecting out of it, right? That's what seems to be happening. Uh that's also what you see happening when other institutions break, right? people look around, they go, "Oh, like this isn't going to my my future isn't here anymore. Like, I got to get out." Like, it's a now it's the first who whoever's out first basically wins, right? Um it's how you know police organizations take down mafias, right? You sort of chip

away at it until everyone realizes, oh wait, like my boss is going to turn on me, so I better be the first one to to rat or whatever. So, you get this nonlinear cascade collapse. And if we're that's what's happening here, okay, it's going to be good from one perspective like the rot institution is failing. But that can that can that can go really wrong if you don't have you know in mind new institutions that you want to you know start to nucleate that can sort of take that energy in a much more positive So maybe that's that's you know this that's sort of the motivating conceptual sort of conceptual framework to think

about um how do you do that? How do you build institutions to that can take into account the whole pluralistic diversity of perspectives on what's really happening here? It's not like a new religion that's going to because that could be the failure mode, right? You get factionalism, you get people that just in the chaos, you know, pick on one thing and create a new religious institution, right? That's what we'd like to do. We need certainty of belief. Um, but that's how you create cults. That's how you create, you know, internal division. You essentially state state decay or

collapse even. And so how do you you know avoid that right? Ideally, you want to maintain what we currently have built in terms of modern prolistic, you know, scientifically grounded, you know, social organizations that uh now have to sort of adapt and reconfigure to address, you know, maybe a new possibility space for technology and and humanity itself. And that's that's that's a non-trivial thing to do, but I don't know. I think it's like an important project. Uh, and you look around like who's got the money to fund that? That would be like crazy enough to try, right? I actually think it could

probably be like a bunch of Bitcoiners that would be willing to do that, right? They'd be like, "We kind of did that like with Bitcoin, like this is the next bit, right? We're gonna do that next." Um, so that might be a bit of a lar right now, but I don't know. It's non-trivial to me that in the next few years, you could see um something like that get created. I think it'd be kind of cool. Well, I'm curious to see where things go from here, Matt. And I feel like you're on the the forefront of so much of it. And uh yeah, it's it's it's an exciting, wild time. I I have a feeling 2025 is just going to be the one of the weirdest years we've had maybe in a millennium.

I mean, I think it's a safe prediction at any given year to say this will be the weirdest year. I think that just we're just on that And just, you know, it's getting weirder and weirder every Yeah. And so like it's more about the derivative of weirdness. Uh is that going to I think it might it might be a step stepwise leap, but I don't know. Yeah. Well, that's although one little personal commentary is like this is the interesting thing is you know going wrapping all this together like the Bitcoin the AI the alien these things are if you imagine there's kind of this

there's this median um distribution of opinion what's considered kind of inside the overton window and it's a distribution and there's some you know ineffable sort of zone outside where if you're outside that zone you're either conspiracy theor theorist you're a fringe kook you're you know just you're out there right and then there are things that are like legitimate but like kind of you know still considered somewhat impolite and that's like almost like Havana syndrome sorts of stuff right it's like just inside the over window but disputed but people say it's a cookie thing but lots of people yeah but now it's increasingly

a serious thing and what's fascinating is like individuals right and maybe myself right I've sort of gravitated to sort of stay on that like whatever that liinal zone is I think I don't know psychologically but just I'm just attracted to that part of like things that are coming in off of that side of the distribution But you almost think about it as like a wave because I think that that whole distribution of itself is moving, right? And so ironically, if I like picked a certain point on that curve and just stayed there. Like what my my like fringe opinions on

Bitcoin and UAPs four or five years ago are now like increasingly like normie. And so it's like if I don't if I don't like constantly try to look further out Right. It's like oh the the reality of non-human intelligence was like fully out there. Now it's like coming in and now you've got this new and now you got psionics. It's like oof. Well, okay. That's the that's the new thing out But that's probably also coming in. So like this whole curve I'm looking at. I'm like and I'm just I didn't know what the shape of that curve is. All I know is like where I am sort of on it through like I get sort of subtle feedback on

