A failure of a major currency block, a massive campaign of asset seizing can wake people up.
A lot of the world just kind of trends toward nihilism lately.
It's like a shark that can't stop swimming unless it ironically drowns.
For this cycle, I would say, well, anything under $150k would be kind of disappointing.
As the price goes up, every single cycle, OGs sell.
If the thesis was true that that was the single biggest thing,
then in theory you should see that more centralized altcoins that have a clear quantum roadmap,
they should be getting a very large bid.
Crazy thing about the dot-com bubble is like even non-tech stocks was trading 50 times earnings.
The interesting thing about the new chairman proposal is he's dovish on interest rates, but he's historically hawkish on balance sheet.
There's really no defense for the four-year cycle going forward just because the numbers for the halving are way smaller than other factors.
The tools are built. The system works.
Do you think that there are more potential geopolitical catalysts out there that could
drive that or push that adoption forward?
I think a broader issue.
Lynn Alden, welcome back.
You have been a repeated guest on this show, for which I am very grateful.
I think between, I don't know if you or Sailor has more total Bitcoin macro podcast hours,
Somebody should really do an agentic analysis of this to figure it out.
Yeah, it's hard to say.
I think he had more of a burst for a while there, but he's been doing a little bit fewer.
I mean, I've been doing fewer, but he had a bigger trail off.
So I guess if it goes long enough, I can take the crown.
I don't know.
Yeah, yeah.
Come back up from the rear there.
Well, I'm excited to be talking with you today, as always.
Got a number of topics I want to get into with you, both from the Bitcoin side, the macro side.
also want to talk about your new book which has nothing directly to do with bitcoin but is in the
sci-fi realm i want to start out though perhaps just on the bitcoin side of things things have
been weird uh we saw a year's worth a year's plus worth of choppy crab market sideways price action
we're now down in the 60 time of recording right now uh 67 000 thereabouts and while we all like
to say you know price is the least interesting thing about bitcoin it is also its greatest
marketing tool and so just kind of want to get your general vibe check on is this where you expected
us to be right now from a fiat price federal reserve note conversion perspective is this
what you expected to see sort of in you know in february 2026 or did this defy some of your
expectations as well i think we're moderately lower than where i would have guessed um i i
I usually am on the record of kind of being like a bearish bull, which is I'm generally on the more conservative side of the price spectrum.
I try not to even give too many predictions when I do.
It's usually a pretty conservative one.
And sometimes we undershoot even those.
I mean, the first time I gave a price prediction was back in 2020.
Bitcoin was like the 10K range.
And I said, I think I could think you could hit a trillion market cap, which at the time puts you around 50,000.
You know, we got to there and I said, well, I think it can go to 100K.
And then we only got to 69K for that cycle, rolled over.
And then when kind of pushing a quarter to give a price target, I would generally, for this cycle, I would say, well, anything under 150K would be kind of disappointing.
And we only got to 126 so far.
So I would classify this, much like last time, as kind of a semi-disappointing cycle.
And from what we can tell, I mean, most of it is just there's kind of a lack of top-line demand.
So a lot of people kind of look for reasons.
And, you know, we could potentially go over some of those reasons.
But I think at the end of the day, the core one is this cycle just didn't attract a lot of individual hodlers, basically.
Obviously, the ETFs unlocked some interest from people that have brokerage accounts and otherwise would like some Bitcoin access and just, you know, kind of had limitations before.
Obviously, the treasury companies were major buyers this cycle.
But because we didn't really have sovereigns come in, which I think that expectation was too bullish.
But also we didn't really have a ton of retail come in.
There's a ton of other things they can invest in, like AI related things.
When Bitcoin gets big enough, it's not necessarily the fastest horse anymore.
And so it relies on its other qualities, like the fact that you can self-custody it, that actually, you know, it's not just a number on a screen, like a stock.
It is something that, you know, more like physical gold, but in digital form that you can use.
you can send, you can pay with.
And if those features go through a cycle
of just not being of particularly interest to people,
so we didn't see a lot of Chinese buyers,
we didn't see a lot of American buyers,
we didn't, you know, it just kind of,
I would say it stagnated this cycle.
And I think a broader issue
is that one, there were some mislined expectations early on.
So for example,
Bitcoin slightly over-performed my expectations in 2024.
I was actually on a panel in the New York Stock Exchange
and like Mike Michael Green was hosting it Nick Carter was on the panel I was on the panel
Eric from Bloomberg was on the panel and they were saying you know could could Bitcoin at 100k
this year and I said well I mean Bitcoin can do a lot of Bitcoin has you know these moments where
it does crazy things I was like you know we only had a few months to go so it's like you know it
wouldn't be my base case I think we're at like 60k at the time or something so I'm not going to call
for a price move that big that quickly but I wouldn't be shocked and but because of the election
we did. We kind of pulled forward quite a bit of demand because we had this new information,
you know, an administration that's going to be supposedly more friendly to the asset.
But then in early 2025, you know, the biggest question I got on podcasts for a while was,
what do you think about a sovereign Bitcoin reserve? And my view was, I think they'll ring
fence the coins they have, maybe buy some, but I wouldn't, you know, all the kind of calls for
half a million coins or a million coins. I'd rather not price that into my expectations.
I'd rather be surprised to the upside.
But I think a lot of people did kind of have that expectation.
So when you didn't really see the U.S. or other sovereigns come in, you didn't see just influx.
I think people had kind of over-enthused expectations.
And for me, even though it undershot the expectation, it's mainly just because retail didn't come in this cycle.
Yeah, and again, with the old equation, it's like happiness is expectations minus reality, right?
So just, you know, or perhaps it's the other way around.
I forget.
But point being, yeah, people I think saw it.
It seems I haven't been in Bitcoin that long, right?
It wasn't after ignoring.
I think I've ignored Bitcoin for longer than I've been in Bitcoin.
And but even in my limited time in Bitcoin, I've noticed that it really seems like there
is that that point where everybody's convinced it's going to keep going higher and nothing's
going to stop it.
And that's typically the point where it takes a dump.
And then there's that other point on the converse side where everybody seems to think
it's going to keep going lower. You felt this in 2022 when it was bouncing around 19K forever.
Carla sang a song about 19K. That was how often we bounced around 19K. And it's going to 10,
it's going to 5, or it's going to 0, negative 0 if you're Peter Zeyhan. And we ended up around 16,
only a little bit lower from that. It feels like we're at a similar point right now,
not based on any analysis that I've done, just a pure gut check, where it seems that everybody
both Bitcoin bulls, bears, no coiners alike has basically gotten to a point where they're saying,
you know, Bitcoin's going significantly lower, 48K, 48K, 28K, whatever it might be.
Where do you stand with this? Are you still kind of in a wait and see period where you're saying,
okay, yeah, we could have some significant drawdown from here? Or do you think most of
the kind of sell pressure has been exhausted at this point? The shortage is still to wait and see
mode. I look for some sort of price confirmation before trying to make a bottom call. We started
to see a limited one like in December, January. So for a while I was like, okay, we had to sell
off in November. We started to kind of hold momentum, started to kind of build again. And I
was like, you know, there's a good chance this was the bottom. But then of course, January came and
we had that waterfall lower. So that kind of reset the board for like the next few months.
and historically bitcoin does not make v-shaped bottoms uh the exception kind of was spring of
2020 when just hyper stimulus made a lot of things look like a v-shaped bottom uh but usually because
because bitcoin is not a stock it doesn't have like an earnings announcement where they can like
come out and surprise you the upside and just every analyst has to update their model and
wall street buys uh instead it only really bottoms when kind of fast money weekly held coins
over time rotate enough into strongly held hands.
And then it just, then it creates that,
you know, that supply squeeze basically.
Like there's just, it becomes very tight.
So it only takes, you know,
kind of like just selling gets exhausted.
It only takes a tiny new spark of buyers
to restart the cycle.
And then obviously a rising price
gets new buyers on board.
It kind of momentum creates its own cycle.
