Pluto, Uranus, Neptune, and Jupiter form exact alignments at 4 degrees for the first time in roughly 6,000 years. Marty came in a skeptic and came out convinced something real is converging — because everything he watches daily is pointing the same direction at the same time.
↓ Jump to the video and timestamps
I'll be straight with you: I am not an astrology guy. My wife is deep into it, my sister is deep into it, our friend Kelly is deep into it, and I have spent years in the comfortable position of the skeptical husband who nods and moves on. But Erin Redwing is not the daily-horoscope-in-the-newspaper version of astrology. She is a former astronomer turned full-time astrologer who has been in Bitcoin long enough to call herself a Bitcoin astrologer without irony, and when we met in Vegas and she started talking about what is converging in July 2026, I decided to actually pay attention.
We deliberately waited months to record this conversation. The reason is simple: what is happening next month astrologically peaks July 15 through 25, and the frame Erin is using to describe it maps, point for point, onto everything I have been watching daily for over a year. The first trillionaire was minted last week, at least on paper. Federal regulators proposed the first GENIUS Act rule set the same day we hit record, extending KYC and AML requirements to stablecoin issuers. Fable 5 got pulled. The K-shaped economy is not a prediction anymore; it is just the economy.
None of that requires believing in anything. The planets are either a useful 6,000-year telescope or they are not, but the things they are supposedly pointing at are real either way.
That is the frame for this conversation. Erin is the guest; the Bitcoin and macro instincts are mine. Where they converge is where this episode lives.
Erin describes astrology as thousands of years of observed cycles, an attempt to understand the timing and patterns of human experience by watching the motion of planetary objects. She came to it through astronomy, as a self-described hardcore materialist atheist, and has spent eight years doing to herself the same skeptical interrogation anyone else would do. She is not asking you to believe it. She is asking you to let it wash over you and take what is useful.
That framing works for me. I am not going to tell you the planets caused anything. What I will tell you is that when Erin describes the historical parallel for this alignment (extreme wealth stratification, digital identity verification tied to transactions, the surveillance apparatus of a new era), she is describing my show notes from the past year.
We met through a mutual friend who told her she had to talk to me because we had so much in common. He was right. We planned the conversation months out, intentionally timing it for the run-up to July, because both of us felt like waiting until after the fact would miss the point entirely.
Most people know sun-sign astrology, the one-year cycle based on your birthday. Erin works with the outer planets, which move on timescales long enough to track civilizational shifts. Pluto takes roughly 250 years to circle the sun. That cycle maps, in her reading, onto Ray Dalio's 250-year empire rise-and-decline framework.
The Uranus cycle is 84 years, close enough to the Fourth Turning's 80-year generational arc that the parallel is hard to dismiss.
In July 2026, all four outer planets (Pluto, Uranus, Neptune, and Jupiter) are forming exact alignments with each other at 4 degrees of their respective signs. Erin, drawing on the work of astrologers S.J. Anderson and Dan Waits, says this configuration has not occurred in roughly 6,000 years.
The last time it did, we got the Varna Necropolis in present-day Bulgaria, dated to approximately 4300 BC and understood by archaeologists as the earliest recorded evidence of a highly wealth-stratified society. Some burial sites were packed with gold ornamentation. Others were not.
Waits also points to the cylinder seal, an artifact from the ancient Near East used as a ledger to verify identity in transactions. Whoever you were, the seal confirmed it. Read that sentence again.
Digital identity verification tied to transactions. Extreme wealth stratification. These are the two themes Erin pulls from 4300 BC. They are also the two themes running through every policy development I have watched in the past twelve months.
When Erin named wealth stratification as the historical parallel, I didn't have to speculate. The first trillionaire was printed last week, on paper, and the number had already come back down by the time this published. The K-shaped economy has been a running theme on this show for over a year. Objectively, the wealth dislocation exists.
The peak of the current alignment is July 15 through 25. Because these are slow-moving planets, the effect is felt throughout July. Eclipse season follows in August, with specific dates of August 12 and August 28.
