Latest / TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast / #667: The Silent Coup with Maryland Hodl

Transcript

#667: The Silent Coup with Maryland Hodl · TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast

• 0:00
  You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
• 0:10
  You talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
• 0:13
  All the central banks going nuts.
• 0:16
  So it's all acting like safe haven.
• 0:18
  I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency,
• 0:24
  Bitcoin wins.
• 0:25
  In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
• 0:28
  I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
• 0:31
  If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
• 0:36
  Marilyn Hoddle, the vibration feels off.
• 0:41
  It certainly does. It certainly does. Doesn't it, Marie?
• 0:43
  It does. That's where we were just talking about.
• 0:47
  I think we start here, the vibration feeling off.
• 0:49
  This is sort of a grown theme.
• 0:52
  I've seen you tweet about Darkside, who was on the show earlier this summer.
• 0:58
  tweet about. Let's jump into that. This idea of systemic vibrations as a leading indicator for
• 1:04
  potential turmoil on the horizon. Yeah. A lot of the work I've been doing is I'm a listener.
• 1:15
  So for the last five years, since I kind of stumbled into this space, I listen. I watch
• 1:22
  podcast i coming twitter um i'm in spaces listening just to different ideas and seeing
• 1:29
  where things are breaking down at you know a couple of the people i really like to follow as
• 1:34
  of late um who i think has been pretty much spot on for years is luke gorman right and his most
• 1:40
  recent um podcast that he did basically he started alluded to you know from his vantage point it looks
• 1:48
  like the system's breaking down and there's going to be a bond revolt and essentially the U.S.
• 1:54
  government's going to have to sacrifice the bond market for a variety of different reasons. And he
• 1:58
  put a timeline of six to nine months from his vantage point, right? You have economic and
• 2:05
  geopolitical risks that are basically growing in the market and it's going to hit ahead at some
• 2:12
  point. You know, and then you take Jack Myler's Monday podcast that he just recently released,
• 2:22
  right? He dives into the fact that austerity doesn't work. You know, we're seeing the examples
• 2:28
  of that in Argentina currently. If you extrapolate further and take that into the United States,
• 2:35
  like we're seeing a continuation of all these efforts that are basically fruitless.
• 2:41
  And the shaping that I put out this week was basically that the government, in my opinion, Bitcoin's already won, right?
• 2:53
  The government is out of options and that the industrial system that we have grown to basically embrace over the last, since the 1900s, you know, GDP is, we have an inflationary system that is basically heading towards a deflationary system.
• 3:11
  run by AI with a monetary base unit of Bitcoin,
• 3:16
  which in my opinion is the only monetary asset
• 3:18
  that can work in a system of deflation.
• 3:21
  So what we're seeing is these systemic fractures
• 3:26
  that are happening across society,
• 3:27
  and you can see it even socially, right, with the cultural wars.
• 3:31
  I think that they're becoming more frequent,
• 3:36
  which you can essentially equate back to the vibration
• 3:39
  that you're discussing about.
• 3:41
  And it's becoming more noticeable by even the everyday individual, right?
• 3:47
  So I think society as a whole is starting to wake up to the idea that something's wrong.
• 3:52
  The financial markets certainly are.
• 3:54
  I mean, correlations are breaking down across the board.
• 3:58
  Historical norms that have basically been in place for decades, even generations, are no longer holding up.
• 4:07
  You know, I think we have a potentially real crisis on our hands.
• 4:10
  And, you know, I spend a lot of time thinking.
• 4:16
  I think you have young kids.
• 4:19
  I have a three-year-old.
• 4:21
  And as a father, during this stage, early child development, you start thinking more about what the future is going to hold for your child.
• 4:29
  So a lot of my work and effort has been basically focused around a transition, right?
• 4:36
  What is the transition going to look like from an inflationary system to a deflationary system?
• 4:41
  How do we avoid all the issues with the forward turning?
• 4:44
  And, you know, what are the issues like the death and destruction, right?
• 4:48
  Entering into another World War II scenario or before that a civil war and before that the revolutionary war, right?
• 4:56
  But now we're at a global scale with different types of weapons, right?
• 5:02
  That can ultimately end society.
• 5:04
  So my thought process has been I look at Bitcoin as a tool for self-sovereignty, but also a tool to be utilized potentially or designed to help us transition through this system.
• 5:17
  But to your point, the vibrations are getting more violent.
• 5:22
  And I think they're becoming undeniable by even the average person across the board.
• 5:31
  yeah i mean outside of the culture wars and the social incohesion which seems obvious i think
• 5:38
  one sort of anecdotal data points or data points that i really leaned on over the last two three
• 5:46
  years specifically are the um the selfie videos of people sitting in their cars complaining about
• 5:52
  a myriad of different things whether it's the grocery bill health insurance car insurance the
• 5:57
  inability to afford a house in the first place. I mean, those are accelerating and who knows if
• 6:02
  they're just sort of attention grabbing things that people are trying to leverage on TikTok to
• 6:10
  get sympathy or feel like their voice is being heard or get some attention. But I feel like
• 6:15
  it's very clear that I do think there's signal there in the sense that people are really feeling
• 6:21
  the burden of the economic pressure
• 6:25
  and this gap between the rich and the poor accelerating.
• 6:30
  But in terms of systemic vibrations within the system,
• 6:34
  what specifically are you looking at?
• 6:37
  I mean, you mentioned Mahler's earlier this week
• 6:39
  talking about austerity doesn't work.
• 6:42
  In the context of Argentina,
• 6:44
  obviously the Treasury just opened up a swap line with them
• 6:46
  for $50 billion to sort of lessen the blow of the austerity
• 6:52
  that they've implemented throughout the country over the last few years.
• 6:56
  What else are you looking at?
• 6:58
  Well, I think you just highlighted the micro and the macro, right?
• 7:02
  And, you know, again, I go back to what I've been saying is I listen a lot.
• 7:07
  So, and then I take more of a theoretical approach to being like the system,
• 7:13
  the money's broken.
• 7:13
  So the incentive structures are distorted and misaligned across society.
• 7:19
  You know, I mean, because the money is broken, the average American, it's more difficult also with the regulatory environment to start a new job, right?
• 7:30
  For the average American, I'm not talking about in the digital economy where individuals that are resourceful can basically whip up a business in a couple of days and kind of get network effects.
• 7:41
  But in the real world, it's difficult. And I see that with family members. I see that with friends. And I don't, the rest of society, I spend a lot of time focusing on kind of the convergence of AI and Bitcoin, as I indicated.
• 8:00
  But we have this amazing tool in front of us, basically with AI, and I use it a lot.
• 8:09
  I even, I mean, I use it medium, a medium for me that has never really been one that I've utilized has been writing.
• 8:19
  But I use AI for my writing, you know, that's and that's not lost on me.
• 8:25
  But the importance of that is the fact that I can throw ideas in the system and I can have active conversations with it and that can start connecting the dots on various things.
• 8:35
  Right. But if you look across the fabric of society right now, you know, from my perspective, I'm seeing distortions.
• 8:42
  I can't really put a finger on exactly those distortions, but you kind of see them day in and day out.
• 8:49
  It doesn't matter where you look.
• 8:50
  So, yeah. And to your earlier point about the federal government, the Fed, Treasury being backed into a corner and really having no other option than the Senate on turbo and the base, everything.
• 9:05
  Well, I think we're heading to a wartime economy, right?
• 9:09
  I mean, the Defense Department basically just changed their name to the War Department.
• 9:14
  Do I think it's going to lead to kinetic warfare?
• 9:16
  It could.
• 9:17
  But I think what we're doing is we're creating that sense of patriotic, like, you know, Luke
• 9:25
  talked about it a little bit in his macro podcast that he did.
• 9:29
  But I think we're heading towards more of a bifurcated world, right?
• 9:33
  Nobody's buying our debt.
• 9:35
  Um, you know, Europe's in a very difficult situation.
• 9:39
  I think they're technically functionally broke.
• 9:43
  Um, so in order to, to kind of solve their economic woes, they're going to have to go
• 9:47
  to war.
• 9:47
  Uh, and that seems to be where they're, they're heading.
• 9:51
  Um, and that leaves the U S in a pretty interesting predicament.
• 9:55
  So, you know, of course we have our allies across the world in various countries, but,
• 10:01
  um, and we'll continue to protect them with those alignments.
• 10:04
  But I think the U.S. is heading towards looks to be heading towards a direction where it's going to we're going to have bifurcated economic zones where it's going to be Western Hemisphere versus Eastern.
• 10:16
  And we're going to have to work together because we're still going to have trade.