And that, because of that kind of lack of catalyst,
unless some, you know,
mag seven stock or sovereign just decides to ape into it um it usually has that more gradual bottom
um so the short answer is i don't know if if we have if this is the bottom or if we have like
another waterfall lower um i would say that this the sentiment is lower than other bear markets i've
seen uh it was it's i mean in in november 2022 literally when ftx was like collapsing and the
price was in the teens uh i was at pacific bitcoin um i think you were you there you were there right
all the conferences kind of merge in my head yeah it was great the energy was high wasn't it
super high we were i was joking on stage like ftex is collapsing and look how happy people are here
because if you don't own crypto if you're not kind of levered uh then you're you know everyone
was quite convinced uh and correctly so this was just a temporary um you know part of the cycle
what I'm seeing this time is there's more kind of exhaustion I think I think after two kind of
weak cycles a lot of even longer term holders are a little bit tired you could say I think it kind
of I think the biggest risk people perceive is that it kind of ran out of like near-term catalysts
right so it's like before you there's always kind of another big thing to look for like say the ETFs
coming out the spot ETFs and things like that they're going to unlock new demand and at this
point that okay we've unlocked all the all the frictions and it just comes down to whether people
want to buy the asset or not um i think if anything the joke is we need more podcasts but there's i
think that's actually true in the sense that the tools are built the system works um dads are still
you know both on the you know on the on the foundational layer but also all the companies
and stuff building building out the broader ecosystem a lot of that is in really good place
and but people got to want to use it they have to know the benefits of it see that it's available
know how to use it not be turned off by the complexity of it or perceive that the culture
about it is something that is just other than them that it's you know only like only hardcore
libertarians like it and i otherwise it's not for me like whatever the branding issue is
or the technical complexity issue i think that's actually the bottleneck if you're hodling bitcoin
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I think that's a fair point. And I will always advocate that until we have as many Bitcoin
podcasts as TradFi podcasts, we don't have enough. Go out there and start a podcast if you are
listening. And also, if you are listening right now live on Noster, thank you for being here.
This show does stream live only on Noster. So if you want to check it out live, go check out Noster.
One of the things that I wanted to kind of bring up is this sentiment mismatch that I definitely
felt as well. In the last year, I thought it was perhaps the most bullish year on record from a
medium of exchange adoption and potential adoption standpoint. If we just took in isolation,
Jack Dorsey's Square, enabling not everybody turned it on, but formerly merchants plus
have the ability to accept Bitcoin, right? Right through their existing Square terminals,
nothing else needed. That was an incredible moment in my mind. And you've already seen,
pop up i just saw as well like a little earlier today that lightning network volume grew by about
400 percent last year so you have this really interesting sort of divergence between so much
incredible stuff happening on the medium of exchange side whether that be new merchants
onboarding the potential for millions more to onboard really easily volume on the lightning
network increasing drastically maybe some of that as a function of the former and then on the sort
of store of value side obviously the fiat price of bitcoin if we're talking about us dollars
obviously if you're talking about iranian rial or a number of other fiat currencies bitcoin did
very well right as those currencies hyperinflated but do you think that that is just one of those
things that you know from a medium of exchange standpoint the average person just doesn't care
like that doesn't actually move the needle for them it seems like if we heard this kind of news
four million merchants being turned on by uh by square if we heard that in 2020 2021 that would
have been massive news as it was. I feel like it was kind of just like, oh, well, that's neat anyway.
Or people just didn't know about it at all. What's your what's your take on that?
I do think that was a massive announcement. And I do think that in general, I mean,
Jack's done more for Bitcoin in the past, call it five years than almost anyone when it comes to
defending devs from legal attacks, when it comes to all sorts of, you know, supporting it with his
own companies. And I think that was a tremendous one. I think that was huge. And also, I mean,
River just came out with a report today, kind of updated information on some lightning volumes
with generally pretty high volumes shown. I think it's a matter of kind of scale, right? So Bitcoin
as, depending on the price, I mean, a trillion to a two trillion plus asset, depending on where it
was in its cycle this time. You know, the overall kind of velocity. So when you look at kind of
how much volume happens, and then compared to the size of the ownership, it's still not super high.
And the numbers we see in Lightning are, I mean, they're good. They're in the billions
over any decent period of time, as far as we can tell. I mean, the cool thing is it's so private
and decentralized. You actually can't just say, okay, here's how much volume is happening in the
Lightning Network. You can only, a company like River and partners can go out and say, okay,
the network we can see, you have a pretty good snapshot, and here's kind of our estimated volumes.
And you kind of go from there.
But I think overall, like the volumes are healthy, especially for what it is, which is it's still a young volatile asset.
It still needs upward volatility if it's going to grow to become like a long term store of value.
Like it's going to become a big asset.
It needs upward volatility.
Anytime you get upward volatility, you get leverage euphoria and downside volatility,
which kind of gives it a pretty long headwind against denominating prices in it,
getting your paycheck denominated in it, not just paid in it, but denominated in it,
having any sort of like debts or liabilities in it.
And so it's this kind of asset that is challenging to use for like near-term working capital
because you can literally get cut in half like it has recently.
and it's instead mostly great for long-term savings that you can also pay with and it's
very hard for anyone to stop you from doing that and so I think that that opportunity set is massive
and I think the medium exchange aspect is essential for it that's what makes it not just
a stock on a screen the fact that you could even if you're not doing so like I think that people
say that because volumes are low that's a bad sign I say well the optionality is a huge deal
like if i have a gold coin i i'm like 99 sure that you know whenever i die and whoever gets
that coin nexus i'm not gonna like melt it down for jewelry for decades i'm not gonna use it for
industrial purposes for decades that coin represents optionality that i don't intend to ever actually
use that option uh and with bitcoin being able to send it for a lot of people it's just that
optionality that you have your bitcoin and there might be a bunch of reasons why you don't spend it
You say, okay, well, it's a taxable event.
It's, you know, not all merchants accept it.
All the, you know, accounting complexity because of that tax issue, just multiple reasons like that.
But the fact that you could is actually a really big deal.
That optionality that it gives every holder, every self-custodial holder is a massive deal.
And then those who actually use it on a regular basis, especially, I mean, Nostra is like one of the biggest use cases in terms of the number of kind of small transactions.
but obviously more broadly than that,
I think that's a massive deal for the network,
and I think that shows the network's working.
Yeah, it almost makes me more bullish
that there is such a disconnect
from some of the news that we saw.
And that was the biggest, I think,
maybe takeaway for me coming out of this last year
was it didn't matter what the news was.
The price wasn't moving as a function of news.
We've seen River put out a, to give them another shout out,
they put out another interesting graph recently.
I don't know if you saw it about the rotation from individuals to sort of institutional buyers.
I'm thinking a lot of that was probably a function of OG selling.
We know there were several very public cases.
The Galaxy whale with like 80,000 Bitcoin.
Presumably they have some more too I imagine At least a couple of them lying around So there was some massive massive volume that went from OG Oedler hands that have hey I mean it impressive they held it for that long
That is truly a testament to their fortitude.
But that's rotating into institutional hands, right?
So it's almost, you know, it's dumping on Wall Street a little bit.
So at least the Tom Jelm swings both ways that way.
But you saw this sort of rotation, and it seemed that that, at least in my mind, was most likely one of the just primary drivers around this.
I think it's difficult for us to kind of comprehend the actual volume that some of these OGs can move.
You know, we talk about, yeah, MicroStrategy is buying every week in large size, but you've got one OG whale that disposes of 80,000 Bitcoin,
and that wipes out months and months and months of their buys from a sell-side perspective.
Is that kind of how you've looked at this as well? Or do you also think it's just a matter of, look, the excitement wasn't there. You didn't have the retail FOMO there. Maybe the retail FOMO was in treasury stocks. I don't know. How do you think about that?
I think the OG selling is one of the biggest factors.
So the two biggest factors are basically top-line demand from all sources, whether it's retail, whether it's retail owning through shares in an ETF or corporation, institutions buying into those shares and stuff.
So all that kind of institutional retail demand, that top-line demand, that's probably the single biggest factor.
And then as the price goes up, every single cycle, OGs sell.
um they they usually you know they got bitcoin it goes up depending on how og they are 10x 20x 100x
more uh it goes from you know like five percent of the net worth to 95 percent of the net worth
in some cases and then some of them have families some of them want to consume more some of them
want to diversify they say i don't want 95 of my net worth that's now substantial in one asset i
mean now i can diversify a couple other things i can get real estate i can get equities whatever
And so you do see that selling pressure into bull markets, liquid, high-priced markets.
And one of the narratives I've seen this time is that there's like an unusual amount of OG selling.
Statistically, I push back on that because every cycle there's OG selling.
It happens every single bull cycle.
For example, and it depends on how you measure it, but like the number of coins that haven't moved on-chain for a year,
and then that metric,
that's not been a particularly strong change of hands
this time compared to past cycles.
Currently, we're near all-time highs
for the percentage of coins
that haven't moved in five years or more.