The day we recorded this episode, federal regulators released the first proposed rule set flowing from the GENIUS Act, extending KYC and AML requirements to stablecoin issuers. Matt Odell and I have been saying for months this was the only place it could go. Stablecoins are centrally controlled. There was never any reason to believe the Bank Secrecy Act framework would not reach them. It has.
The Fable 5 situation has multiple plausible readings. It could be the Department of Defense was angry that Anthropic would not hand over kill-decision authority. It could be that the models were genuinely and trivially jailbreakable in ways that put critical infrastructure at systemic risk. Or, the scenario I find most plausible given everything else happening, it could be a regulatory-moat play: pull the model, get to the table, agree on a licensing regime, and let the incumbents ride it while the barriers go up behind them.
Dario Amodei's blog post, released alongside the Fable 5 news, reads to me as a veiled threat in that direction: governments move too slow, catch up or get left behind.
Erin connects it to Sam Altman's Worldcoin project, which proposed scanning everyone's iris to verify humanity and rewarding them with a one-world currency. That was Altman's crypto project before OpenAI became what it is. He has since pivoted from talking about Universal Basic Income to talking about Universal Base OpenAI stock. The through-line is the same: your place in society is determined by your buy-in to his power structure.
The AI narrative control point is subtler than it first appears. It is not primarily about governments sending people to jail for wrong-think, though that risk is real. It is about regaining control over what counts as truth. The mainstream narrative apparatus has spent the last fifteen years falling apart on the internet.
AI creates a new mechanism to reassemble it. If the models are only permitted to give certain answers, and if those models become the default cognitive infrastructure for most people's work and thinking, then the people who control the model updates control the epistemology. That is the actual end state.
The individual counter-move is the same one we have always had in Bitcoin: run your own node. The sovereign AI equivalent is running open-weight models locally. Kyle Olney, who we published the day before this recording, said alarm bells are going off in the Valley. People who treated open source as a pet project are taking it seriously now that Fable 5's pull made the fragility visible.
Peter Thiel did a four-part lecture series on the Antichrist at UATX in Austin. I attended the first and last of the four. This was over a year ago, so I am working from memory here, not a transcript.
His core argument, as I understood it: most people are focused on Armageddon, the cataclysmic event, the Rapture, the asteroid, the grid failure. Not enough people are focused on the Antichrist. He drew the distinction carefully, trying to define what the Antichrist actually looks like when it emerges rather than what the end of the world looks like. AI was a recurring thread through both lectures I attended.
His prescription was not to retreat from it. There is no putting the genie back in the lamp. The move is to lean in and use the tools in ways that equip you to recognize and resist what he was describing.
Erin's astrological read on the Antichrist question is that a human figurehead is probably the wrong frame for the Age of Aquarius. Aquarius is a sign of decentralization. The Piscean era ran on hierarchical access to power: you needed the priest, who needed the bishop, who needed the Pope. Aquarius flattens that into a mycelial network.
We do not have massive cultural superstars anymore; media is too fragmented. What we do have is infrastructure of thought that spreads through model updates in ways most people do not notice. "That can easily spread all throughout the world and into your mind in ways that you don't even realize," she said. That, to her, is a stronger candidate for the Antichrist archetype than any individual human figure could be in this era.
One detail from the lectures that I found interesting enough to check live on tape: Thiel's argument, as I remember it, was that the Antichrist must be close to 33, a near-direct reflection of Christ at the time of the crucifixion. Zohrán Mamdani, who won the New York City mayoral race last fall, was born October 18, 1991. I looked it up in real time. He was 33 when he won the primary.
Make of that what you will.
The Catholic framing I keep coming back to is this: the aliens are angels and demons. The language changes depending on the mythology you use to make sense of contact with entities beyond ordinary human experience. Maybe someone emerges who claims alien sanction, who has a leader and a program and a plan for righting the wrongs we have done.
Maybe that is the Antichrist. I do not think that is a crazy thing to entertain, and I am not embarrassed to say it.
Erin's astrological read on Bitcoin is specific. She uses the genesis block as the birth chart: January 3, 2009, 18:15 UTC, with the headline "Chancellor on Brink of Second Bailout for Banks" embedded by Satoshi. Bitcoin's natal moon, in her calculation, sits at 4 degrees Aries. Neptune is currently approaching or at that exact degree.