• 10:21
  But I think the U.S. is going to potentially stop meddling with other countries geopolitical wise and start focusing on cleaning its own house in its own hemisphere.
• 10:31
  So that's why I see different things happening in Panama to Mexico to Canada to Argentina to now Venezuela.
• 10:41
  You know, we're adding additional pressure to Brazil.
• 10:43
  I think what we're doing is trying to clean house in the Western Hemisphere.
• 10:46
  But these are all part of that vibration, right, is basically we're seeing movements that haven't historically happened that are happening now, again, with more frequency.
• 10:58
  Yeah. And then domestically, look at like the industrial policy that Trump's gone after. I was just pulling it up. Speaking of using AI, just doing some deep research here on the go. But Trump's taken equity positions in semiconductors, energy companies, critical minerals companies, took a golden share, quote unquote, golden share in U.S. steel under its acquisition by Nip and Steel.
• 11:24
  So it seems like that push to re-industrialize the homeland is there.
• 11:32
  I guess that's my question.
• 11:34
  Can they actually do it successfully?
• 11:36
  Can the federal government pick the winners and losers in this re-industrialization and manifest a good outcome?
• 11:43
  I think if they have a sense of where we're heading, if they know that AI is going to be revolutionary, from my perspective to the degree I think it will be, for humanity, I think it's pretty easy.
• 11:59
  You're just investing up and down the supply chain and trying to control those resources.
• 12:06
  Now, do I think that's ethical or where the government should be? No.
• 12:10
  But again, it goes back to the whole idea that we're in a wartime economy, right?
• 12:17
  And that war is to be first.
• 12:20
  The war is basically over monetary base layer and kind of the reconfiguration of that, which is going to be a delicate matter.
• 12:30
  But it's also around securing resources that we need for not just our economy, domestic economy, but also for defense, right?
• 12:39
  And I don't know how much longer we can go with getting materials from China without a solidified kind of trade agreement.
• 12:52
  Right. And that seems to be up and down with how the administration basically has been kind of conveying that information to the public for for several months now.
• 13:02
  Yeah. Yeah, it's very positive because, I mean, particularly juxtaposed to China.
• 13:08
  if you look at the head start that they have at the base layer i would even put this below
• 13:13
  money or actually no it's right above money which is energy like that's that's where i could see the
• 13:19
  the big hurdles coming is in the energy sector in terms of just simply not having
• 13:26
  the grid infrastructure the transmission infrastructure in place to actually manifest the
• 13:31
  scalable artificial intelligence boom in the United States.
• 13:37
  Agreed. I mean, I think it was, if it works with AI on it, Eric Rice commented on it the other day.
• 13:45
  I said it was going to be about $2 trillion from my research in public infrastructure investment.
• 13:51
  It's going to have to happen on behalf of the government. So he corrected me and basically said,
• 13:58
  actually, if you run the numbers from a different vantage point, it's going to be close to $3
• 14:02
  trillion, right? Just to get the grid up to where it needs to be without sacrificing kind of the
• 14:12
  domestic residential side. So we're talking some really big numbers, right? And we're also talking
• 14:20
  about having to do it at a very high-paced speed, which I don't know if our economy is
• 14:27
  told to do so at this point, right? Again, it kind of plays into the wartime economy, right?
• 14:34
  I think there'll end up being mandates that basically say, you know, this is the direction
• 14:40
  in the country we have to go and it's about survival, right? We have to win this race.
• 14:45
  So I'm not too much of a geopolitical.
• 14:49
  You know, this is just armchair.
• 14:51
  But I certainly have some thoughts.
• 14:55
  But I think it's a global AI race and we have to win.
• 15:00
  And I think what we're seeing is the U.S. government basically getting us ready to secure the Western Hemisphere and kind of retour our economy so that we can do that.
• 15:11
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• 16:54
  Yeah, I guess this is a good segue into the monetary aspect of it.
• 16:57
  I mean, transitioning from industrial sort of industrial policy in terms of making sure that we have the physical critical infrastructure in place.
• 17:08
  Obviously, the U.S. dollar has been the reserve currency of the world.
• 17:11
  We've used that to our advantage over the last 50 years, specifically 54 years since we ripped the dollar off the gold standard officially in 1971.
• 17:23
  And obviously the veracity of the U.S. dollars, the reserve currency is coming into question as we've gone into 37, almost 38 trillion dollars in debt.
• 17:37
  I think I saw yesterday that we added 60 billion in a couple of days earlier this week to the deficit.
• 17:45
  And there's sort of two things at play.
• 17:48
  You have that physical industrial policy.
• 17:50
  Then it seems very clear if you have more than two brain cells just looking at what the priorities were the first nine months of this administration that really rejiggering the monetary protocol and monetary system that we've that we've leveraged for years is a very high priority.
• 18:10
  It's actively breaking down.
• 18:12
  Right. And we can see that in the bond offerings.
• 18:14
  we can see it by them moving duration from the long end to the front end right
• 18:20
  and and the set coming in and essentially continuing Yellen's strategy
• 18:28
  right and I think it's because they're out of they're out of options on top of
• 18:34
  that you can see it from Jay Powell right his the markets reaction to his 50
• 18:41
  basis point increased last year, whether you agree with it or not, the bond market moved
• 18:45
  in the wrong direction, right?
• 18:48
  His most recent cut bond market, basically, it's kind of been flat over the last year,
• 18:53
  but it basically, again, moved in the wrong direction, right?
• 18:57
  So I think the Fed has essentially been, in my opinion, my framework has been neutralized.
• 19:05
  It's not functional anymore to the way that it historically should be.
• 19:09
  And I'm sure there could be professional economics that would argue differently.
• 19:14
  But at least from my framework, again, going back to those correlations breaking down, you know, and the systemic vibrations that we're starting to see that Luke was alluding to with being like a kind of a bond revolt and potentially sacrificing the bond market at expense of kind of saving the system or pivoting to a new system.
• 19:36
  I think that's essentially the general direction we have to go and we have to come up with other
• 19:44
  solutions and I think that we're starting to to get you know I tend to try to read the tea leaves
• 19:50
  at least through my framework with some of the the ideas I'm throwing out there and not only try to
• 19:56
  make them logical but also have them fit in what I'm viewing in the news or through the administration
• 20:01
  or through ideas that, you know, individuals such as yourself or Jack are basically putting out there
• 20:07
  and kind of how I started coming up with some of the theories I'm putting out there now.
• 20:15
  Yeah, and I'm just pulling up this Porter Stansberry thread from yesterday.
• 20:19
  I thought he made a really good point to your point about the system breaking down
• 20:22
  and pulling the Fed into it specifically.
• 20:25
  I think that the fact that many of the decisions that are made at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury are based off of completely manipulated economic data, particularly inflation, is really what has backed them into a corner and makes them unable to actually implement policy that could turn things around.
• 20:46
  because if you're setting the Fed funds rate
• 20:48
  using the Taylor rule above what CPI is telling you inflation is,
• 20:53
  you're using the wrong metric to base that rate off of.
• 20:57
  It's getting tough to be a traditional economist, right?
• 21:01
  You can't make the arguments like you used to.
• 21:05
  I mean, somebody came out yesterday and commented,
• 21:11
  his name's going to escape me.
• 21:12
  He's on CNBC a lot.
• 21:14
  Amir?
• 21:16
  Do you know who that is?
• 21:19
  Amir?
• 21:20
  Yeah, well, he has the mustache.
• 21:22
  He looks like he's maybe Turkish.
• 21:25
  Oh, you mean Mohammed Al-Aaron?
• 21:28
  Correct.
• 21:29
  Yeah.
• 21:29
  And, you know, he put a post out there
• 21:31
  as just reforming or strengthening the argument
• 21:35
  that JP Morgan put out,
• 21:37
  basically calling Bitcoin the deflation trade, right?
• 21:40
  Or the debasement trade.
• 21:42
  Debasement trade, yeah.
