Bitcoin’s HUGE Problem: Why the Majority is Ignoring It

Why does it seem like the masses are voting against their own financial interests even when the math of inevitable fiat money debasement is right in front of them? In this episode of Bitcoin for Millennials, I'm joined by Brandon Quittum to explore his research on Bitcoiner personality types and the hard truths of human evolution. We explore why about 50% of all Bitcoiners share the same personality type and what this means for the next phase of global adoption. and stick around to hear why we think that the pioneer phase is over and what that actually means for building a decentralized force to navigate the complex technos society of the future. If you're enjoying my content, it would mean a lot to me if you could subscribe to the channel and like my video to support my journey. Thanks a lot. Now, let's dive in to this episode. >> Right, Brandon Quitum, welcome back to Bitcoin for Millennials. >> Thanks for having me, Bram. Looking forward to it. >> Likewise. Yeah, this uh I don't know when you were back on before, but it is definitely almost 2 years ago or something. So, I'm happy you uh you are back. Um you recently published uh an updated report on your Bitcoin personality types, right? Like the MyersBriggs. And I thought it would be interesting to to discuss this together, right? Uh I I just showed you off cam, but I have my undercover Bitcoin hat, right? Uh so that's it's like an insider insider joke. And um yeah, I kind of want to take our time today to kind of go a little bit more meta. Like can we kind of like zoom out and maybe explore, you know, if Bitcoin is actually a universal tool for everyone or maybe we're accidentally kind of like filtering for a specific type of of people and um missing, you know, a bigger part of the of the population in the way that we, you know, talk about the philosophy and the underlying thesis um etc. So, if you're up for that, then uh let's do it. >> Yeah, I'm all about it. Looking forward to it. >> Awesome. Yeah. So, maybe a short a short MyersBriggs uh primer because I know that, you know, some people say like, "Oh, this is BS." Other people love it. I just think it is a nice way to approach a certain type of personality type, right? If I read, you know, INTJ or INTP, I very much identify with it. I think, you know, although the head is INTJ, I'm probably more an INTP, right? This is not a 100% you know conclusion or whatever but it's more a direction as to you know how someone is wired. So I just wrote down a short primer for the people that that don't know right. So the MyersBriggs type indicator MBTI is a popular personality assessment designed to identify how a person perceives the world processes information and makes decisions. It assigns individuals a specific four-letter code based on the four spectrums of psychological preferences. Right. So, um, you did this research. We'll we'll put some images uh on the screen for the for the people watching, but you you found something, right? You saw that 71% of the Bitcoin community shared the same um psychological footprint, which is the the analyst. Do you feel like we've discovered kind of like a tribe or do you feel like we've discovered perhaps a limitation? >> Yeah, good question. And so let let me deconstruct MyersBriggs first so the caveats are out of the way. Um it is one of many personality types. There's plenty of critiques around it. Some people say it's not very good. It's widely adopted in corporate America. There was a there was a phase where like half the cubicles in America had your MyersBriggs on the outside of your cubicle so the employees could learn how to work with each other. Um, but let's just say we don't I'm not going to I'm not going to defend MyersBriggs as like the right way to evaluate personalities. But what I will defend is after surveying about 1,500 Bitcoiners, um, the signal was so strong that there's clearly something here differentiating the general population from Bitcoin, right? Um, I think the easy one is INTJ and INTP, which in the surveys I've done account for about 57% of Bitcoiners. And if you compare that to the general population, you would expect around 5% of the general population to have both of those two. And so 10x over represented in only two of the MyersBriggs personality types means something. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, we have um what they define as the sentinel group. Um which is like late adopters. They don't like taking risks. They're not comfortable going against the grain. Um they want Bitcoin to be boring, right? And it's roughly the inverse there where it's around 50% of general populations in that category and it's like 2% of Bitcoiners. And so yeah, that that's the quick quick analysis is we're nothing like Genpop and it appears more like Bitcoiners are uh systems thinkers, forwardlooking, comfortable going against the grain, high risk, things like that, which also maps to early adopters of any technology, right? So I think your question was like, are we in a weird spot with adoption right now? And I I think we really are. I think up until this point, the Bitcoin community, if we want to call it that, is made up of that same archetype of early adopters. And in order to communicate with those people, you can talk about how money printing is bad and how Bitcoin is a new form of money and this new form of money is better for you. And the early adopter types eat that up. But the second half of that adoption curve is terrified of those ideas. And so I think there's two ways to look at it. one, the Bitcoin community needs to do a better job communicating uh what Bitcoin is to the more normie population. That's one one angle. The other angle is Bitcoin itself needs to mature beyond a certain point to where those late adopters aren't threatened by it. You know, if Bitcoin is sold everywhere, it's part of your company's 401k match. it's, you know, it's just embedded in society. Then all of a sudden the defenses go down and and those late adopter folks can buy some Bitcoin. And so I think we're right at that point. Um I think it was Gartner Hype Cycles has a similar bell curve and they talk about like the chasm and it's essentially the hardest part of an adoption curve is going from those early adopters to the early majority. And to me that's exactly where we are in Bitcoin. I think you could