Neptune, in her framework, is about dreaming a new dream. What is possible that we never thought was possible before? What is the idealistic vision, even if it is not yet real? She frames Bitcoin's Aries moon as the fighter spirit of the network, the honey-badger antifragility that refuses to be defeated.
Right now, she argues, that fighter spirit needs to rediscover what it is actually fighting for.
I agree with her. And I have been saying a version of this for months.
Paper bitcoin is not bitcoin. Last summer, when the treasury company narrative was running hot, I was pointing out alongside Parker Lewis that buying shares in a company that holds bitcoin is not the same as holding bitcoin. Instruments like Stretch have been trading below par.
The orange tie crowd has been getting increasingly nervous, and honestly, they should be. When you build a financial Rube Goldberg machine on top of Bitcoin in search of yield, the risk lands somewhere. It always does.
We turned nine years old ten days before this recording. First newsletter went out June 8, 2017. Having that pattern recognition, having watched every cycle, every narrative, every attempt to dress something up as Bitcoin when it is not, I can see the factions clearly.
I know which one I am in: stay humble, stack sats, peer-to-peer digital cash, hold your own keys. It is fuck-you money. Use it that way.
The more important story, the one getting drowned out by the treasury company drama, is what is being built quietly on the second layer. Ark, Spark, and eCash mints are the interoperability infrastructure that could make Bitcoin functional as actual freedom money in everyday life. The day before we recorded, Erin paid for coffee at a Square-enabled coffee shop using her Phoenix Lightning wallet.
That is a bigger deal than it sounds. The rails are there. The dev work is happening. I am confident it will be critical to any realistic scenario where Bitcoin has established itself as something beyond a speculative asset by 2032.
On the governance question, I have been consistent: I can see both sides. BIP 110 is not the solution. I am also not happy with how Core has been maintained. Something has to give on both sides.
Erin called us radical centrists. I will take it, though I am probably more sympathetic to the Core side than that label implies, and I do not agree with everything they have done.
July 15 through 25 is the peak. Slow-moving planets mean the effect is diffuse across the entire month, not a single dramatic day.
August 12 and August 28 are the eclipse dates. Erin's framework distinguishes between the two phases: pieces fall into place in July for those paying attention; the revelations go public in August. She points to FTX as an example: if you were watching how Sam Bankman-Fried was operating, you could see the writing on the wall beforehand.
The eclipse was when the tower collapsed publicly, in a way that became undeniable and felt inevitable in retrospect.
She has looked at MicroStrategy's chart and Michael Saylor's. She is explicit that she is not predicting a collapse. But she is equally explicit that she sees "major, major reconcilings" ahead for Saylor in August. That is her astrological interpretation, attributed to her.
The OpenAI IPO is targeting September. Anthropic reportedly aims for shortly after. When both happen, the public markets get access to what is being sold as the only escape from the permanent underclass. Erin says it reminds her of the shitcoin "get in get in" energy, and she is right.
The value AI is creating does not flow directly into AI company equity in a simple way. A $20 monthly subscription is a $20 monthly subscription. But we are certainly pricing these IPOs as if it does.
Can you feel it crescendoing? Because I can. Iran ceasefire. World Cup in the United States. UFC at the White House. The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The SpaceX IPO, which created thousands of millionaires within the company, including people at non-executive levels.
Vibes in this country are genuinely high right now, at least from where I sit. I acknowledge that may be my algorithm. But I do not think it is only my algorithm.
The longer arc: 2026 through 2029 is, in Erin's read, new energy, major technological transformation, questions about transhumanism and what aspects of being human you actually want to hold onto. Then 2032: a Saturn-Uranus conjunction that she calls the do-or-die moment for Bitcoin. If Bitcoin has not established itself as something integrated, something real and functional beyond speculation and podcasting, by 2032, it is not going to happen. That is not her doom take; it is her timeline for what success actually requires.
The prescription from both sides of this conversation is the same, and it does not require believing in any of the astrology to follow it.
Stack sats. Hold your own keys. Use Bitcoin the way it was supposed to be used, peer-to-peer digital cash, not as shares in a leveraged treasury company. It is fuck-you money.