• 21:42
  but you know he's been a historically very strong traditional trad by type of economic
• 21:51
  economist and even he's starting the changes tune right so yeah it's again going back to
• 22:00
  the vibrations people can't ignore it anymore yeah I'm just going to pull up this
• 22:05
  supporter thread because I thought it was really good I read this on my flight back yesterday but
• 22:11
  diving into this he does some great work yeah and to your point on uh
• 22:16
  a muhammadal around like he's been a bitcoin hater it's funny like he was referencing a jp
• 22:23
  morgan sort of like analyst report i guess they they polled their customers at jp morgan like why
• 22:29
  are you allocating the bitcoin and they were relaying that information and both jp morgan and
• 22:34
  muhammadal around who have both been pretty bearish on bitcoin for well over a decade
• 22:39
  sort of had to admit like people are we may not deem it to be the perfect alternative but
• 22:46
  many others our clients see it that way um and to the point about like this is exactly why it's
• 22:53
  because whether it's the fact that people explicitly understand this or just intuitively
• 23:00
  feel it which i feel like the latter is uh is the case for most people they just intuit it
• 23:06
  But I think this point here
• 23:09
  About the Fed
• 23:11
  Not being able to make good decisions
• 23:13
  Like in plain English
• 23:14
  He just explained the Taylor rule
• 23:16
  It's 2% plus the current inflation rate
• 23:19
  Using official CPI
• 23:20
  The Taylor rule prescribes the current
• 23:22
  4.75% Fed fund rate
• 23:25
  However, if you use actual inflation
• 23:27
  The Taylor rule would set
• 23:29
  Short term rates at 17.5%
• 23:31
  So you just have this complete
• 23:32
  Mispricing of
• 23:34
  of of risk and money risk and money correct um well i mean if you want to take it to
• 23:45
  from a bitcoin lens i mean if you look at what sailor's doing he's developing a bitcoin yield
• 23:51
  curve right and right now he's currently trying to figure out in price where his stretch product
• 23:57
  is right now granted you have some nuances with the fact that the market doesn't yet completely
• 24:03
  understand what he's trying to do or value the collateral appropriately.
• 24:07
  So there's some perception issues, but he's currently at what, 10 and a quarter, 10 and
• 24:12
  a half percent on the stretch product.
• 24:16
  And I think that ultimately is kind of establishing a Bitcoin yield curve where he's establishing
• 24:23
  the cost of money, right?
• 24:25
  Where it ultimately should be with kind of within the economic framework of where we
• 24:31
  might be heading to.
• 24:32
  so um and that plays right into the the taylor rule with the true fallation being you know
• 24:39
  upwards of 15 yeah and as we're speaking bitcoin's running towards 122 and and uh
• 24:48
  i guess let's get into like this this this two-part series that you've written so far on
• 24:53
  stable coins bit bonds bitcoin and sort of this the silent coup that is going on behind the scenes
• 25:01
  yeah so i and i respect a lot of the work that you and your team do um and i've also also give
• 25:09
  a shout out to burn the fed because he also has a similar type of approach um i love the storytelling
• 25:17
  aspect that you guys do and how it hits not only educational but it hits from an emotional
• 25:21
  standpoint to people um so what i look to do is kind of replicate that in the writing that i'm
• 25:29
  doing, which, you know, I set in the parameters to keep it kind of stoic, right? But I want to make
• 25:35
  it almost storytelling, but trying to tell how we got there. So that's why I started with kind
• 25:41
  of the prelude and then moved into the part one and then part two. I'll be issuing something over
• 25:47
  the next two weeks, specifically on BitBonds, at least for my framework and how I look at it,
• 25:52
  because I think everybody looks at it a little differently. I really started to
• 25:58
  kind of connect the idea. Um, when Aaron New Owens talked about it, um, in DC in December or
• 26:08
  January this past year, um, I really started kind of diving into what the implications of
• 26:14
  this new product was. Um, and as I started, yeah, I took the white paper that they developed with
• 26:22
  Matt Pines and threw it into AI, started having a bunch of conversations about it. And then I just
• 26:26
  kind of sat on it for a little bit. Um, we moved into kind of the, the May timeframe. Um,
• 26:36
  and I kind of picked it up and started revisiting it again. And then I heard some rumblings about
• 26:43
  21 coming out and I was like, all right, well, if I'm the U S government, I'm not going to be
• 26:49
  able to essentially, uh, issue pick on bonds out of the treasury. Cause we're going to have
• 26:53
  political issues. So I kind of connected the dots of being, well, you have 21, you have
• 27:00
  Canterford Sheld, who's a primary, and then you have SoftBank and Tether. It seems like a pretty
• 27:07
  interesting union. And I kind of started diving a little deeper into my thoughts and frameworks
• 27:13
  around that. And I'm like, it seems like this would be the perfect entity to essentially do
• 27:18
  like a BitBond pilot and kind of bypass any political issues with Congress.
• 27:25
  And from that, I kind of put out a short tweet and, you know, Dark and Buncher kind of jumped
• 27:32
  on it.
• 27:32
  And basically, that's where I started the framework of exploring more in depth what the significance
• 27:40
  of BitBonds would be, not necessarily through a 21 angle, but more from what could it be
• 27:45
  if the treasury houses it inside at some point.
• 27:49
  Ultimately, what would that structure look like?
• 27:54
  Started kind of playing around with the idea of a sovereign monetary flywheel
• 27:58
  or a sovereign flywheel throughout the summer.
• 28:01
  And that's when certain interviews came out,
• 28:05
  like Tucker Carlson with Richard Werner.
• 28:10
  And that added a whole other layer.
• 28:13
  Then we had the stablecoin bill come out.
• 28:15
  Right. And we started getting a little more insights into what that structure was going to look like, you know, that they were going to be investable for, I think, inside 93 to 80 bills.
• 28:25
  Right. You start overlaying what the set's looking to do by basically moving duration to the front end.
• 28:33
  And you still see that we have fiscal dominance. You also understand that we have this build up that has to happen three to two to three trillion dollars is going to have to happen for AI.
• 28:45
  And you see a lot of demand coming to the front end. Right. So at which point that started adding a whole nother layer into formating the kind of sovereign flywheel to which then an idea was populated based off of Richard Werner's work by Dr. Pippa Malgram.
• 29:06
  and she basically positioned the Stablecoin Act as a workaround by the Treasury of the Fed.
• 29:18
  So in her argument, she was stating that effectively by issuing a stablecoin that's fully reserved,
• 29:30
  it moves the individual ahead of the banks kind of in the, the ladder,
• 29:37
  the waterfall effect in case something goes wrong.
• 29:39
  Um, which I thought was a really interesting concept.
• 29:43
  Um, so that's cut.
• 29:46
  That was kind of, I waited a while for that all to kind of start taking shape.
• 29:50
  And then I think I had a pretty good basis for which I could really start
• 29:54
  working on this piece and theory and kind of push into the,
• 29:58
  the sovereign flywheel mechanical aspect, because again, going back to what I was saying earlier,
• 30:04
  I'm trying to spend a lot of time thinking about what the transition could be and what those levers
• 30:09
  would be. Um, and that's once I had the concept out around stable coins, right. And putting the
• 30:18
  dollar on digital rails and being able to essentially push it out across the world,
• 30:24
  from a digital standpoint,
• 30:28
  kind of drive follow the dollars brand basically The fact that it kind of the king fayette versus all other fayettes throughout the geopolitical landscape
• 30:45
  And the fact that you can get around capital controls, essentially, because now that you
• 30:50
  have StarLinks or other systems, it becomes easier.
• 30:53
  They can stop a good portion of it, but they can't stop it all, right?
• 30:57
  Technology will always find a way.
• 30:59
  um you know i started this whole framework that basically the fact that you have a digital dollar
• 31:06
  and you have the technology to transport it to every mobile phone on the in the entire world
• 31:11
  you're taking it from a macro to a micro from a liquidity standpoint and there's power in that
• 31:18
  and what essentially does that um end up like supporting well kind of supports the idea of uh
• 31:28
  a euro dollar 2.0 almost right or a petro dollar 2.0 right um but what is that skid
• 31:37
  it basically oils the skids for um a whole digital asset ecosystem right because it's it's it limits
• 31:46
  once you have the stable coin in place right basically the friction between stable coins and
• 31:53
  Bitcoin almost becomes minute. So it's, it's, it's easy to go back and forth. And then I started
• 32:02
  kind of putting the framework together is if you look at the administration between the SBR,
• 32:06
  and more importantly, around the investments around the Trump family that's making in
• 32:09
  into this ecosystem. And some of the actions with the SEC, especially around this ecosystem,
• 32:20
  And I think it's not just campaign promises.
• 32:22
  I think it's strategic in nature, right?
• 32:25
  So at least that's from the lens I'm looking at it from.
• 32:29
  So when you start viewing it as the administration's making inroads into this, you have strategic alignments with companies around an innovator like Jack Mahler's, but you have basically Cantor, right?
• 32:45
  And Cantor itself is highly integrated into this ecosystem.
• 32:50
  You have Tether, right, which is basically the base layer right now, liquidity layer for kind of the digital ecosystem.
• 32:59
  And basically you have SoftBank, which is basically funded our entire technology infrastructure via the carry trade for the last 20 years.
• 33:09
  Right. And they also have their own systemic kind of demographic and debt issues.
• 33:15
  Right. You can start formulating an idea of how does it all come together and what could that mechanism be?
• 33:25
  And that's basically where I threw in the next idea.