And so you do get these individual massive whale sellers
and just the broader just kind of shark level sellers around,
but that happens every cycle.
And then also, because Bitcoin is,
it's not a five-year-old asset or a 10-year-old asset anymore.
It's a 17-year-old asset.
Kind of the spectrum of buyers that even count as OG at this point is bigger.
There's just more people that have been holding for five-plus years,
call it a cycle or two at least, that can then sell into that.
So you can actually have more OG sellers in terms of the number of sellers,
the number of Bitcoin they're selling,
And yet as a percentage of older coins, it's actually not really elevated.
So statistically, I don't really, kind of the bearish narratives were like, OGs are becoming disillusioned in it or something.
There's actually statistically no evidence of that.
I mean, there's always an anecdote, like this whale sold for this reason, sure.
But statistically, this hasn't really been an unusual selling environment for OGs.
So I think OG selling pressure is kind of what exhausts the cycle every time, which is that there's new demand, there's price euphoria, there's OG sellers, and eventually that gets exhausted on the buy side.
And then the reverse happens on the bottom in the sell side.
And so I think that OG selling was a key factor this time.
But I think the reason we only got to, say, 126 rather than having that kind of peak out at, say, 150 or 200, I think was just because top line demand was on the weaker side.
So you don't think OG selling is driven by quantum's imminent cracking of Bitcoin?
I do not.
I think there's more data we can look into in this.
So for example, if the thesis was true that that was the single biggest thing, as some
analysts are saying, like if that was the single biggest factor of the cycle, then in
theory, you should see that more centralized altcoins that have a clear quantum roadmap
because they're centralized, they can do that, or ones that are already semi-quantum resilient,
they should be getting a very large bid, right?
If that was like the key reason, then you should see pretty big differentiation between
the most decentralized one that has a pretty tough time getting quantum resilient, which is Bitcoin,
and tight block space, which of course limits quantum resilient signature sizes. And there's
all sorts of complexities if we ever want to make this quantum resilient versus ones that are in a
better position because of their centralization and other factors become more quantum resilient.
We haven't really seen that performance gap. Now, on the other side, where I give that some credit
is that I have it on good authority
from very high-level institutions
that that was a factor in some buying decisions
by large pools of capital,
which is any institution comes in,
they say, okay, there's a bear case,
a base case, and a bull case
for what Bitcoin can do.
And on the bear case, they have catalysts,
like what if the US bans it?
What if quantum breaks it?
You know, they have all the FUD.
Then on the bull case,
they have what if, you know,
sovereign or whatever, base case,
it is what it is.
Now, if they get a little spooked by the quantum side, it kind of fattens their bear case to some extent.
So they would say they might have put in 5%, they put in 3%.
They might have had a price target averaging 200K.
And they say, well, because of this left tail risk that we have total quantifying, we're going to bring that down to 150K.
um and so for example one major major institution said that basically you know people went from like
five percent of institutions were asking about quantum risk to 30 percent uh and that was given
to me before the peak uh so i would guess that that number for them probably got to 40 or 50
percent so i do think that that was a non-trivial variable in uh pretty we call it kind of smart
capital that would actually, you know, knows how to ask these things. But I don't think that was
like the factor. I think it was just a factor among many. Just part of that overall kind of
decision weight, you know, weighting that they're doing and trying to figure out, okay, what is this
actually, what makes sense for us at this moment? Yes. Yeah. Basically, I think whether or not the
technical risk is real in any sort of timeline that matters, I would say the perception of that
risk was a non-trivial variable. Yeah. That makes sense. And okay, so smart money aside,
in terms of dumb money, you know, us retail, what do you think that it takes to move the needle in
terms of really driving up the number of retail investors, participants, whatever you'd like to
call them, into holding Bitcoin? Is this just somewhat of a function of education, time, and
it's kind of a slow and steady grind? Or do you think that there are more, you know, there are
potential geopolitical catalysts out there even that could drive that or push that adoption forward?
Because I think you're exactly right that we didn't really see this massive retail interest
this past, you know, this past couple of years. It just hasn't been there. You can feel that it's
different, right? Yeah. And I think, I think people are very, I think people like, instead of,
they often like they'll be against a government for example when the opposition's in charge but
then in favor of the same government when their party's in charge and rather than just kind of
saying like there's a lot of variables that can happen where i want to self-custody my own money
um and whether it's u.s whether it's multiple places in europe and elsewhere there is actually
like we have in kind of our bitcoin bubble a little bit more natural skepticism toward
kind of structures of authority
and the ways that they go corrupt
and we're kind of in the rabbit hole.
The average person is actually pretty comfortable often,
especially in developed markets,
with their legal standing
and their kind of the security of their assets that they have.
And so I think,
like, analyzing to people
or getting people to understand why,
like, gold bugs face this for decades,
why you might want to hold your own hard monies and not just either put an ETF or not just not own it entirely and just be entirely in stocks and bonds in your house.
That was like always like a marketing issue, essentially.
And now the Bitcoin is, you know, it's got many advantages, but it's still the same kind of fundamental marketing problem,
which is there's like a certain percentage of people that are kind of just naturally
kind of libertarian adjacent or trusting of authority minimized or whatever the the
venn diagrams of people in this field are um there's like a people that are naturally proposed
and it's like how do you expand that uh that pocket because if you're just going on price
you know when bitcoin was a 10 billion dollar asset or 100 billion dollar asset it could go
up dramatically. But when it's a trillion dollar asset, it's rarely going to be the fastest horse.
I mean, we've seen that, you know, it's like something as big as silver can move quite
substantially. But even that in percentage terms didn't move like Nvidia stock did,
for example. I mean, you know, I've been holding silver since 16 and ounce. It was nice to see it
touch, you know, 120. It's a crazy move, but it's still smaller than, say, the percentage move that
Bitcoin did from 2020 to 2021. It's a smaller move than some of these RAM stocks or GPU stocks.
So the bigger an asset gets, it's less likely to be the absolute best returner in percentage terms.
It's more about risk adjusted returns. And then in Bitcoin's case, unlike a stock,
it's more about what its unique attributes can give you. And because we also kind of live in an
era of financial nihilism um fastest horse often means what can i what's the best thing i can dabble
in in six months which is kind of like that temptation of altcoins you know some little
micro thing can move and people think they can out trade the pros and they almost certainly can't
but that's kind of the temptation it's like well i'll just yolo in it's kind of lotto type gambling
rather than having a mindset of i want to own the one with the best security the best network effect
the best liquidity, that has the best shot at 5, 10, 15-year structural growth, that also has
these self-custodial properties, unlike stocks that can also exhibit similar characteristics.
And it's a challenging marketing thing overall. I think I might have lost track of your initial
question, but that's a lot of ramblings about... No, no, no, that's fair. And it actually kind
of brings up another one. Because you mentioned, yeah, okay, people have said for a while that
Bitcoin's going to sort of have these diminishing returns.
It's not going to make those multi-X moves in a short time frame.
But then we saw something like silver, like gold even, making massive, you know, adding trillions and trillions to the market cap in a very short period of time.
Do you, I guess, what's your take on that from the perspective of, okay, Bitcoin's not going to move like something that has a market cap of 10 billion, you know, could potentially move, you know, obviously.
but even with it at you know um you know trying to get back to a two trillion dollar market cap
might i don't know how long it's going to take does it still have that potential to let's say
melt faces to use the uh to use the the degen jargon like is there still just given what we've
seen in silver given what we've seen in gold does it still have that ability to make some of those
outsized moves or do you view it still as more of like will returns like here on out still be
diminishing but you know what's i guess what's your read on that from kind of the longer term
perspective like we look out 20 years i think it can absolutely move like silver has moved um you
know gold gold went from it depends on when you measure it from but in a fairly short period of
time gold went from 2k to 5k right so i mean that's a that's a you know that's a pretty big
gain right but it's not like a you know it's not like a nvidia stock going up 10x or more gain or
20x or 30x more gain it's a sizable gain for such a you know multi multi tens of trillion dollar
asset. Silver had a bigger percent gain because, you know, it's more starting from like a trillion
dollar asset estimated. We'd actually, obviously, we can't really audit silver, but we have estimates
for it. It's obviously quite a big market. That moved pretty substantially, but it wasn't quite
a 10x, at least this particular kind of multi-year period. And I think Bitcoin can move like that.