Twitter and professional and semi-professional networks of like where am I on this curve is like a clue to how fast the median you know shape is moving and it seems like that whole shape is moving this direction. Yeah. Right. uh which is you know if you you take any stats class like if you move the mean of a of a distribution like the tails explode right there's like an asymmetric like uh like if you cut off the left side right the the the right side explodes right um and so there's just like a statistical analogy here which is even

if it's like a subtle movement in the mean perception of these things like the the effect on the margin especially what that threshold is is changing much faster Yep. I think that's what you see now. That's what your podcast think represents. I think [laughter] that's that's like that's the alpha Jesse Michaels podcast. Yeah. It's funny to watch these like people who have credentials that well exceed mine, but they're like they they have to like call me like on Signal or something, you know, and they have to just be like, you know, okay, you know, maybe there's something here and like,

you know, send me some papers on it or whatever. They can't like kind of like fully like own it because it's like too fringy for them. And so it's like this and then they do some like hedging thing publicly where they're like we should look into this but it there's 99% like nothing there and then you just watch them like crumbling like over time like as they realized everything's just way weirder than they think. And there is something nice about like not being in that not having to play that game like not having to like optics or you know care about optics or like posture at all. If any of these

weirder frameworks are real, you can't have your talented STEM students just growing up not thinking they exist. Like that doesn't work. I again in the world in which like we're at par with our adversaries, which you'd have to assume that we kind of are at least as far as the basic existence of the frameworks. But that's back to my point about like the median moves a little bit and like that like the tails move a lot. Like that's an example of the tail moving a lot. Mhm. And the thing is you you're done venture capital, you've done investing, you

know, if you're doing intellectual, you know, investing in this sense. Uh if you're only paying attention to the mean, you're missing the movement on on the on the on the tail. And that is that is where the dramatic change is happening. And I see you you have to be looking there and you have to say, okay, well, that is a pretty dramatic shift that pretends, you know, an even more dramatic evolution the next, you know, year or two. Yeah. And it's like that, you know, like Timor Kurand, you know, that is this like Duke professor, he talks about like preference falsification and it's always this like very quick cascade. So, and

it's not preference falsification, but it's like, you know, the the mean shifting will be uh, you know, very fast. Like, it'll it'll happen at the tail and then it'll like bulge up and then and then it'll just like it it it'll accelerate much quicker like sort of exponentially quickly and then and then all of a sudden the mean will be like in an entirely different place like like after that. And that's that's that's goes back to the whole like you need to have that can be a disruptive process, right? cuz like a lot of the social institutions we have are framed around with like the mean right it's like

everyone believes you know this is the basic architecture this is the assumptions around next week next month next year 20 years my retirement my kids etc etc like I just did estate planning this morning right it's like very practical trust how to make sure my kids get what I get you know it's like okay I have to plan 20 30 years and that's like okay a certain psychological orientation to the future but then you've got this other these other developments here and even I who pay very close attention to it it's very hard to try to stitch those together. Oh, it's extreme, right? It's like how do I, you know, I need I know I need to do this. This is like what I need to do,

right? But like I don't really know what 20 30 years is going to look like. Put it on big, right? That's an insane like it's just so much. It's like a event horizon which I can't really see. Do you think like, you know, I think uh FDR bought like a huge percentage of like the gold supply and like put it in Fort Knox and then post Bread and Woods, this is a total oversimplification, but you could say that a lot of American foreign policy was just like governed by the need to have somewhat control or like friendly,

you know, eyes on like some percentage of like the world's crude oil or something. Yeah. Do you think that Bitcoin becomes that now? Especially if you were to get these sort of like breakthroughs in energy like say you get something weird on the UAP side. You get some break you see you get um you know over unity you know or you get you know get free energy or something and you know fusion works you know at scale. Um then then then would Bitcoin become this like all of a sudden you get this like crazy game theory dynamic over Bitcoin

where like that becomes the new oil which was the new gold or something. Well yeah and I think uh there's a few things. One is I don't think Bitcoin is UAP proof but it might be UAP resistant in that sense. I don't think I'm sure you can say anything is Bitcoin is UAP proof. I like disclosure proof maybe is a better way of saying it. Um, and uh, like I think I have a I had like a semi- tongue-in-cheek tweet like four or five years ago that's like, "What's your UAP hedge hashtag Bitcoin?" It was a response to this uh, like FT alpha article is talking about like financial stability risks associated with

uh, UAPs disclosure, right? Uncertainty, technological paradigms being changed, branded assets, sociological, religious, institutional disruptions, etc. The whole kitten kaboodleoodle. Um, which is interesting, right, from an investor's perspective, which is you want to hold your money for the long term. You know, most people have a per balanced weighted assets of like sovereign debt, right? Mostly treasury bonds. Maybe some people have some gold, right? The old standby in case things get totally crazy. You've got, you know, diversified equity exposure to make sure there's any technology changes, right? New paradigms, whether it's big tech, you know, you've got energy utility plays,