• 33:30
  Right. Which was, all right, you have the stable coins and you have the liquidity layer.
• 33:37
  And then you have Bitcoin as the neutral reserve asset.
• 33:42
  Luke Gorman talks a lot about neutral reserve assets and how important they are.
• 33:46
  And ultimately, that's what the next monetary system is going to be based off of.
• 33:51
  Right. And you could argue that the East is moving more towards gold.
• 33:55
  Right. And there's a lot of reasons for that.
• 33:58
  But it looks certainly looks like the West is moving more towards a digital sound money to kind of grease the tracks here, per se.
• 34:07
  Yeah. So once we got, once I got that concept together, I then kind of looked for how do we,
• 34:18
  because Bitcoin seems to have a lot of positive feedback loops from a monetary perspective.
• 34:24
  It also has a lot of ethical feedback loops, but we needed to figure out a way to connect the
• 34:30
  asset side, the SBR side of the balance sheet to the debt, right? And bit bonds were the perfect
• 34:37
  transition point basically to help feed that whole system and then you can start a positive feedback
• 34:43
  loop basically using the stable coins as liquidity right and one of the important framings also was
• 34:51
  the fact that the idea that at some point they're going to front load the front end and ultimately
• 34:59
  it looks like they're heading towards yield curve control and stable coins are an easy outlet for
• 35:05
  method for them to do that.
• 35:08
  We're a couple
• 35:09
  months away from,
• 35:12
  in my opinion,
• 35:13
  the administration
• 35:15
  is going to basically
• 35:18
  kind of neuter the Fed.
• 35:19
  And when that
• 35:21
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• 35:24
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• 36:49
  I was going to say, because we backed Andrew in battery finance from 1031 years ago.
• 37:01
  And I think the thing you're talking about, like BitBonds and the macro level, but at the micro level, too, it's one thing that we sort of recognized many years ago.
• 37:13
  When we first backed battery is that you have this ability to manufacture the soft landing that Janet Yellen and many others talked about years ago, but via Bitcoin in structured credit.
• 37:27
  And so the example of battery, you have Bitcoin sitting in a structure with another asset, typically real estate, and sort of de-risk that credit structure because you're not as worried about the debasement of the currency and your fixed income not being worth much because it's going to be compensated for in the value creation that Bitcoin recognizes.
• 37:57
  over the course and the duration of that loan.
• 38:00
  So you sort of have the de-risking of this private credit product.
• 38:03
  And I think what you're describing is the mechanisms
• 38:06
  of how it will work at the federal level.
• 38:10
  Yeah.
• 38:12
  So what happens?
• 38:17
  The critical point that I came up,
• 38:23
  I finally ended up,
• 38:24
  was the fact that by putting the neutral reserve asset
• 38:28
  that's backed by absolute scarcity on the balance sheet
• 38:32
  and then harnessing the volatility of that asset
• 38:39
  to help restructure the debt through bit bonds, right?
• 38:44
  Through volatility harvesting,
• 38:47
  ultimately causes this self-reinforcing, right?
• 38:53
  Because the important part is when I was going through it with AI and the revolution, what is Saylor's issue?
• 39:01
  Saylor's issue right now, at least the arguments that were being made, was it was he's basically using the ATM ultimately to basically pay the interest on his preferreds, right?
• 39:16
  Whether you call that an issue or not, I mean, there's a perception there.
• 39:19
  um i think he gave a great answer two weeks ago as to what his solution was for that but
• 39:26
  it got me thinking like what happens the u.s government doesn't have that issue because
• 39:32
  the bit bonds are going to be u.s denominated right so ultimately you could essentially
• 39:38
  print the coupon um for the bitcoin volatility the monetization of the bitcoin volatility
• 39:46
  associated with the BitBonds and basically keep the Bitcoin permanently in the strategic reserve.
• 39:57
  And once you do that and you continue to restructure,
• 40:01
  now granted over time the market is probably going to require some sort of Bitcoin kind of payout.
• 40:07
  But until that moment happens, you basically can start this engine that allows you to basically start really ramping up by using the scarcity of the Bitcoin on the SVR and basically locking the Bitcoin away forever at an infinite duration.
• 40:34
  because you'd never have to monetize.
• 40:37
  Now, I think there's going to be other structures that come up
• 40:42
  similar to what you're talking about.
• 40:45
  I think if the U.S. government would ever single,
• 40:48
  even if they did it through kind of a 21 as a pilot program,
• 40:52
  that this is potentially happening,
• 40:54
  it signals that Bitcoin's essentially pristine collateral, right?
• 40:58
  And once that perception happens,
• 41:00
  you know there's going to be a rush to basically structure bitcoin and harvest its volatility in
• 41:07
  every um conceivable method that wall street has just because you're basically rebasing um
• 41:16
  from the u.s government's perspective you're rebasing its faillate liabilities
• 41:21
  against absolute scarcity right while keeping the
• 41:26
  the scarce asset on your balance sheet, right? In a bubble that works well for the US government,
• 41:34
  but imagine when Wall Street with the deepest capital market starts doing the same thing
• 41:39
  and structuring it into portfolio products or structuring a corporate debt or structuring it
• 41:46
  with real estate, similar to what you've been talking about or what Grant Cardone's talking
• 41:50
  about, right, at these increasingly longer durations, it becomes a superpower, right?
• 41:57
  Like that's when we hit essentially kind of a reflexive equilibrium.
• 42:03
  Yeah, that second portion of the S curve.
• 42:05
  And I think it comes with when the mindset shifts with investors and the general pop,
• 42:11
  right, or Wall Street, that this is a, you know, superior collateral, pristine collateral
• 42:19
  that the world's ever seen, right?
• 42:21
  And I was listening to Peter Dunbar's talk last night
• 42:23
  on the What Bitcoin Did podcast,
• 42:26
  and he had a segment in there about bit bonds.
• 42:30
  And he kind of opened it up,
• 42:32
  and I like the framing of it.
• 42:34
  He's like, the world doesn't have a debt problem.
• 42:36
  We have a collateral problem.
• 42:38
  And that point resonates
• 42:40
  because it makes a lot of sense, right?
• 42:43
  Going back to the vibrations and the distortions,
• 42:47
  you know, it's an inflationary system.
• 42:49
  It's run by debt.
• 42:51
  You know, we need to find base layer collateral.
• 42:54
  And whether that's gold or Bitcoin, and ultimately Bitcoin will win because it beats gold on every single one of its characteristics, right?
• 43:02
  It's just a matter of time.
• 43:03
  And in my opinion, Bitcoin's already won.
• 43:06
  It's just how do we leverage it and use it against this absolute scarcity to make, to kind of realign incentives across society?
• 43:17
  Yeah.
• 43:17
  To your point about the reflexive tipping point,
• 43:21
  I think what Taylor's doing,
• 43:23
  if BIP bonds ever get out the door,
• 43:25
  obviously you mentioned 21.
• 43:26
  We're at the very beginning stages.
• 43:28
  And to your point about, it's very clear.
• 43:32
  It went from implicit to explicit over the course of this year.
• 43:35
  The Trump administration basically wants to neuter the Fed
• 43:40
  and bring everything in-house.
• 43:41
  To the Treasury, I think that in and of itself
• 43:46
  will have,
• 43:47
  will set a reflexive tipping point
• 43:49
  because you're like,
• 43:51
  who owns the Fed,
• 43:51
  the commercial banks, right?
• 43:53
  And you're sort of cutting them
• 43:55
  out of the situation
• 43:56
  and they're going to have
• 43:57
  a sink or swim moment
• 43:59
  where they're almost forced
• 44:00
  to adopt similar strategies,
• 44:02
  begin using Bitcoin
• 44:03
  as pristine collateral.
• 44:06
  I don't think many people
• 44:08
  are factoring that in.
• 44:10
  I don't think many people
• 44:10
  are ready for that.
• 44:11
  But if you look
• 44:13
  from a regulatory perspective,
• 44:14
  it's certainly where we're heading.
• 44:16
  Right. You look at the comments that JP Morgan put out right yesterday, the day before.
• 44:22
  Like. The market's waking up to this. It's the wave is coming.
• 44:28
  It's just how fast once it gets here, what's the exponentiality associated with it?
• 44:35
  And I think we're going to have ups and downs. I do believe the cycle theory is dead.
• 44:42
  And I think that the market, especially if some of these ideas that we're kind of exploring come to fruition, it is the end game for the inflationary monetary system.
• 44:55
  And it has to be because the debt-based system can't operate in a deflationary world that's driven by AI.
• 45:04
  Right. So.