And I think that if Bitcoin is going to be successful in that kind of 20 plus year period
you mentioned i do think that it'll eventually have a cycle it's bigger than the prior cycle
uh meaning that there will be a time where that diminishing returns would have to kind of be
broken like that's i think bitcoin goes through narratives uh and i think it has to break a
couple things i think one has to break the four-year cycle narrative eventually uh because
as we talked about from og selling that is by far the bigger impact than mining rewards getting cut
in half every roughly four years.
That's just because the, I mean, in the early days, that was obviously a giant factor because
the percent inflation was huge.
And now it's already tiny.
It's already smaller annual supply growth than gold.
And so when OGs can sell five or 10% of all coins in a year, that's a much bigger variable
than what happens with supply.
So the four-year cycle doesn't really have a reason to exist anymore other than some
degree of kind of self-prophecy. And just because it's always been kind of correlated with other
cycles, like liquidity cycles and things like that. And so I think it has to break the four-year
cycle narrative eventually. And I think it has to break the diminishing return narrative. And that
could be, I mean, I think part of the thing you asked before that didn't answer was about catalysts,
like big geopolitical things. You know, a failure of a major currency block, I think,
would be a catalyst or just a massive campaign of asset seizing without charging people with
crimes or things like that can wake people up. You know, I think, or like just a cluster of those
happening over time. I think those are kind of external catalysts that do a lot of marketing
for stuff that, you know, Bitcoiners and gold enthusiasts have been marketing for
years or decades of the kind of the importance of self-custodial assets that are liquid.
Do you think regarding cycles, and I'm glad you brought that up because I specifically wanted to ask about that. Do you think we've already started to break that narrative? Has that four-year cycle narrative already been disproven to a certain extent?
was it you know yeah we it obviously has had less of an impact over time as a function of the block
reward having but did it ever exist in a meaningful way or was it always also just driven by these
larger liquidity cycles these these cycles that are you know like basically super ordinate to the
bitcoin having cycle and it just so happened to kind of line up pretty well with the having cycle
where it sort of tricked us into thinking yes this is the having cycle that matters when in reality
there were these other factors that were really the drivers i think in the first two to three
halvings it was pretty meaningful impact uh just the the number of new coins that uh you know that
that changes so we have far fewer new coins coming to market because when the market gets kind of an
equilibrium there's like buyers coming in there's sellers getting out there's there's new coins
coming in it kind of reaches an equilibrium and then when you just reduce the number of new coins
coming in, and that's still a pretty substantial number, then that kind of shakes it up in the
bowl's favor. And then once you get price momentum, you get others, you know, all the marketing happens,
all the, you know, everybody starts talking about it, a whole marketing wave happens, people get in,
creates people that heard about it for the first time. So I think that was real for the first two
or three cycles. As that halving becomes a much smaller percentage of new supply impact,
I think it's it's there's a little bit of that like a self-fulfilling narrative where people trade around past price action.
And then there's and then I do think that liquidity started taking over as not not the absolute variable that matters, but one of the more important ones that was correlated with.
I mean, liquidity is like why everything went down in March 2020.
And because the unit of account itself was temporarily hardening because of a liquidity shortage.
and that's an extreme event,
but then there's multiple kind of more moderate events.
And I think going forward,
I think just fundamentally,
there's really no defense
for the four-year cycle going forward
just because the numbers for the halving
are way smaller than other factors.
But I would say that the four-year enthusiasts,
they're still winning
as long as the price actually keeps dusting them.
I mean, the balls in their court,
if we peaked in Q4 and it takes us a while to reclaim it.
So price action-wise, they still got it,
even though it doesn't really make sense.
The numbers that I'm really looking at are 58K.
I want that win for the 58K gang.
I want to see the memetic perfection achieved there.
They've gotten pretty darn close right now.
I guess it would be the ultimate bait and switch
if we just didn't quite hit 58K.
But let's see.
They've been pretty right about 58K for a while.
I did a meme about that.
I was like, because that day we hit 60, I was like, that's like actually the perfect pain spot because you got as low as you wanted to make everyone sad.
We didn't quite hit 58K for the memes either.
So, yeah, that 59 or 60K range is actually like the pain point.
It's depriving us of all the memes that could have been.
It's, you know, Schrodinger's meme, I guess.
Yeah.
I want to zoom out a little bit, too, and talk about trains and whether or not they stop.
um there's always a lot going on in the world there's always a lot going on in the u.s
one thing people have been focusing on is whether or not trump will be able to get uh you know
when his new presumably more dovish uh fed chair gets installed what that's going to mean for
markets and i'm just wondering how much you're looking at this paying attention to it if you
think especially going into a midterm year as we are that we're going to see sort of a a push for
more dovish policies for more liquidity getting in there to juice the economy to pump everyone's
bags including trump is is that something that you are kind of uh looking at as a primary factor
or is it just one of those things where it's like hey look we know long term that nothing stops this
train and that you know the fed and the treasury they have certain things that we know that they
need to do. And really, in the short term, there's not going to be that much of a difference,
you know, regardless of who's installed as the head of the banker cabal.
So long term, nothing stops his train near term. The interesting thing about the new chairman
proposal is he's dovish on interest rates, but he's historically hawkish on balance sheet.
So he's less in favor of, say, Chairman Powell's current balance sheet expansion plan,
which is actually fairly mild compared to prior balance sheet expansions.
um i i wrote about this in my february newsletter uh kind of analyzing the levers that the new
chairman could pull there's a couple things to keep in mind one is he's only even though he would
be the chairman he's only one of 12 members that gets to vote on what happens with with policy
uh so the fact that he can organize the discussions that he's got the biggest microphone matters it is
a really big factor but he's not a he's not like the fed dictator uh so um it's not like a wholesale
say I'll snap your fingers change in Fed policy just because we rotate chairmen's is, I think,
the first thing to keep in mind. The second factor, I think that most of his comments about
balance sheet reduction are not going to come to fruition. In that piece I talked about, there's a
couple of levers you can pull that are actually pretty liquidity neutral. So the reason they
switch from quantitative tightening to balance sheet expansion is because they kind of hit the
liquidity floor unless they pull levers that move liquidity around So for example if they change regulation to let banks hold more treasuries without running into a foul of various capital or liquidity requirements
then they basically just offload some of their treasuries to commercial banks.
Likewise, if the Fed, if the treasury were to term out its debt a little longer,
they could reduce the size of their cash balance, which lets the Fed reduce their balance sheet a
little bit without sacrificing liquidity. So there's a couple of levers they could pull.
I don't think they're going to pull them much at all, especially with just the number of people involved in that decision-making process.
And it's kind of like picking pennies up in front of a steamroller.
So I lean toward that because of him, they're going to be a little more dovish on interest rates than they might have otherwise been.
They might be a little bit more hawkish on balance sheet than they otherwise would have been, meaning that they – not that I think that they'll shrink it, especially not materially, but they might grow it a little bit slower than Powell would have.
which I think already is actually kind of slow.
I keep calling it the gradual print,
which is that because banks are already pretty flush with liquidity,
I think that Fed balance sheet expansion going forward
is going to be kind of modest in terms of percent gains.
I mean, the numbers are big just because the nominal system is so huge now.
So it's like, you know, what's a few hundred billion between friends?
But it's not like that kind of multi-trillion giga stimulus
unless something huge happens,
which China wakes up one day
and decides to sell all its treasuries
or Japan starts rapidly selling treasuries
or war breaks,
things like that that are just,
they happen.
But as a base case,
I think we enter gradual balance sheet expansion,
more dovish interest rate policy,
and that lower interest rate
is generally good for other currencies.
It's generally good for kind of neutral assets,
whether it's gold, Bitcoin, and so forth.
and then the question is
can lower interest rates
result in more bank lending
which creates broad money
around the margins
I think it can
but I think it's a
it's a pretty slow effort
overall
so I generally lean
I would say that
I think they're gonna be
mildly dovish
but maybe not hyper dovish
like I don't think
they're just gonna
rapidly cut interest rates
and just turn around
to like rapid balance
expansion
this calendar year
okay okay i mean i think that that's that's fair it's uh it may not be quite as many fireworks as
people are expecting i want to ask too just about how obviously okay got these various cycles that
uh ebb and flow and everything uh does ai how does this general move toward like really
fast advancements now in ai and robotics and the implications of that does that at all you know
how are you factoring that into kind of your core theses as you look at markets, as you look at their
evolution, as you look at the potential for Bitcoin or for gold or for other things to really be,
to move more to the forefront of people's minds? I mean, does, do the advances that we're seeing
in sort of the deflationary or hyper deflationary nature of things like AI and robotics, do those
sort of fundamentally change the calculus in any way in that, okay, does this sort of, does this
basically force them to potentially like print more to deal with this hype what will be like a
from a productivity standpoint extremely deflationary or is this something that also like
how much of an impact does it make i guess in like the five-year horizon versus like the 10-year
20-year horizon if that does that make sense i'm i'm trying to understand how much does this change
the way you look at things from a time before these were really kind of forefront uh forefront
concerns yeah good question overall i think it's a it's a productivity boosting disinflationary
force uh but only on some segments not others um basically and there's kind of multiple parts here
so that the fiat system as as it's structured globally has to nominally grow um it's designed
it's like a shark that can't stop swimming unless it ironically drowns which um uh probably some
comments but like not all sharks have that problem but there are a lot of sharks that have that
problem. And the fiat system is kind of like that. It goes back fundamentally to when they make a loan
that directly increases broad money supply, when they make a loan on fractional reserve, I should
say. And they don't create the interest that ultimately that loan will accrue, which ends up
getting paid with later loans. So it's like it always has to expand because it's so levered.