you know, and then maybe you have your flyer 2.5 2 to 5% Bitcoin kind of like thing. Um that's probably the you know the new investment sort of you know sort of distribution if you you know no one can predict what will really come out in terms of technology or the diffusion or the rate of change um of these paradigms but even if you just get one or two big changes right say you do get um not free energy because I don't think that's physically possible in the universe there's no such thing as free energy but you get extremely high energy return on energy

invested sorts of you know systems maybe you can draw energy out of the vacuum but there's no such thing free energy. You actually have to do some amount of work, but it's going to be like a high payoff relative to your, you know, whatever engineering devices you have to put together. Um, and not we're not even sure if that's physically possible because you can do CASmir to just get, you know, to do this, but that's not that's a that's a reversible process. You have to like you can't develop an engine based off of that. Um, at least not to not to my knowledge. Uh but then say you do get something like antigravity or some novel propulsion system that allows you to pull forward

say the feasibility of asteroid mining at scale by 10 or 20 years like that's now on the horizon for just conventional propulsion. And we know that if you can do asteroid mining you can probably get like you know massive amounts of these right now very scarce resources don't become scarce anymore. And or if you get a ore extraction and refining technology some some sort of laser thing that can just you know blast out of the ore and isolate all the gold. Well, maybe you go from a process that right now generates 2% of new gold in a year and keeps gold as a old standby scarce reserve asset.

If now you have new technology allows you to create uh five or 10 or 20% new gold every year, well then gold's viability as a reserve asset that's scarce enough goes away, right? So new technology can fundamentally change the sort of monetary predicate of our of our global system. Uh, and sovereign debt is sort of the ser what serves as the the global reserve asset right now. And we're in, you know, if you read Ray Dalia's new book, we're kind of in the sort of endgame of that kind of sovereign debt crisis where we're now paying more on interest than we do than we do on our defense. Uh, and we're

heading to the point where you get this reflexivity where now the Fed cuts rates on the short end, the long end goes up by an equivalent maybe even more. That's a classic symptom of sort of latestage uh, debt cycles. uh and you know it's very hard to get out of those without essentially monetizing the debt, financial oppression, capital controls. It's usually what you see, right? You have to, you know, inflate the debt away or you risk cascading defaults and great depression. So, you've got to effectively cap rates, run the economy hot, try to devalue, but the more debt you have, the more of a pain you have to impose. You've got to isolate sources of

capital and impose losses on them. And so they're gonna be fleeing to and that's usually, you know, essentially that's the bond market that has to get effectively, you know, taken out back and shot, right? Like, and usually the governments don't forecast that. They don't give people clues. It just happens, right? That's how you make sure the sheep roll in the pen and then you you you you call the herd. So you're going to have toize the the global bond market, uh, the global sovereign bond market in particular. Um, it's not just the US, it's basically the whole world at this point. Um and so there's going to be this movement to you know harder

assets that are harder to do that too right so gold and bitcoin that's kind of become almost consensus now among major institutional investors radalio etc. You know, I think right now the the basic ratio is like a five or 10 to1 gold to Bitcoin allocation in terms of the level of trust, you know, and the institutional levels between gold and Bitcoin. But that seems to be the the posture, right? In fact, there was a story in the FT that the London gold the London gold um uh uh vaults are basically being emptied because a bunch of uh you know, it's all moved to New York essentially um because they're

worried about tariffs, but I think there's other things going on there too. so people are repositioning at scale. Um, in fact, one quick anecdote on that. The Swiss uh army uh sort of signals intelligence guy gave a quote to like a pretty niche satellite magazine several months ago about how they were noticing that certain synthetic aperture radar satellites flown by the US and China were intensively monitoring their territory. Um it's like what do you use synthetic aperture satellites to do? They're

super high resolution. super high resolution is actually terrain mapping. So you can detect you know sub millimeter deformationations and say the shape of a mountain side the the uh the um the settling of a building or trucks moving in and out. So if you were moving large amounts of gold, say out of Swiss and moving that around the world, that would be a thing of of acute intelligence collection interest to both US and China. Where's that gold going? You know, gold's hard to track otherwise, right? There's no blockchain for for gold. Um, and a lot you look at