• 45:12
  Yeah, the important part, if you looked at the monetary flywheel, the sovereign flywheel, is the structure of a BitBond is, you know, I think you posted something about negative yielding debt.
• 45:30
  And, you know, I think that you posted something yesterday about that.
• 45:35
  And what big bonds do or any type, anytime you want to incorporate Bitcoin, because all you're doing is you're harvesting the volatility of its annual cager, right?
• 45:46
  Into a debt structure and you're attaching it to a fayette debt structure, right?
• 45:52
  And you trying to realign the incentives right That all we doing is in the case of a bit bond the u government can borrow one or two percent right and it the investor gets basically the principal protection
• 46:06
  plus their one or two percent and over the life of the duration whatever that is say it's a 10 year
• 46:12
  you know and you're at a 35 kager say it's a 20 80 split and um between bid and bitcoin and say
• 46:22
  that the split with the US government's a 50-50, right? You're looking at an incentive anywhere
• 46:27
  15 to 18% tax-free back, right? To the investor at the end, right? So now you're starting to get
• 46:36
  real returns back. So the government can basically get its one or 2% borrowing rate,
• 46:43
  But the investor can get its 15% to 18% return.
• 46:50
  And that's why I think it's important.
• 46:52
  And DarkSide's discussed this a couple of times about how the cost of money is significantly higher.
• 46:58
  You alluded to it earlier, right, where it should be from a society standpoint.
• 47:01
  So I think the way we need to look at this is if you look at Bitbond and Bitcoin as transitionary tools, it's going to help society basically converge to whatever that natural cost of money is over time as Bitcoin's volatility on a CAGR perspective decreases as it gets more integrated into society.
• 47:25
  Right. So ultimately, I think the cost of money should be 10 percent.
• 47:32
  Right. Or higher. But how do we get there and how do we ease society into achieving that without ripping itself apart?
• 47:41
  Right. And I think the mechanisms or ideas behind BitBonds or the Bitcoin harvest volatility harvesting mechanisms is a great way for us to do that.
• 47:55
  Right. Again, rebasing debt against absolute scarcity.
• 48:00
  Well, let's let's dive into that a bit more.
• 48:02
  I mean, from a social cohesion perspective, you think this is one of the only paths to make sure that we get on the other side of this fourth turning, this inflection point, whatever you want to call it, with relatively.
• 48:16
  Relatively low conflict, kinetic conflict.
• 48:20
  From my perspective, yeah, I do.
• 48:22
  as to how it plays out into what variations,
• 48:29
  like how it's introduced into what variations.
• 48:31
  It doesn't have to be the way I've outlined it, right?
• 48:36
  Various people have various ideas about it,
• 48:38
  and I think it's generally directionally correct.
• 48:44
  You know, I received some feedback
• 48:48
  from Luke Gorman, right?
• 48:52
  And his feedback was, well, how does this work
• 48:56
  with the rest of the world, right?
• 48:58
  What stops this process from hyperinflating
• 49:02
  the dollar against Bitcoin?
• 49:04
  And my thought was, well, it's the speed
• 49:08
  at which you issue the BitBonds.
• 49:09
  You don't do it all at once, right?
• 49:11
  And then he came back with, how does this work
• 49:14
  basically with trade issues, right?
• 49:19
  Between China and the rest of the world
• 49:22
  where we're having deficits and surpluses, right?
• 49:25
  And we're on the wrong side of that, the coin there.
• 49:28
  And I can't necessarily answer that question.
• 49:33
  You know, it goes back to some of the thoughts
• 49:35
  and work that's been done by Dr. Pippa Malgram,
• 49:38
  which talks about the three pillars.
• 49:40
  And in her pillars, it's basically controlling the money,
• 49:44
  having technology and having control of kind of the power to your point that you said earlier
• 49:49
  and this is speculation on my part but i ultimately think that potentially the u.s government has
• 49:59
  superior um military advantage and i think there's probably stuff that we don't realize that they have
• 50:07
  um and one of my posts this week i was kind of feeling feisty i was joking
• 50:13
  you've discussed or throwing a toss back to independence day like you don't think a total
• 50:20
  seat costs twenty thousand dollars to you right and how many audits do we continue to fail
• 50:25
  um if that's the case well we know nuclear war is not an option because of
• 50:33
  um mutual assured destruction right but we have to work together um from an economic because
• 50:41
  demographics are bad, even with our trading partners, whether it's on the front end of the
• 50:45
  demographic curve or the back end, right? So everybody's kind of in this really crappy economic
• 50:50
  situation across the world. And people, of course, will argue with that. But I think there's incentive
• 50:57
  to work together. But even if there wasn't, and there was an issue with, from a kinetic standpoint,
• 51:03
  I do think that the U.S. has extra cards in its back pocket that basically could help keep the military or kinetic issues across the world at a minimum.
• 51:16
  And if that's the case, I think the give here is basically going back to the bifurcation of kind of the world, you know, East versus West.
• 51:26
  I think the U.S. is going to pull back and really focus at home, kind of retooling its supply chains here on the Western Hemisphere and let the East kind of handle itself.
• 51:37
  Right.
• 51:38
  So, again, that's kind of where I see it from a geopolitical economic.
• 51:49
  But as part of that, we're going to have to figure out how to kind of retool our monetary system.
• 51:55
  And Bitcoin and these volatility harming mechanisms are the only way that we can realign incentives.
• 52:00
  and I think that having that military might and economic kind of
• 52:09
  requirement to kind of work together because of demographics,
• 52:17
  everybody's going to basically play ball.
• 52:20
  So, and maybe that's just hopium on my part,
• 52:24
  but at least that's the framework I've been kind of working with lately.
• 52:27
  no i i completely i like to be i don't like the doom i like to be an optimist and especially when
• 52:36
  you consider the fact that we have the tools at our fingertips it just takes the will
• 52:39
  and the drive to actually pick them up and use them and if you view from that perspective things
• 52:47
  are actually incredibly optimistic and exciting because um you sort of have this opportunity to
• 52:54
  to rewire the global economy and that's uh that's a massive opportunity and i think that's when you
• 53:00
  position bitcoin i think that's something i could do better everybody could do better is really just
• 53:06
  painting that incredibly optimistic like we have an opportunity as a generation as people living on
• 53:15
  this planet this particular point in time to really change the trajectory of where our species
• 53:20
  goes along them.
• 53:22
  But it's how we realign the incentive structure
• 53:24
  to help us transition, right?
• 53:25
  And the incentives need to gradually
• 53:30
  come back to a market rate.
• 53:34
  And it really comes down to this
• 53:36
  basically structuring Bitcoin
• 53:39
  into a variety of different products
• 53:40
  that's going to get us there.
• 53:41
  Yeah, one being the sovereign debt.
• 53:43
  Well, I guess that's the question.
• 53:45
  Is it dependent on us doing that?
• 53:49
  Or is that almost inevitable because more and more people are realizing that Bitcoin is just a natural hurdle rate?
• 53:56
  And I think it's an acceleration mechanism.
• 54:01
  Right. Like we could use it.
• 54:04
  Ultimately, Bitcoin is going to win and we're going to end up in that system.
• 54:09
  Naturally, individuals and governments are going to gravitate towards it and it'll fix it over time.
• 54:14
  Right. Or we could use a system that I kind of outlined in the paper that basically would help accelerate it. Right.
• 54:23
  Question is, what are the the fractures, the vibrations are becoming more violent and more frequent?
• 54:32
  So how much time do we actually have?
• 54:35
  How much time do we actually have before the deflationary forces of AI and its impact on labor?