The whole point is that nobody can take it from you.
On the AI side, Fable 5 being pulled should have been the alarm. When the model you depend on can disappear overnight because of decisions made between a company and the government, you do not actually have access to that tool. Running open-weight models locally is the equivalent move to self-custody.
It is more friction. It is worth it.
MidJourney announced a medical imaging product the day before we recorded. They have never raised outside capital. They have been quiet and unknown outside of their image generation user base. And then they release a full-body ultrasonic scanner pitched as a low-cost alternative to MRI.
That is the non-dystopian version of AI: bootstrapped, quiet, then a product that could genuinely save lives. That announcement gave me real optimism, the kind that is hard to manufacture. From the darkness can emerge light.
Erin's closing was the right one: stay grounded to physical reality. Log off. Go camping. Find somewhere with no service. Family, loved ones, the natural world.
That is what the human experience is. Technology is going to keep accelerating whether we log off or not. But you cannot engage with it well if you lose track of what you are trying to protect.
She said it better than I could have. I told her so.
Per astrologer Erin Redwing, drawing on research by S.J. Anderson and Dan Waits, Pluto, Uranus, Neptune, and Jupiter are forming exact aspects to each other at 4 degrees of their respective signs in July 2026. This configuration, in her research, has not occurred in approximately 6,000 years. Each outer planet governs long-cycle civilizational themes (transformation, rebellion, collective idealism, and expansion), and their simultaneous alignment is what Redwing and others call the July portal.
Erin Redwing places the peak of the alignment at July 15 through 25. Because Pluto, Uranus, and Neptune are slow-moving planets, the effect is felt throughout the entire month of July rather than spiking at a single moment. Eclipse season follows in August, with specific dates on August 12 and August 28, which Redwing associates with more sudden, public-facing developments.
Erin Redwing uses the genesis block as Bitcoin's birth chart: January 3, 2009, at 18:15 UTC, the moment Satoshi mined block zero with the headline "Chancellor on Brink of Second Bailout for Banks" embedded in the coinbase. In her calculation, Bitcoin's natal moon sits at 4 degrees Aries (the exact degree being hit by Neptune in the July 2026 alignment). She interprets this transit as Bitcoin being asked to rediscover what its fighter spirit is actually fighting for.
Erin Redwing and researcher Dan Waits point to two archaeological markers from that era. The Varna Necropolis in present-day Bulgaria, dated to approximately 4300 BC, is understood as the earliest recorded evidence of a highly wealth-stratified society (some burials loaded with gold, others not). Cylinder seals from the ancient Near East functioned as identity-verification tools tied to transactions. Redwing draws the parallel to KYC digital identity and stablecoin surveillance explicitly.
The eclipse dates Erin Redwing flags are August 12 and August 28. In her framework, July is when the pieces fall into place for those paying attention, and the August eclipses are when information that has been building becomes publicly undeniable. She points to the FTX collapse as an example of the eclipse mechanism: the warning signs were visible beforehand; the eclipse was the moment the tower fell in public view.
Erin Redwing borrows the phrase from a well-known essay on anarchist organizing to describe a challenge Bitcoin faces: voluntary, decentralized contribution structures make it genuinely difficult to push through hard but necessary changes. Every Bitcoin soft fork in history has happened via a different process than the one before it. There is no agreed protocol for governing the protocol. Redwing sees the current fork activity as a necessary, if painful, attempt to work through that problem.
Redwing points to a Saturn-Uranus conjunction in 2032 as the next major astrological stress-test moment for Bitcoin. Her take is that by 2032, Bitcoin must have established itself as something integrated into everyday life beyond speculation. She frames it as a do-or-die moment, not a price target, and says it aligns with what she expects from the 2026-to-2029 period of new energy and technological transformation.
Erin Redwing is a full-time astrologer who came to the practice through a background in astronomy. She describes herself as a Bitcoin astrologer and has been working at the intersection of outer-planet astrology, technology, and economics for eight years. She co-hosts a podcast focused on Bitcoin and astrology and produces regular video content on YouTube. She recommends the work of S.J. Anderson and Dan Waits for anyone interested in outer-planet and technology-focused astrology.