the just the balance of of disclosed transfers. There's been a huge amount of imports to Saudi Arabia from Swiss um in terms of the gold account. So anyways, that's a bit of a sidebar on the monetary side, but this is Wait, we got to close that loop. Yes. Well, no. So, this is this is I think they're trying to sell gold, buy Uh, well, that's a separate question. I have heard that of the in the Emirates, for example, explorations of, you know, trying to there's a lot of say there's a ton of gold and other scarce assets, you know, art and whatever that has just

been tucked away in Swiss vaults. Mhm. Um Swiss banking secrecy laws have have been changing uh especially after the Russian invasion and essentially you know large pools of what you call shadow wealth is no longer feeling safe in Switzerland. So they're trying to go back home right in Saudi Arabia and in the Emirates or other wealth countries or in Asia and Singapore Hong Kong etc. And so there's been a reconfiguration of where say the hidden wealth of the world wants to go and they're realizing now that actually if you just want to hold gold in a Swiss vault for 100 years it's

been great right but at the moment you realize it could be seized or sanctioned um there's a new risk premium attached to it and then you want to move it well that's super expensive to move right it's extremely expensive and then actually you're like oh if I could just sell the gold buy Bitcoin I can then teleport the Bitcoin and maybe buy buy back gold essentially there with a local importer Maybe maybe that fee actually that transaction cost is cheaper than actually physically transporting the gold. But then if you're doing that, you might be you might be convinced to just keep five or 10% of that in Bitcoin

along the way. Y, right? Oh, maybe I don't sell it all back into gold, right? There's a that's an extra conver that's an extra transaction fee. Maybe I'll keep some of it in Bitcoin, right? So, I think that is happening now. Um, there's institutions, I think, being set up in the Middle East to facilitate that type of trade. Do you think you see game theory play out on the global scale with Bitcoin? So like do you have you know smaller players like Boulli of El Salvador who like I think would buy Bitcoin tomorrow and you hear rumors about stuff you know in Saudi Arabia as well but I think they're kind of waiting for the US to kind of take the lead on some of these

things. So like do we if we create a strategic Federal Reserve or strategic you know Bitcoin reserve does that sort of tee off this like you know every other country needs to like kind of get in line and get coordinated on their Bitcoin policy and like start to start to buy in? Yes, I think that is that is happening but in a very nent and very um you know everyone's looking around sort of stage. No one's nobody's bolted out right to be at first at the door stage but everyone is definitely looking around. Right. I was I was in Abu Dhabi. Mhm. I don't know two months ago for a

bitcoin conference there and it was more like a geopolitical summit than a industry conference right there were delegations sent there from multiple you know nations like GC you know GCC and there were explicit like mission from their national leadership like reporting directly back to the king the minister of finance the central bank head was what does this new administration really think about bitcoin how serious are are they about shifting in a pro bitcoin direction and not just on this rigid bitcoin reserve idea but just in general like doing this 180 that we're sort of seeing in motion.

And then what will that mean? Again, these these governments, they're not traders. They're not trying to like time the trade. This is a strategic orientation. They're trying to Well, how serious do you think the American government is now, the new incoming administration when it comes to They're very serious. I mean, Trump has said explicitly and he's he's, you know, about US being crypto capital of of of the world. Um, he's very serious about this pro Bitcoin policy. We'll see what that manifests practically in terms of say executive orders. we have this

working group that's going to study this issue uh of a of a stockpile of of digital assets most likely just bitcoin um and also stable coins right so though I think strategically there's a synergy between stable coins essentially dollar pegged crypto euro dollars that trade offshore on on open blockchains mostly and are essentially like IUS uh in crypto world denominated in dollars right so they function just as like a dollar but you know on an open and these will be mostly Ethereum based do you think or

so? Yeah, there's some Yeah. Well, Ethereum at Tron is a very popular um but there's there's a now that was like nent and I think now there there's a lot of focus on the regulatory side to pass laws that would allow say banks to issue stable coins and get in on the game and that would you know create this regulatory perimeter to essentially expand the dollar network. Mhm. Stable coins also have this feature where if they're properly regulated as they would be um you know forced to uh under this law would be fully reserved right with high quality liquid assets

specifically treasury securities most likely short-term but if they're banks they could actually term that out. So you'd have new buyers of you know basically it's a new balance sheet capacity to absorb new government debt. So you expand stable coins around the world which are right now about 200 trillion 200 billion right uh they're about 2.5% of of the T bill market. I think it's very plausible if they pass this legislation within a few years you could see that 10x and then just stable coins themselves are basically giving the US government 25% of their role on on the short end. Um what do you mean by that?