• 54:42
  right not just um blue collar which is still down the road with robotics and the embodiment of ai
• 54:48
  but more so with um with white collars what we're currently seeing or you know college entrance
• 54:56
  basically getting decimated and not being able to find work because productivity is increasing
• 55:01
  kind of the mid to upper level management levels so they don't need that backfill um i think
• 55:06
  yeah if we have 20 30 years bitcoin's going to do it i don't know if we have that much time
• 55:13
  because of the vibrations and you know where ai is going to put us in the next five to ten years
• 55:20
  would be my counter argument so what would
• 55:24
  what would you tell individuals listening to this like how can they help accelerate what should or
• 55:31
  how should they position themselves to prepare for either path the path where we decide to
• 55:38
  actually accelerate or we strategically mess up and or don't recognize the gravity of the situation
• 55:46
  go full bore the beauty of this the beauty is you know and i put bitcoin in two distinct categories
• 55:55
  right it's one for the sovereign individual bring sovereignty back to the individual so just buy
• 56:01
  bitcoin that's all you have to do in either path right and then the the second um is potentially
• 56:07
  my framing which is it can be used as a tool to kind of transition us into the next system right
• 56:13
  um so in either situation it's it's just going to be as an individual just buy bitcoin right now as
• 56:21
  to whether i'm hopeful that the u.s government is to me this is the ideas that i have is something
• 56:27
  that Saylor would have done kind of in his sleep over a weekend, basically playing with AI,
• 56:35
  he could have figured all this out. And I'm hopeful that maybe the US government has
• 56:40
  this type of plan or functionality or thought process in play. And if you read the tea leaves,
• 56:46
  it certainly looks like it could, not saying it's still highly speculative. But if they don't,
• 56:53
  you know they haven't been thinking from this standpoint it's either this or some variation of
• 56:59
  this um notwithstanding any considerations you have to take into the global geoeconomic political
• 57:07
  trade um type of thought processes um that could be leveraged at some point to to help again realign
• 57:16
  of centers across the board. So, you know, one last thing is I was talking at a conference call
• 57:24
  with Jeff Booth just to kind of talk through it at a high level. And at the end of it,
• 57:29
  there was another idea I've been kind of playing with a little bit is what if,
• 57:35
  because Jeff's commented multiple times, like it's very difficult for humans to look through
• 57:40
  a paradigm shift and see what it looks like on the other side or be able to understand the changes,
• 57:48
  right? What if Bitcoin, going back to that whole tool idea, right? Where it's a tool to help us
• 57:55
  realign incentives to get through a transition. What if going, you know, we talked earlier about
• 58:02
  Bitcoin having monetary feedback loops. And I alluded to that it also has ethical feedback loops,
• 58:07
  right it's a system built on trust and transparency so what if ultimately bitcoin was established not
• 58:15
  only to give us a base layer for the sovereign individual but to to also infiltrate governments
• 58:24
  and the broken incentive truck structures than our our own governments to start bringing trust
• 58:32
  back to governments and realigning their incentives from serving themselves to serving the people
• 58:37
  right and ultimately if governments do use bitcoin um in a method that i i've described
• 58:45
  you know they're going to have a large pile of bitcoin right so what if once we get through this
• 58:51
  and we go into kind of an age of abundance where basically all marginal costs are driven to zero
• 58:57
  because of ai and advancements in ai um where we value things differently not from a monetary
• 59:05
  perspective, but the true value comes in trust. What if Bitcoin realigns, reordinated society
• 59:12
  around trust? And that's its true value. And when you get to a world of AI, the monetary value is
• 59:19
  basically, there's no need for it anymore. And Karen, that's definitely opium and speculation,
• 59:26
  but I think it's a different framework to start looking at or explore is basically the end game
• 59:33
  It might not be the monetary value that Bitcoin holds, but the fact that it reinstitutes and re-injects trust into society, right?
• 59:42
  So that we can live freely in an age of abundance.
• 59:46
  Yeah.
• 59:47
  I don't think they're mutually exclusive either, right?
• 59:50
  Yeah.
• 59:51
  I mean, Bitcoin has been described as this trust machine, right?
• 59:55
  I remember, I haven't described it this way in a while, but when I was first getting into Bitcoin and trying to explain it to people,
• 1:00:03
  like going back to like the original form of accounting where people would have to go to like
• 1:00:08
  town square and somebody would literally have the ledger and you'd go with your trading partner
• 1:00:12
  being like okay he's giving me apples move money from my point in the ledger to his like you can
• 1:00:19
  view bitcoin is just like this massive beam of light that anybody can just like anchor into and
• 1:00:23
  know that it actually like you just have complete faith in it you can trust it because you know the
• 1:00:29
  consensus rules are open source and the incentives of the system are such that it's really hard to
• 1:00:36
  corrupt and just being able to trust that um that monetary system which is the most important tool
• 1:00:44
  that we use in money um you naturally have those second third order ripple effects throughout
• 1:00:51
  not only economy but interpersonal relationships and stuff like that
• 1:00:54
  It's fascinating.
• 1:01:01
  That's the frustrating thing.
• 1:01:05
  Some I've been in Bitcoin for over a decade now.
• 1:01:08
  It's like, how do other people not realize this?
• 1:01:10
  And to your point about Jeff Booth's comments about most people not being able to recognize that they're going through a paradigm.
• 1:01:18
  shift not only not recognize it but not understanding how to operate while we're going
• 1:01:23
  through it um it's frustrating then obviously you have like the cultural culture war stuff
• 1:01:29
  it seems like um the spectrum of political volatility is uh as wide as it's ever been
• 1:01:38
  hitting from all angles whether it's um whether it's uh
• 1:01:44
  like Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, Russia,
• 1:01:49
  trans stuff here in the country, guns rights.
• 1:01:52
  Like it just seems like their racial division,
• 1:01:54
  they're hitting it from all angles right now.
• 1:01:57
  Yeah. And I remain hopeful.
• 1:02:00
  I know you interviewed Jordi Visser over the summer, correct?
• 1:02:05
  I remember I was up at,
• 1:02:07
  I got a date of myself and I went to Gettysburg and I was just kind of
• 1:02:09
  walking around listening. And,
• 1:02:12
  your framing of how you did
• 1:02:16
  Jordy spends a lot of time
• 1:02:19
  I mean he's a big Bitcoin proponent
• 1:02:22
  but he's also very focused on AI and the transition
• 1:02:27
  right so and what that's going to look like
• 1:02:30
  and I loved your framing you know and I wrote a piece that
• 1:02:35
  basically at the end it was kind of more of a manuscript for my son
• 1:02:39
  and for how I want to kind of raise him
• 1:02:41
  and you guys towards the end of your discussion were talking about framing of what it looks like
• 1:02:46
  over the next five, 10, 20 years, bringing us from today kind of into the age of abundance.
• 1:02:53
  Right. And that I'd be honest with you, that was kind of a, uh, a cornerstone for,
• 1:02:59
  for why I wrote the piece and got me thinking. So I appreciate that. Um, it was inspiration
• 1:03:05
  and it just, the world's going to change.
• 1:03:10
  There's nothing we can do about it
• 1:03:12
  and nobody's prepared for it, right?
• 1:03:16
  If you go out and ask most people,
• 1:03:18
  you know, what type of system we operate in
• 1:03:21
  being an inflationary one, right?
• 1:03:23
  Nobody can really explain or realize
• 1:03:25
  that there's a counter argument
• 1:03:26
  that there's also deflationary forces, right?
• 1:03:28
  I mean, everybody's heard a little bit about,
• 1:03:30
  you know, the price of a TV goes down over time, right?
• 1:03:33
  But nobody structurally understands why.
• 1:03:35
  And that's, it shows you the degradation of society where we've, we're no longer teaching our kids what's important and how the world actually works.
• 1:03:47
  You know, we're so stuck on these dopamine hits that are related to our phones or the next TikTok.
• 1:03:53
  Right.
• 1:03:54
  And I have a 16 year old as well.
• 1:03:56
  And, you know, it's, it's definitely been an eyeopening experience and watching her go through her teenage years and see what she values versus what we valued growing up.
• 1:04:05
  yeah no i mean it's something i've got wow three three under six right now and
• 1:04:14
  it is crazy to think like my oldest he's in kindergarten he's aware he knows what bitcoin
• 1:04:24
  is he had the bitcoin wallet and he's starting to ask those those questions like the last year
• 1:04:30
  it's been like questions in the car it's like oh wow you're beginning to think about this stuff
• 1:04:34
  Like, how do we approach this? And we have in not only that, but like, how do we?
• 1:04:41
  How do we make sure that you don't go insane in this in this world as you're you were born?
• 1:04:47
  If the covid baby was born in early 2020, like literally born in the middle of what I would seem to be one of the most massive inflection points and points of awakening.
• 1:04:59
  like COVID, I think it was actually the silver lining of COVID was how many people sort of shook
• 1:05:05
  awake in the sense of, uh, in the sense of like, Hey, something's really wrong here.
• 1:05:11
  They're the opposite to like, it was, it was the silver lining. It woke up a bunch of people,
• 1:05:14
  but it also, um, sent, uh, another portion of the population down the road of doubling down
• 1:05:21
  on the insanity.
• 1:05:23
  And I think...
• 1:05:23
  It certainly woke me up.
• 1:05:27
  I mean, my entry came in 2020.
• 1:05:29
  So, and it was right in the midst
• 1:05:33
  of when gold started breaking down
• 1:05:35
  right before Bitcoin started rising.
• 1:05:36
  I think my orange pill was actually
• 1:05:40
  Breedlove's letter to Ray Dalio
• 1:05:42
  where he outlined the properties
• 1:05:44
  as to why you should invest in Bitcoin
• 1:05:46
  based upon Dalio's book, Principles.
• 1:05:48
  So, and that, that was the, uh, the moment I started my journey, right.