You know, it can contract for short periods of time, but it can't just keep contracting the way
it's designed. It would totally implode in a disorganized way. So it always nominally grows.
And then there's a long-term calculation you could think of, which is there's money supply growth,
and then there's average productivity growth, which is kind of hard to measure. But for example,
if you have average 7% money supply growth over a multi-decade period, and you have average 4%
productivity growth, meaning we're 4% better at making a lot of things per year, then the average
price gains end up being something like 3% per year because money supply is growing up faster
than we're getting more efficient at making things. And then the added factor is that's not even.
So for example, the harder kind of scarcity of the asset, the less good we are at making more of it.
So kind of over the past 30 years, the spectrum is, you know, Bitcoin, obviously, it's got a set
clock pretty much regardless of what's going on. Fine art, as long as like tastes don't change,
like the really Lindy like art,
like they're not making any more Picassos, for example.
They're not making any more Da Vinci's.
And so that's also benefiting from money supply growth
because we're not more efficient making those.
Money supply grows up.
So the more dollars chasing kind of finite art.
Then you have waterfront property.
You know, we're not radically better at making it.
To the extent that you want to build an island like Dubai,
it's very expensive to do so.
So it actually takes a ton of, you know,
we have limited coastline and it's really expensive to make more coastline.
So waterfront property, fairly scarce, but of course you have maintenance,
you have insurance, you have taxes, all the, all these things, but it's,
it's a, it's a fairly scarce asset class. Um, then you get into gold,
which is, you know, over the course of like a hundred years, uh,
it's averaged about 1.5% estimated supply growth per year.
Even in the seventies, when like gold went up massively, the,
the percent supply growth didn't change a ton. Uh,
it's very hard to just radically get better unless we have like a crazy
breakthrough at getting more gold out of the ground and it just a radically
different way. So again,
more dollars chasing only a slowing like amount of gold stack.
But then when you get into like oil, you know, we do get, you know,
all of our like imaging technologies and all our stuff,
we do get better at finding it not radically better,
but we do get moderately better at finding it.
But then you get like the long tail of like anything in the past 30,
40, 50 years if we could automate. So we already had a big, you know, before AI, it was this
automation, just taking a lot of things that used to be very manual construction things and having
just robots do 80% of it. That was a huge boom for productivity. And then also telecommunications
let us globalize. You know, it's not an accident that that happened around when it did, because
as the world gets to talk to each other more and is not at war more, it's easy to say, okay,
well, we'll put workers in this other cheap country. So between automation and offshoring,
that was a huge kind of deflationary force for manufacturing goods. And of course, Moore's law
is an exponentially deflationary force for electronics, at least until it runs into like
physical limits, which actually is kind of getting close to and you have to kind of scale in other
ways. So those were like the big, that's kind of been the longer term thing. Now what AI does,
AI is kind of like that blue collar automation for a lot of white collar labor, which should be quite a disinflationary productivity boom, at least in the things it impacts.
So it's not like a miracle cure for everything, but it takes a lot of iterative tasks and lets one person oversee a bunch of bots doing it versus just a bunch of people that have to spend all day doing it.
And that, so like one accountant can potentially do the work of five accounts and one editor can potentially do the work of 10 editors and so forth.
We'll see. I mean, it depends how quickly it gets good, you know, how quickly people adapt.
It actually takes time for companies to kind of change their processes around or if they refuse to change their processes, they slowly get outcompeted by ones that have.
So it should be a disinflationary force
on that white collar labor,
but we still have that spectrum
where the more energy intensive things
or just inherently scarce things,
those things kind of accumulate
when you have, you know,
the nominal system keeps growing.
Some things get exponentially cheaper
because they're not inherently scarce.
And then the scarce assets
benefit from that difference.
That's where the kind of
the value accrual shows up.
And another factor is
there are multiple periods in time where there's like a productivity boom.
So what I mentioned before, you have money supply growth, you have productivity,
and there's periods of time where you get like an unusually large amount of productivity.
So for example, the United States in the late 1800s, you know, that was like electrification.
That was like automobiles.
You had unlimited land, basically.
And so that combination of just so much lack of scarcity and so much technological growth,
you know railroads and and you know discovering hydrocarbons and using them at scale for the first
time you know like outside of coal so using oil for the first time at scale those were all massive
productivity booms um or like japan uh after world war ii uh it's just like this crazy amount of
organization happened and they were super productive um or the whole 90s 2000s and 2010s
because that was kind of this age of globalization.
So you have, in those kind of periods of productivity growth,
you have a bigger disconnect than normal
between money supply growth and average prices
because we've got a bigger than normal
kind of window that opened up
that makes us radically better
at making some meaningful percentage of things.
And I think AI is like one of those
and it happens to be for services,
like white collar services, especially.
there's a couple directions i want to take with that too but perhaps before i do i do want to ask
you do you think where we're at right now obviously you look at like the valuations and the funding
rounds they're happening with these companies and it's just like it's mind-boggling amounts of money
is there any danger of a potential short-term bubble like obviously we had the internet had
the dot-com bubble right that didn't mean the internet wasn't valuable or the internet wasn't
done it just meant there was a uh let's say an initial misapplicate or allocation or over
allocation of capital, kind of getting out over the skis a little bit. And then obviously the
internet today has grown probably more than people could have imagined even at that time.
Do you think we see something similar with AI where we do sort of get almost this, you know,
dot-com AI moment, but then, okay, things normalize a little bit. They steady out,
valuations come back to earth a little bit and things proceed from there on a more,
let's say, measured trajectory. Or do you think this is like, these valuations are actually
totally fair. And we're not going to have any sort of dot-com moment in the AI industry specifically.
I mean, I don't know if it'll be as big as the dot-com bubble. The crazy thing about the dot-com
bubble is like even non-tech stocks, like Coca-Cola was trading at 50 times earnings
and Walmart was trading at 50 times earnings. And those stocks went on to like go sideways
the next like 15 years, even because their earnings had to like double just to kind of
catch up with their valuations. So the problem with the dot-com bubble is you would like even
non-tech stocks were trading at high valuations.
Anything that was perceived as benefiting from globalization
or was blue-chip.
You almost never have a major new technology
that doesn't have bubbles associated with it.
The build-out of the railroads had bubbles.
The build-out of radio had bubbles.
The build-out of the internet had bubbles.
Telecom had bubbles.
So the exception would be
if somehow AI doesn't have a bubble.
So I think my base case is we will have local bubbles.
I've been slow to call tops.
I think it bears jump on
and just as soon as something does well,
like it's a bubble.
Usually bubbles go longer than the bears think.
And so my approach,
because I do invest in stocks as well,
like I was NVIDIA,
it got out when it got euphoric,
you know goes down sometimes i get in sometimes i don't get in in time so i have to go to like
amd instead you know but it's like i tend to be buyers of the idea whenever it goes down a ton
they say okay that was the bubble i'm like i don't think that was the bubble yet i think we go further
but i am careful when it's everything's kind of screaming vertical and uh so i'm more in that
moderate phase right now um like i think probably ram stocks go higher um like i think overall ram
demand will certainly go higher and we'll see what happens with the share prices but um i think it
just goes further than people think and then becomes a bubble um and then just like the build
out of the internet then becomes real over time it kind of it catches up with the bubble but
that doesn't mean there's like broken you know there's broken dreams in the in the meantime
um and in in general it's like the build out like the the entities that like laid the fiber
optics cables that like made the internet what it is they went bankrupt um and the you know the
people that like dug the english channel they went bankrupt and like the like these things were super
valuable for like the people that inherited from the bankruptcy and like from the users that like
benefited from that having been done so there'll probably be things like that where like you know
people build a lot of it it's super expensive um but yeah i think it's it's i would be on the
look out for euphoric valuations and the idea that things can't go down, I would fade those.