Meaning about 25% of their uh annual financing capac uh like requirements for short-term bill issuance would be absorbed by the stable coin uh that are have to reserve the expansion of the of of the stable coin sort of issuance. um you know it's an IOU they have to have an asset to back that up right liability asset matching and so you expand the dollar network again you're sort of penetrating parts of the global south that don't have access to correspondent banks where remittances and you know western union are very expensive and so this would just be like an accelerant for I think

global development as well as the expansion of the dollar network helps the US government on the margin finance itself uh so kind of win-win and bitcoin to first order is what drives the expansion of the of the global sort of stable coin market it's what you use to trade in and out of bitcoin And so if the unit price of Bitcoin is, you know, much higher, you need much more stable coins to just facilitate that trade, let alone the additional activities in the crypto ecosystem, some of which are more speculative than others. Um, and uh, and so yeah, they had you can see the synergistic flywheel develop between

Bitcoin and stable coins that starts to take on a geopolitical dimension. And then Bitcoin is, you know, seen right now essentially as a speculative reserve asset that's complimentary to gold, but because it's much more volatile, right? it it's prudently you know risk weighted right as a much smaller proportion of your overall portfolio in say a sovereign wealth you know uh portfolio uh but it is now like a non-zero thing right and so as it's total value likely increases its volatility likely decreases therefore its risk weighted you know allocation should rationally go so it's this like sort of positive

feedback loop yeah and so actually the Bitcoin policy institute um the organization I'm proud to now help lead uh actually has a fellow named Matthew Ferranti who's a a economist trained and PhD at Harvard under uh under under Ken Rogoff who's an economist for the US intelligence community and he's written a white paper for us which is the case for Bitcoin as a uh as a central bank reserve asset. So I would encourage folks to read would that is is Satoshi either rolling in his grave or or or extremely pissed off at that process.

This is the thing is like you know eventually Bitcoin is now is going to play just geopolitical and the sovereign level and it does open up these larger questions. Okay, Bitcoin is non-state money, but when states start to hold it, what happens to Bitcoin? Yeah, totally. And then also you get this wealth transfer. So that's like this really interesting thing, but it is sort of anathema to like the initial, you know, spirit maybe of I mean, you read the early forums and how Finny was calling for a Bitcoin price of 10 million and thought that states would buy it and it would just be like a global money, right? And the question is the argument was more is

there a central issuer that can control the supply or censor transactions? Yep. Right. The government owning Bitcoin does not change the supply of Bitcoin. It doesn't restrict anybody's ability to to to transact. Yeah. Like they're just a participant in the network like anybody else and they're subject to its rule set as much as everybody else is. Right. Uh and so this is the thing you got to there are more second order effects though that are important to assess and as DPI I think we'll be taking a very close look at these which is more on the nuance associated with the development ecosystem which is this

rough consensus model. You've got Bitcoin developers. you've got kind of this community of folks that are very invested in Bitcoin technical development and there's always a lot of you know conversations of you know it's an open source money project right there's there's code right and so it's like what sorts of BIPs Bitcoin improvement um proposals are going to be considered uh and you know that conversation was happening at some levels and then there's big companies that get involved and that potentially changes some of the inherent dynamics associated with that consensus model now you've got say Bitcoin miners are a big

constituency there are certain things that they they would rather see versus other things. Whereas the individual user or developer or custodian like they all have their own interests in Bitcoin, right? And those are going to be reflected in the kind of the dynamic political economy of Bitcoin. And now states, right? As they buy Bitcoin, they're going to have a view, right? And it's there's no monopoly power, but now there a multi-level bargaining about, you know, the future of this open source money project, right? And the game theory of Bitcoin has always been the incentives always align in a positive direction that works to Bitcoin's benefit, right? like the miners and the

users and the and the algorithm are essentially they structure the game theory the incentives around this protocol that's makes it a stable system right and so again I have no crystal ball but that's that's that's what you got to you know that's why it's not already 10 million right is because there's some inherent uncertainty in risk if everyone knew that it was going to become a global reserve asset seamlessly from here to 2040 then that would be priced in right clearly the market has some uncertainty about that right and we're going to see I on a path dependent basis like how it actually

Well, it seems like a pretty constructive setup both for Bitcoin and for UAP and uh we'll see where where things go from here and I I really appreciate your time, Matt. It's always a pleasure and an honor and uh a lot of Thanks for having me, man. Yeah, of course. All right.