• 1:05:54
  And it has not stopped.
• 1:05:56
  It just continues to get deeper and deeper.
• 1:05:58
  And then you add in the secondary layers of what the convergence of AI means.
• 1:06:02
  And, um, you know, we're standing in a very interesting moment in history.
• 1:06:08
  And, um, I think this is going to be remembered and talked about for generations to come.
• 1:06:14
  Yeah.
• 1:06:15
  Yeah, maybe we'll even be able to talk about it for generations because we'll be able to live to 250.
• 1:06:22
  Potentially.
• 1:06:23
  I mean, there's a thought process that our children might not die, right?
• 1:06:29
  Like, it's medical, right?
• 1:06:33
  It's physiological.
• 1:06:34
  You can solve for that, potentially.
• 1:06:37
  Now, I don't want to get into the ethical issues around that,
• 1:06:39
  But there's a potential that our kids could live as long as they want, you know, God forbid, an accident.
• 1:06:46
  We might be able to solve for that, which would be interesting, which is an interesting theory to have.
• 1:06:52
  Right.
• 1:06:55
  It has a whole bunch of other second order effects and issues with that.
• 1:06:59
  But.
• 1:07:00
  But to your point, living to 280, why do you have why is it just 280?
• 1:07:05
  Right.
• 1:07:05
  um that could be go off of some of the other thought leaders in the space you know we're
• 1:07:13
  ultimately converged with with machines i don't know if i want to go that far but not impossible
• 1:07:19
  no i don want to get the chip either i don want to become a borg a cyborg but uh i think the community appreciates you just the way you are I know I certainly do Thank you It
• 1:07:32
  uh,
• 1:07:34
  that is,
• 1:07:34
  uh,
• 1:07:35
  I've said it on the podcast recently too.
• 1:07:37
  It's like equally unnerving and exhilarating.
• 1:07:39
  Um,
• 1:07:41
  I think the unknown is greater than it's ever been.
• 1:07:44
  Um,
• 1:07:45
  but the opportunity on the flip side of that,
• 1:07:48
  the opportunity is greater than it's ever been too.
• 1:07:51
  that's uh that was like the last thing i was going to say like i think
• 1:07:55
  part of my focus and goal is because you do have these competing forces um
• 1:08:02
  particularly from the political spectrum of like people that want to go over like democratic
• 1:08:08
  socialists they say but i saw ramdani it was on the vo he's like i'm not a communist i'm a
• 1:08:15
  democratic socialist it's like you're a communist you're just a step before communism um
• 1:08:20
  And so we have, there's a very large portion of the world that wants to go down that direction and tried that failed experiment once again. And then you have people like us who are like, I think, have appropriately recognized that central authority has corrupted everything and we need to get back to emergent properties and distributed decentralized markets.
• 1:08:46
  And I think that could fix it.
• 1:08:48
  I think that's going to be speaking of like spreading the needle with BitBonds and recognizing Bitcoin is pristine collateral at the federal level.
• 1:08:57
  I think socially, too, that's going to be a sort of critical decision point or turn at some point in the next five years where it's like, no, we're free market.
• 1:09:09
  We're going to the free market direction, not this democratic socialist communist direction.
• 1:09:15
  Yeah, no, I agree.
• 1:09:16
  And Preston Pistis argued that it needs to be like a BitBond needs to be kind of a bottom-up approach.
• 1:09:28
  And I disagree.
• 1:09:30
  Bitcoin's been a bottom-up approach, right?
• 1:09:33
  It's grown nothing to 123, you know, in 13, 14 years.
• 1:09:40
  So I think it's come to the point where in order to turgeon horse a system that's been hyper financialized, that it's going to take strong leadership to realize what the asset class is and has to be a top down approach from my perspective.
• 1:10:02
  and once it is a top-down approach because you might have some different thoughts on that um i
• 1:10:09
  believe the asset as stances and the network and the protocol is completely capable um of taking on
• 1:10:16
  immense um value basically being added to it i don't think it's i think it's capable of doing it
• 1:10:23
  now. If you hold that thesis, then Bitcoin's ready for prime time. And I think administration
• 1:10:37
  or government that realizes its value prop and understands what the asset is, especially
• 1:10:44
  backed by the absolute undeniable transparency and scarcity, will establish that it's percine
• 1:10:53
  collateral and once they do that it doesn't stop like it's game over yeah i have no
• 1:11:01
  my perspective is is like it's all good okay do it don't wait on any other actor to do it just do
• 1:11:10
  it so again that's why we back battery it's like let's not wait for the government to issue bit
• 1:11:15
  bombs they should but yeah let's get something in the private market so that they can pave the way
• 1:11:21
  like, hey, this works in a private credit structure.
• 1:11:24
  Like, you can apply it to this.
• 1:11:25
  You can definitely apply it to a PIP bond.
• 1:11:27
  And, yeah, I think the most important thing is just develop the agency,
• 1:11:34
  the will, and the drive to do what you can do with what's at your fingertips
• 1:11:38
  and hope that you're successful, number one,
• 1:11:43
  and then number two, that success sort of inspires others
• 1:11:45
  to bring it into what they're doing.
• 1:11:47
  yeah i completely agree and with battery or with what grant cardone's doing right i think um there's
• 1:11:59
  going to be a lot of a lot of solid examples that um will help provide some guidance to the powers
• 1:12:07
  to be to help them feel more comfortable you know in the coming years to kind of move forward with
• 1:12:12
  some of these ideas around BitBonds.
• 1:12:15
  So, yeah.
• 1:12:16
  No, and I know that they're very solid Bitcoiners,
• 1:12:20
  well-placed throughout the administration.
• 1:12:24
  I've talked to them,
• 1:12:25
  and to the extent that they have ultimate influence
• 1:12:30
  over decisions, I don't think it's,
• 1:12:33
  they obviously don't have ultimate say,
• 1:12:36
  but I think the seeds are being planted,
• 1:12:38
  the right seeds are being planted.
• 1:12:40
  If you, maybe it's just pie in the sky, but if you take the concept I had about 21, one of the original thoughts, you kind of play it out.
• 1:12:53
  Not only does it potentially bypass congressional approval and basically establish kind of a pilot program, but it's proof of concept, right?
• 1:13:03
  because if you go out and you deal with $100 billion or $200 billion,
• 1:13:07
  which is small in comparison to the U.S. government debt,
• 1:13:14
  then ultimately what happens when Congress on either side of the aisle starts to see that,
• 1:13:20
  hey, we might actually be able to borrow 1%, 2%.
• 1:13:23
  This could actually solve our debt issues or financing issues.
• 1:13:29
  Not only that this gives us the mechanism to move front maturities or duration to the long end right You know say there a hiccup with because there a lot of people including Infra
• 1:13:44
  when I spent a lot of time in spaces in Bitcoin today,
• 1:13:49
  where it looks like we're heading towards yield curve control.
• 1:13:52
  It certainly looks like stable coins could provide the treasury,
• 1:13:56
  that mechanism, especially if the Fed has been minimized in its power
• 1:14:01
  in scope, then, you know, if you're not doing it with yield curve control, at some point
• 1:14:12
  you're going to need to move duration.
• 1:14:14
  And this is going to give the perfect cover mechanism to basically move it out further
• 1:14:20
  on the yield curve from where it's currently standing.
• 1:14:24
  And, but I think it's important that the pilot program itself be established because if
• 1:14:31
  you need to have the pilot in order to get congressional or political buy-in from both sides of the aisle.
• 1:14:38
  Again, going back to incentive alignment, right?
• 1:14:41
  Even this simple concept, when it's put out in the wild and it starts to show how it operates,
• 1:14:49
  it aligns incentives even across political aisles, right?
• 1:14:52
  And you've done a lot of work and the community's done a lot of work on talking to Congress on both sides
• 1:14:59
  to basically state what this asset is
• 1:15:03
  and bring everybody to the center to understand it, right?
• 1:15:08
  Well, BIP bonds are basically a monetary structural proof
• 1:15:12
  as well of that, right?
• 1:15:15
  That ultimately, I think, again,
• 1:15:20
  the pilot program with the S21 or somebody else
• 1:15:23
  will give us the...
• 1:15:29
  Give us the examples and the results that we need.
• 1:15:32
  Yeah, I completely agree.
• 1:15:34
  It was like, it's all happening right now.
• 1:15:38
  It's all going according to the plan.
• 1:15:39
  We're running towards 124 right now, 123, 720.
• 1:15:44
  And it's funny.
• 1:15:46
  I think this year was interesting.
• 1:15:50
  I was actually talking about it this week at the 1031 retreat that we're on.