But then when things do have pullbacks, it's like they're actually interesting. I mean,
I do think that this probably lasts a while. How do you factor in like the propagation of
open sourcing a lot of these models to that equation? Because that's something that didn't,
if we talk about prior bubbles with different industries, there hasn't really been maybe that
same factor of like just the speed at which once the genie is out of the bottle when it comes to
open source it's like it's beautiful like and that's somewhat of china's strategy almost to
destabilize the western side of things right is to open source a lot of this stuff we've seen a lot
of open source uh models i mean there's a huge uh huge interest in you know claude bot right now
open claw all of this but there's there's so many models that have been open sourced right now
does that fundamentally sort of add a different calculus where the the moat that these larger
first entrance would otherwise have is increasingly diminished and becomes that head start that they
had and the capital they're able to raise becomes sort of less effective than it would otherwise be
in absence of open source. I think partially, but I think even more broadly, I think your point on
moats is the main one, which is I think that this is inherently a less moaty space than some other
major investment cycles. I think the 2010s, like the reason the mag seven stocks and previously
they were called the FAANG stocks. The reason they got so big, they had kind of the sweet spot of
a lot of them had network effect products, you know, like social media networks and things like
that. And like ecosystems that people get locked into, like, you know, Microsoft or Apple,
they have these network effects. And so, you know, it doesn't take a ton of capex,
at least relative to revenues, to keep growing. They're insanely profitable. And then they can
plow all their profits back into buybacks, which pumps the stock up. And then the stocks are so
high, they can issue shares to employees and pay them. It's really easy to attract top talent.
And you get this crazy flywheel where a lot of the value, trillions upon trillions,
accumulates at the top. The user does get value. But for example, in social media, it's like,
okay, the corporation gets your data. You get to talk to your friends, but you also get depression
because you're online all the time. And it's the actual biggest winners were really the major
corporations running these things. I think AI does not have that. It's much weaker moats.
They don't really benefit from economies of scale and network effects in the same way
that those kind of internet platforms and ecosystems did. The switching ability,
when one model is just not doing it for you and you want to go to another model,
obviously some stickiness of data can be a factor, but if it's a big enough difference,
people will go over.
And so they're in a big CapEx arms race.
It's, you know, like OpenAI,
they made one of the most popular apps ever
and they don't really see a path to profitability
from now until 2030.
And even the hyperscalers,
like those that are, you know,
the Microsofts of the world
and those that are kind of operating
the infrastructure behind all this thing,
they're the ones benefiting.
But now to keep up,
they have to plow all their free cashflow
or a lot of their free cashflow
into just more and more hardware, basically.
And kind of like how the biggest winners
from the blue-collar automation,
like the manufacturing automation,
obviously the Intels and stuff of the world,
they did well.
But it's really like all these corporations
are the ones that benefited.
The ones like the Nikes of the world
could benefit from automation and offshoring
because they could cut their costs
and still sell expensive branded sneakers.
and I think that the biggest winners actually are individuals and companies that are using AI
to do things more productively so they're finding ways to cut costs or bring things to market they
wouldn't before so I think we have this will have less top level accrual and the good news is I
think there'll be more spread out accrual of the advantages of AI with the really hard part that it's
not even, which is that those that are early to adopt it are disproportionate winners.
And those who get disrupted by it and don't adjust or can't adjust, they're the biggest losers, I think.
Following up on that, just something I've been thinking about and memed about a little bit recently,
because it's the best way to share that information.
This idea that, OK, AI is coming for your computer job, basically.
like hey if you're working in front of a computer you're doing any sort of you know uh thought work
basically like look you're you're getting replaced i can't help but think okay where is there actually
out you know we okay that's the private sector but in the public sector we have actually a much
higher concentration of probably i don't want to say useless bureaucrats but useless bureaucrats
like there is a huge amount of blood the governments have never been bigger more more expansive
and more i mean they're just you know they're not very efficient right there's a lot of bloat there
that could very easily be cut automated away without uh you know with probably a very perceptible
improvement actually also a reduction you know might actually be able to balance a budget call
it crazy you know knock on wood i'll you know won't won't hold my breath but how do you think
about that because there's the other part of it that obviously public sector unions which
collectively bargain against the taxpayer and we can that's a different topic but how do you think
about the potential for AI to actually radically shrink government? Is that something that you think
could happen in the relative near term? Or do you think there's going to be so much pushback on it,
especially from the public sector, from these unions that collectively bargain against the
taxpayer, that it's going to perhaps be a lot slower to be affected than the private sector is
just because the private sector has a profit motive. You know, they have to be productive
or they will die. The government doesn't, or it would have already died. I would answer in two
parts, headcount versus budget.
I think those are two very different answers.
I think in terms of headcount, it can impact things quickly.
Not that I think you'll see mass firings, but I think the combination of what
we've seen will keep happening, which is you give people like incentives to leave.
You know like hey if you leave now you get a more generous than average severance package And that worked in this past year combined with attrition Like you just kind of say well we don really need that many new people unless you like an AI specialist
or like, you know, we can limit our new buying,
our new hiring, and then let people retire
while also offering people to get out.
So I think it can meaningfully impact headcount
already is pretty quickly.
The part, but the, and this is,
it was the analysis that Sam Callahan and I did on Doge
back in like late 2024 we published it in january 2025 we we called ahead of time why doge would be
so uh ineffective at cutting uh spending uh and like literally on the macro chart it's not you
can't even identify where doge started or ended it's just like two it's like straight line that's
like slightly bigger than the straight line of before in terms of like federal government
expenditures and the reason for that is the biggest like dollar amounts flowing around are
not high headcount things.
The biggest, like Social Security and Medicare, they are like the number of people that the
health and human services employees is actually pretty low in the grand scheme of the federal
government, even though the dollar amounts, it's all these transfer payments and things
like that.
So that's, you could cut headcount all you want.
It's a blip.
The other, the only thing that's like both big in terms of headcount and numbers is the
Department of Defense.
which is also the defense against cutting that is all the bureaucrats, all the politicians in all the jurisdiction,
they say, well, sure, I want to cut spending, but I don't want you to stop making tanks of this type because that's in my district.
Right. And you have 10,000 of those. Right. So everyone defends their own little turf.
And then the last part, I don't have the numbers offhand, but it's like, OK, that last 15 percent,
that's like where almost all the non-military federal employees are.
that's all like your department of transportation or department of thing you never heard of or
department of whatever and it's like a 15 of the budget but like most of the headcount is like in
those places and it's like you could you could cut headcount in half and you know especially when you
count their their property the other things they do you might cut you know a quarter or a third of
their spending so you're cutting a quarter or a third of the 15 of the pie chart so i would say
there's two different answers. I think AI can substantially reduce headcount, but I think that
voters and politicians, they like transfer payments and they like defending stuff in their
own districts. And that's the part that AI runs into kind of a political wall. And then of course,
is the other thing of just one of the biggest costs, especially in the US is what we eat and
our health because, you know, like Japan can spend way less on healthcare per capita despite
living older than we can because of one is how our system is constructed and then two because of
what we eat and we have high levels of, you know, the types of things that eat up a lot of the
healthcare costs. Yeah, total digression, but did you see the RFK Jr. Kid Rock video?
where they're in Kid Rock's gym, RFK Jr.
I think RFK Jr., did you ever watch Arrested Development
back in the day?
I see, I saw some episodes, yeah.
Yeah, there's the guy Tobias in there.
He's what they call a never nude.
Like he's never naked even around himself.
Like he always at least is wearing jean shorts
and RFK Jr. like just always wearing his jeans
wherever he goes reminded me of that.
Total digression, has nothing to do with what we're talking about.
But there's just, wow, what a strange memetic zeitgeist exists right now.
I think it's a new food pyramid for a change.
I do.
I mean, they literally did South Park.
They did the meme.
They just inverted the food pyramid, which is beautiful.
But it's also like, it's just common sense, right?
It's kind of crazy that we let it go this long.
Yeah.
I don't know.
It's like whole nutrient-dense food.
Who would have thought?
Yeah, it's crazy.
It's not like the sugar lobbies and corn lobbies and all that could have played any part in
influencing that for a very, very long time.