• 1:15:53
  this year reminds me a lot of like 2015 2016 where people were completely unable to recognize
• 1:16:01
  i'm just looking at the chart now we hit a low of 76 000 in april during the
• 1:16:07
  air of tantrum but yep we've been hovering in the 100 to 115 range for like six months now and it's
• 1:16:14
  like that is if you would have told me that in 2017 then 2025 is where we'd be hanging out i'd
• 1:16:22
  be like oh good bitcoin succeeding many people uh feels like we're being dragged through the mud and
• 1:16:28
  tortured in the same time that's that's one thing too like bitcoin is uh
• 1:16:35
  she will humble you because that's that's the way it works she'll bore you to death and then
• 1:16:41
  she'll rip like she is today and then uh people can't can't stomach that uh that the the boring
• 1:16:49
  periods and it makes sense because you once you see it you understand like oh this should be a 200
• 1:16:54
  300 500 trillion dollar market uh it's only at two and a half trillion right now like why isn't this
• 1:17:00
  priced it and i think it's the nature of just human nature like people move at their own pace
• 1:17:07
  it's uh yeah i put out uh something quick earlier this week just talking about being bitcoin based
• 1:17:16
  and what that represents.
• 1:17:18
  And it plays on the terms humility, right?
• 1:17:21
  Because it forces you, Bitcoin forces you.
• 1:17:25
  Not only is it a lens to look at the world
• 1:17:27
  and actually call it bullshit for what it is, right?
• 1:17:31
  And actually say, if this is real, this is not.
• 1:17:34
  When you understand what Bitcoin is
• 1:17:38
  and just the incentive alignment,
• 1:17:41
  the Bitcoin, the ethical feedback loops.
• 1:17:43
  But then when you look at the rest of the world
• 1:17:44
  through that lens,
• 1:17:45
  You can see how distorted the broken money system has created it, created whether that's politics or Wall Street and kind of their ongoing.
• 1:17:55
  But that whole process of looking at the world through a Bitcoin lens is a process in humility.
• 1:18:02
  right you really have to question everything you've been told your entire life and take a step back
• 1:18:09
  and realize that not necessarily a lie it's just how society's been misaligned right with a certain
• 1:18:18
  belief system and to see that belief system break down and to swallow your pride first off to explore
• 1:18:24
  what this asset is but then once you start to really dive deep into seeing how it can change
• 1:18:31
  things. Um, yeah, it's, it's a humiliated, it's a lesson humiliation, but it, it also like a
• 1:18:40
  Phoenix allows you to kind of, to rise up and think clearly. And, um, it reestablishes the
• 1:18:47
  thought of Jordy Visser talks about it, you know, sense of childish curiosity. Um, but also fosters
• 1:18:56
  critical thinking right yeah no it is i mean another phrase of you is creative destruction
• 1:19:04
  like your creative destruction is like a concept we learned in business school that you're supposed
• 1:19:07
  to embrace and many people uh most people don't start businesses and so i guess you can argue that
• 1:19:15
  most people don't recognize that or intuit it but um no i think that's the hardest part for most
• 1:19:22
  people. Luckily, I was very young and impressionable and somewhat radicalized by the great financial
• 1:19:27
  crisis when I found Bitcoin. So I was almost immediately receptive to it. But most people
• 1:19:33
  have a very hard time admitting that they were duped by the authority figures in their lives in many different contexts and aspects And everybody likes to think that they are standing on solid ground
• 1:19:52
  and have the ability to perceive the world in reality in a way
• 1:19:58
  that gives them some degree of certainty.
• 1:20:02
  And once you find Bitcoin and begin recognizing everywhere
• 1:20:07
  throughout the system where things are corrupted
• 1:20:10
  and you've been lied to.
• 1:20:11
  It's hard to hold your hand up and say,
• 1:20:13
  yeah, I've been duped for decades.
• 1:20:17
  To a point, like, humility is the most critical attribute
• 1:20:23
  to have when sitting down and looking at Bitcoin.
• 1:20:29
  I think we need more of it.
• 1:20:31
  Yeah, certainly do.
• 1:20:34
  I think society is going to get its dose of it in short order.
• 1:20:37
  But hopefully it's an easier pill to swallow than it could be.
• 1:20:42
  Because it could.
• 1:20:44
  And the quicker you get to that point, the better off your life is going to be in the long run.
• 1:20:48
  So anybody out there is skeptical and thinking that we're completely insane talking about not only Bitcoin, but the integration of Bitcoin into bond issuance.
• 1:20:59
  Like, maybe just eat a slice of humble pie and recognize.
• 1:21:04
  And that's the other thing we were talking about this week on this retreat.
• 1:21:09
  It's like, how many times does Bitcoin have to completely prove you wrong?
• 1:21:15
  For you to reckon like we're at $124,000 almost.
• 1:21:20
  It's not dead.
• 1:21:22
  Yes, at very volatile periods, but it's been up and to the right consistently.
• 1:21:27
  For 16, almost 17 years now.
• 1:21:29
  It's the best performing asset for the last 17 years.
• 1:21:32
  and how long is that going to continue to happen
• 1:21:35
  before people wake up and say,
• 1:21:37
  ah, maybe I was wrong.
• 1:21:40
  It's tough to look in the mirror for a lot of people.
• 1:21:44
  And that's part of the humiliation process, right?
• 1:21:50
  But a lot of people do not adjust.
• 1:21:53
  They adjust when they're told.
• 1:21:58
  This has been awesome, Marilyn.
• 1:21:59
  Thank you for doing this.
• 1:22:00
  the notes uh thanks martin sorry i kind of ramble sometimes so i get lost in thought but
• 1:22:06
  um i think you get the drift of my direction and quite so when i'm trying to
• 1:22:10
  torture that yeah for all the government officials listening out there consider it
• 1:22:15
  we need to accelerate i know i know there are many of you out there are dozens of you out there
• 1:22:19
  to listen to the show um so light a fire under scott pacin's ass and the trump administration
• 1:22:26
  and tell them to focus in on this.
• 1:22:29
  Because again, I think if you're thinking about manufacturing a soft landing
• 1:22:35
  that results in as little social turbulence,
• 1:22:42
  if you want to minimize social turbulence for the next 5, 10 years,
• 1:22:48
  you need to create a way to manufacture a soft landing.
• 1:22:52
  people access and exposure to the most pristine collateral, the best asset that's ever existed.
• 1:23:02
  Yeah. And it's, it's important that we stop duct taping. And to your point,
• 1:23:07
  we actually start providing real solutions for the people, right. And following through.
• 1:23:13
  Yeah. So start thinking outside the box. And, uh, that's one thing we're good as a community,
• 1:23:19
  is thinking outside the box.
• 1:23:23
  Creative destruction.
• 1:23:25
  The government
• 1:23:25
  participating in creative destruction
• 1:23:28
  of the
• 1:23:30
  monetary and debt system that they've
• 1:23:32
  erected.
• 1:23:34
  That's an idea.
• 1:23:35
  It's the only way out.
• 1:23:38
  This is awesome.
• 1:23:39
  Where should we
• 1:23:42
  send people who are interested to learn
• 1:23:43
  more about your thoughts and
• 1:23:45
  what you're writing about?
• 1:23:48
  see the subs. Yeah, I'm pretty active on X, so you can find me there under Maryland HODL or
• 1:23:55
  Maryland or HODL Maryland, I think is actually the surname. And then in my bio, there'll be a
• 1:24:04
  link to my subsack. I pretty much put things out on both platforms. So you just follow me,
• 1:24:10
  you'll see the information. All right. We will link both of those in the show notes.
• 1:24:15
  I hope you have a great weekend.
• 1:24:17
  Hopefully you too, sir.
• 1:24:19
  We can do this at some point in the future as things progress.
• 1:24:22
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:24:23
  Look forward to it.
• 1:24:24
  Again, I just want to say thank you for all of your efforts and contributions to the community.
• 1:24:30
  You've certainly been instrumental kind of in developing my foundation over the last couple of years as I've really dip into the space.
• 1:24:39
  So, well, we're all in it together.
• 1:24:41
  Yes, sir.
• 1:24:43
  Through a common bond.
• 1:24:45
  Yes. Truth.
• 1:24:47
  We're going to win. We're going to win as we like to.
• 1:24:49
  Yes, we are.
• 1:24:51
  All right. Peace and love, freaks.
• 1:24:53
  Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC.
• 1:24:56
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• 1:25:00
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• 1:25:04
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• 1:25:06
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• 1:25:11
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• 1:25:13
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• 1:25:19
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• 1:25:30
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• 1:25:34
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• 1:25:37
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• 1:25:41
  Thank you for your time
• 1:25:42
  And until next time
• 1:25:44
  Bye