No, certainly not.
um okay so i maybe want to uh like shift gears a little bit slightly here just being conscious of
your time also because uh you just had an announcement that really has nothing to do with
macro or bitcoin uh directly or any of that but you are now going to be a science fiction author
so how much how much do you want to talk about uh sort of the the premise without without giving
anything away. I was honored to have been an early reader of the book. It is fantastic. And I think
it's going to ignite a lot of people's love for sci-fi again. If like me, you took a break from
these things and it just takes one book to kind of get you back into fiction after having so much
time just reading, you know, nonfiction, nonfiction, you can only read so much Austrian economics,
you know, before you need a break. So yeah, I spent, I started writing it in late, well,
kind of autumn 2024. The premise had been in my head for quite a while, but I kind of finally had
time to put, you know, pen to paper, as it were. And it's called The Stolgard Incident. And it's a
near future sci-fi. So cyberpunk, techno thriller, biopunk type of story. Those are the sub-genres
it would be considered as. So it's not a space opera. And it kind of, you know, extrapolates a
lot of things we talked about here you know kind of a future where ai is more prevalent where
robotics are more prevalent uh where uh kind of disinformation is more prevalent you know with
ai generated content it gets harder to differentiate uh outside of your kind of near orbit like what is
real or what is not real so if aliens land in the white house it's easy to be like no that's that's
fake i don't believe that and it's like you know video is not what it used to be in terms of uh
giving us like credible things of what's happening if we didn't see them ourselves.
And so it's in this kind of more detached digital world where it's still in some ways
looks like us.
Like, you know, I tend to be, I tend to fade the most extreme like changes.
Like the world looks a lot different than it did in the seventies, but it still looks
a lot like the seventies, you know, like the same people still often have the same problems.
And even though like the whole internet is like, you know, obviously a new thing, people, the houses and cars and a lot of other factors, actually, they only change slowly.
So I kind of, I use that kind of as I kind of look forward over the next, you know, 50 plus years.
And so a lot of things are different.
A lot of things are the same.
And it kind of explores, let's see, terrorism in a world where it's hard to know what even happened, you know, because things could be fake.
it explores
an area that we're not getting into a lot
now like now the focus is on
AI but one of the focuses is
on gene editing
and kind of the whole rabbit hole
you know that can be opened up
ethics wise and
otherwise from that avenue
so it's
dark it's violent but it's
it's also very human I think
it is
both dark and violent but human I can
attest to that it was it was a really enjoyable read and i think for people like myself i've talked
with you about this before but i got very much into the path of i used to read a ton of fiction
whether it be sci-fi fantasy whatever it was for most of my life kind of stopped doing that especially
you know uh leading up to starting to go down the bitcoin rabbit hole and then going basically
down like i need to read everything i can about you know money and economics and and all these
things and then it was devon erickson's book which we talked about a little bit just off air
theft of fire that kind of reignited that love for sci-fi where i remembered oh wait you can learn
so much from fiction you don't have to read non-fiction to learn something like fiction is
often the best teacher and so i'm wondering how how did you think about this in terms of like
setting the stage for the future or you know is there uh without giving too much away is there
me you want people to come out of this experience of reading the stoll guard instant with like is
there is there a feeling or a an idea and emotion that you hope that people will have after they
read the book yeah it's a good question and i think um for the first part on kind of the importance
of reading or kind of the cycles we can go through in terms of being interested in reading one of the
advantages of the book still has is that anything that that gets made into a show or movie they tend
to be kind of things that they expect to do well in the mainstream right so it's it's it's kind of
inherently like mid-curve in a way that that's kind of over you know it's obviously there's very
sophisticated movies there's but it's like there's a certain expectation there's a lot of people
involved in it and they need to make a decent amount of money for it to make sense um and the
advantage of a book is that uh you can you can make something that is you know like a little bit
more niche or a little bit more you know complex you could say like you know often a book compared
to the adaptation that gets turned into a two-hour movie, it often has to reduce the
complexity of that work.
And especially the inner feelings of the characters, for example.
That's something that a book is kind of uniquely good at.
And so I think that's still, even in the digital world, I still think books are super valuable
in all of their forms.
So physical books, e-books, audio books, I think those are all kind of still very valuable
things.
I think one of the main themes in the book is that as everything changes, individual choices still matter.
So kind of one of the big questions in the book is, you know, in a world of bureaucracy and AI and virtual reality and, you know, technology in general, like, does an individual matter?
Do human decisions matter?
and kind of one of the themes is that human relationships are one of the things that you
can kind of grab onto when everything else feels uncertain or too big or so far removed from
yourself so there's kind of a kind of a virtuous aspect that that comes through i think and i think
that i think you know i a lot of the world just kind of tends trends toward nihilism lately you
People are like, okay, so we've had all these financial crises.
Our money's broken.
AI is going to take all of our jobs.
Our leaders lie to us and go to war.
Half of them are apparently pedophiles and vampires, whatever's going on there.
We live in a world where it can be quantified.
The percentage of people that used to say, I trust Congress.
If you're international, I trust parliament or whatever.
I trust, you know, the entities in charge. I trust corporations. I trust the media. That is all, you know, deteriorated for decades. Our institutions have deteriorated. Things that we built, things that like our grandfathers and great grandfathers built, you know, in a prior cycle are just kind of unfit for the modern time. They've kind of had institutional rot. They've been captured by bad incentives. It's kind of the later stages of them.
um and so and you know then people turn to just like gambling you know in its myriad forms um
and just kind of like ethical nihilism in a way or machiavellianism and kind of the the book is in
that kind of setting where it's not dystopian it's not some like horribly dystopian world it's
kind of just like a a further out version of our world there's there's good and bad in that world
and and there are people trying to do the right thing and a lot of people doing the wrong thing
But it kind of says like in that in that world, it's like people kind of pushing back against the tide of nihilism and saying, well, maybe one person, you know, caring can can matter.
Yeah. And again, I enjoyed the heck out of reading it.
I can we can also probably disclose on the audio book side is now an appropriate time to do that.
So Carl and I are very honored to be narrating your audio book for the Stolgardt instant.
It is in the works right now.
We're super stoked about it.
I'm glad that it's not just me doing it or just any single male narrator,
because there's a huge cast of characters also.
It's a massive cast of characters.
There's a lot of complexity to it.
I very much enjoy also, again, I don't want to give too much away here,
but I enjoy the way that things hop around, let's just say.
I know some people may not enjoy that particular style.
I've always found that's one of the best ways to tell a story, you know, is to sort of give these different perspectives from sort of different times.
But again, don't want to get too much into that.
Just want to say I really love that about the book because it makes everything come together really well.
There are some twists and turns in there.
When can people actually get their hands on the physical copy of this?
So we expect publication by the second half of March.
The exact date is not known yet.
We're still doing kind of production tests.
but it looks like late March it'll be available.
And the cool thing about audiobooks is,
I mean, that's a rapidly growing market.
And this goes back to technology and productivity.
So it used to be that when people bought audiobooks,
it'd be on like literally like a bunch of CDs
or a bunch of tape.
Well, before then it was like a bunch of cassettes.
So audiobooks were very expensive.
And so, for example, like libraries would buy them
and people would rent them out
because it'd be like only like fairly wealthy people
could just regularly buy and own multiple audiobooks. And then as, you know, as we all
got smartphones and as we, you know, it just made the distribution of audiobooks way more efficient.
And so rather, they used to be kind of like an afterthought that you only, only like super
popular books could have. And now it's becoming more standard. But then as it becomes a larger
percentage, I think there's, it's good that there's more quality being focused on them.
there are some that are doing like full cast productions which have their own pros and cons
and one of the things i really like about what we're putting together is that you know with both
you and carla involved uh we've got a bigger range of voices than is normally available
um and it's kind of full like dual narration uh so you know basically in any given chapter
and not just one of you reading one chapter one of you reading another chapter it's like actual
both you were involved in basically every chapter,
which I think is, it adds something special.
We're having a lot of fun with it too.
Very honored to be a part of this.
And again, it's just a darn good book.
And one of the things I like, Glenn,
you talked about this idea of, okay,
people often maybe overestimate
how different things will look in the future.
And that's kind of a recurring theme, right?
It's like things change, yes, things change drastically,
but how much does the core of what we recognize
stay the same?
Like you'd recognize, you know, you're in America in the 70s.
You're going to recognize it still as America if you went back in time, right?
You know, the idea being you go forward a little bit in America, like you're still going to recognize it as America.
And I think that's a difficult thing.
Sometimes we want to assume that things are going to change more, either for the better or the worse than they actually do.
But one of the things I loved was just your incorporation, again, won't give too much weight, at a high level of just things like cryptography, of, you know, encryption services, of, you know, cryptographically signing things,
becoming more commonplace little things like that that i think add this realism where if you're on
the cutting edge of those things today you see where they're going and that makes a ton of sense
but for people that maybe aren't it might give them a little bit more pause to think and actually
evaluate what is currently available to them right now was that sort of a in any way a goal with it
or was it just to kind of hey let's let's put these things in there because it makes sense and
that's where i actually think the future is heading it's a little bit of both uh you know i wanted i
I mean, I wanted Bitcoin to show up and I wanted Nostra to show up.
And I had Nostra show up instead of calling it Nostra.
It's like because that's, you know, we don't really refer to like SMTP.
But Nostra-like technology shows up, which is that there's people that have continuous identities that are key-based rather than account-based.
And I also wanted to somewhat explore the idea of kind of edge-level verification, which is in a world that we just talked about.
if you could just make AI videos that are like super convincing all the time and you want to
know if something happened, if like the camera that like, you know, took that video, you know,
cryptographically signs it and then there's a way to verify the supply chain or an organization you
trust that says, OK, these are our cameras and these are signed by, you know, it's not like 100%
foolproof, but there are layers of evidence you can put in that kind of verify that, you know,
at least from the path from there to here,
it could not have been tampered with.
It explores that a little bit.
And for the most part with the technology in the book,
I would try to be realistic where possible.
There are a couple of fantastical things I put in
because they're cool.
But there are other things that I was, you know,
I was like, okay, what is a reasonable extrapolation of this?
What bottlenecks hit first?
Because, you know, I have an engineering background.
I want to try to make things that can be realistic.
I want to make realistic, you know, I'm not committing to like hard science per se, but
it's like, I want to make things realistic where possible.
And then there are things it's like, what ifs?
So like, for example, historically, it's been VR has been very slow to catch on because
it's actually, it's quite complex, you know, putting all the processing power into something
that's like lightweight and wearable is way harder than just having it on your desk, for
example.
And then also anything that's like affecting your senses, there's all these limitations.
and it's like i don't know when we're gonna crack that complexity but i'd like the idea of exploring
how vr would impact people so it's like okay we we assume that some technologies catch on and we
have a environment where vr is more prevalent and what does that do to a society um so yeah
some technologies i try to be pretty um like concise with and say okay this is actually what
i think will happen and other ones it's like well what if this happened and is it reasonable and can
we can make it a reasonable part of this world it's a good blend of that i mean and elements of
it are very much like i would say hard sci-fi in a lot of ways you know there's different like
classifications for how people say like no this is officially hard sci-fi this isn't but ultimately
like it's a great story i encourage people to go out there and to get a copy of it did you you
self-published correct uh yes um and basically when you when you kind of already have a
media arm and you already have like a you know a company entity uh the benefits from traditional
publishing are just weaker um with broken money i got offers uh to traditionally publish it um
but i wanted it i mean i wanted to be a 500 page book so i want to complete control over it
um so we actually just self-published that one uh and this one uh i explored uh potentially doing
traditional publishing when you have a fairly large audience you generally have a better chance
of obviously making that come to happen um but i wanted total control over the project um so yeah
it's it's published by i would say i would describe it as the resources put into it are on par or
higher than your typical traditionally published book in terms of like the the number and quality
of editors uh the the quality of the cover artist uh that worked on it uh any amount of time that
goes into it from all the parties uh involved i mean the the quality for example the audio
production uh this has all been taken as as though it is kind of as high as as anyone does for a book
um while it yeah technically being self-published or you know published by uh my business entity
right and i think it's also it's sort of a different paradigm like you obviously have a
massive following online just like you you as a as a person business entities aside you can very much
move the needle like a huge part of why a lot of people end up doing publishing like aside from
obviously getting it published uh is just hey we want help promoting this thing but like you can
send out a tweet or a post on noster and you'll drive massive amounts of traffic to it and i think
that just that sort of it really puts the uh changes the power dynamics a little bit where
you're able to have more freedom like that this you know this wouldn't have necessarily been
possible or feasible you know even a couple you know decade or two decades ago and certainly it's
It gives you an edge, I think, because you've got that audience.
And especially, I think, coming from, obviously, you have Broken Money.
It was a huge success in many languages.
You're a very well-known person.
And now people get to see sort of this other side, like this sci-fi Lin, which
I just love, can I ask, when you posted about it on Noster,
I forget exactly when,
had you already started writing at that point
when you basically said, hey, should I take the next year
and write a sci-fi book?
Had you already begun writing,
or were you still just in the ideation phase?
I had started dabbling in writing,
but wasn't sure if I was going to be able to stick with it.
The story itself, I mean, the seeds of it go back 15 years or more.
and the the the kind of the final story itself goes back probably about a decade or more um
and so i had most of the story written even like the opening of the first chapter
uh and parts of the climax like for as a as a writing just kind of experiment i wrote chunks
of those maybe eight years ago just like literally a couple pages here and there right so technically
you know first pen to paper was was like a decade ago um but i mean we're talking like one percent
of the book, right? So it's like a, like sections of the opening and ending just to kind of,
cause one, for me, the biggest bottleneck was getting good at fiction prose. Um, cause I already
had kind of an idea for story uh and characters and things like that but actually taking all my nonfiction prose and converting it to fiction prose Uh and I will never up the M despite the AIs coming for it But building my fiction pros took time especially you know
if you try to do everything, you're not really good at anything, right? So it's like I had,
there were many times I thought about writing this and I always just figured I wouldn't be
going to do it until I'm like done with my finance career, right? But in 2024,
um i had more time on average uh my husband was actually he had to spend longer than we often go
back and forth between the u.s and egypt he had to spend extra time in egypt due to like a big like
house construction project um and i had to come back for multiple reasons uh so it's like i'm
living like a monk for a period of time and i'm like you know i looked actually into i was like
should i get like should i lose myself in like a video game or something and i was like i'm not
really feeling it i'm like well you know what maybe it's time to write the book so i started
dabbling in it and i just kind of posted on nostril like hey would you guys you know
should i actually prioritize this and so the first draft was written in about two months
uh but that was that had like i wouldn't be able to do that again because i had the benefit of this
i had 80 of the story in my head for like a decade uh but then the the actually the hard part was then all of 2025 really was revising it Multiple beta readers multiple editors my own just kind of combing through it over and over again kind of like tackling the parts that I when I wrote them I like that good enough
And I'm like, no, no, I want to, how do I like really, this is still like a friction point that I want to make sure is better.
where I still have this hang up and really kind of carving it into at least the best story I can
make. You know, we'll see how people receive it. But it's, you know, I was like, I don't want to
put it out until it's the best thing that I feel like I can do at this time. Speaking of video
games, I've said this to you before, but I think it would make a sweet video game or, you know,
later perhaps either animated or real people series. And I think it has that kind of potential.
I think it's a really unique story.
I haven't read anything quite like it.
And, yeah, I think you figured out the fiction prose, too, clearly,
because it reads very well.
But, yeah, I'm excited for folks to get their hands on it at the end of the day.
I want to be conscious of your time here because we've run a little over,
and I may be having connection issues.
I don't know if it's me or if it's you.
But let me see here.
Do you still have me Yep I here I think this is on my side right now Maybe I just say Lynn by way of wrapping up so I get you out of here just a little bit late
where do you want to send folks to either pre-order, find out more about the book, etc.,
or just where they can find your other work?
People can, if they go to lynnaldon.com, I have a free newsletter.
At or around when the book comes out, I'll have a newsletter also just kind of announcing it.
people will be able to find it.
I'll definitely announce it on Noster and X
when it's available.
So as long as people follow me
one of those two places,
they'll still be making noise about it
once it's available.
Love it.
And I love too that you gave your first
kind of teaser of this book,
actually posting the cover and everything.
You did that on Noster.
So I thought that was excellent.
And it's a great reminder
that if folks want to hear about cool stuff first,
Noster is a great place to do that,
at least from the subset of people
who are using Noster actively right now.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, Lynn, thank you so much.
It is great picking your brain as always.
Excited for people to read the book and then shortly after listen to the audio book as
well.
Really excited for it.
And thank you for sharing your time.
This was a pleasure as always.
Thanks for having me.
Always happy to be here.
And thank you to everybody who joined in the Noster livestream.
I appreciate all of you and all of your zaps.
Thank you, guys.