point to the fact that the 2024 2025 cycle that we just finished here did not bring in new retail like any previous cycle did. And it's certainly not an awareness issue, right? I would say from 2017 on, especially during the co era, everyone heard about Bitcoin. It's on TV every day. Everyone knows the Bitcoin friend in their life. And yet still, we didn't see new folks coming in. So that's thesis one, like personality types crossing the chasm. We're at we're in the tricky stage. The other side is I think the economic condition for the average individual, I'll speak on the US, I assume it's the same in Europe. The average American does not have investable income. And so at the end of the month, if you're struggling to pay your bills, you're you're not looking to invest. You can't invest, let alone have time to learn about this new monetary technology. And so I think it's a little bit of both. And so I think most of the uh adoption quote unquote that we've seen the last couple years has been corporate adoption or something approaching the financialization of the Bitcoin asset. And obviously those groups have uh more disposable or investable income. And so I think that all ties in. If something happened to you tomorrow, could your family access your Bitcoin? 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And I've said this before as well, like I also think we are very lucky with how we're wired, right? Like um I think our kind of like personality types have the ability apparently to kind of also project toward the future, right? a certain circumstance toward the future or or extrapolate a possible problem or probability or scenario toward the future and then kind of translate it back to today and then you know have um a way to kind of like judge the probability of said scenario in the future and then make a decision on like you know should I should I uh take action today or or not. And so one of my conclusions has also been that a lot of people just find it very hard to either visualize that or are I don't want to say interested enough but probably like triggered enough or something to actually care about the the possible scenario in the future, right? And so um the INTJ which is the architect and INTP which is the logician um they share you know INT and that means they have very similar underlying temperaments right so they uh are rational logical they're introverted they have a need for autonomy right so I think you know once you realize that the money is centrally controlled by people no better than you right but not aligned with you know whatever you're aligned with with your individual life then I think that kind of already triggers there's this autonomy autonomy part right and also kind of like the intellectual curiosity is is also a big uh part of that right because if you um yeah come across the first thing and then are like you know this is not something I want then we're also curious enough to actually try or attempt to figure out okay then what is actually going on right what kind of information do I need to actually make um some type of action and you just mentioned the the sentinels Right. Um, and I also wrote that uh like looked that up. It said, "Sentinels represent a temperament group characterized by practicality, reliability, and a strong sense of duty. They value stability, structure, and tradition, making them the grounded foundation of most organizations and families, right? And as you said, you saw that 46% um of people, that's the Sentinel majority, right? They haven't yet gotten to to Bitcoin. And I agree with you that you know if you if you don't have any money to actually save right or you don't have time and space to actually think and reflect right those are the the biggest issues I I I would agree with right but like what is something that we could actually do is there something we could actually do you think or maybe they're just not there yet in terms of external circumstances right like whatever we are projecting toward the future bond crisis, whatever, you know, fiat monetary debasement, stuff like that. Um, maybe it actually has to happen for them to to to take notice. What What do you think? >> Yeah, I think it's hard. You and I can't do anything about the macroeconomic conditions. So, I think we just leave that one alone and assume it has some weight. I think what the Bitcoin community can do a better job of is to communicate the benefits of Bitcoin in a way that represents the needs of those lagger groups, right? I think my to illustrate it personally, my favorite part of being in Bitcoin was like 2018 to 2021 maybe and it the content was philosophical. We're we feel like we're coming up with new ideas. We're very abstract. We're very futureoriented, very exciting from my perspective. But if you share that type of content with a normal person, it offends all their sensibilities. And so I think the Bitcoin community that I resonate mo most with has a very hard time communicating across those lines. We're just talking to each other. And so if we want to change that, we either need to uh attract newer Bitcoin community members uh who then go communicate it a little bit more watered down, a little bit more sterile to the next wave of adopters or we have to convince ourselves to get out of our own way and start doing that communication oursel. And the way you'd want to think about that is we're not uh overthrowing the central banking regime. We're not stealing fire from the gods. Okay? Bitcoin's here to stay. It should be a part of a well- balanced portfolio and it makes your family's financial health better. It actually derisks your family uh financially going forward. And so that would be kind of the shift. And I I think we're pretty close to that point. Um, I don't think the mass consciousness has accepted this yet, but the Bitcoin ETFs were obviously a huge success. They're everywhere. Our former uh adversaries on Wall Street are now promoting Bitcoin every chance they get. All the banks bend the knee one by one. And I think the Trump administration has done a lot to attempt to normalize Bitcoin. But at the same time, the family's grifting so hard that I think a lot of people who are uh who started anti-Trump, they're not going to change their mind because Trump says strategic Bitcoin reserve, they're going to see all the shitcoining and the Trump coin, the millennia coin, and all this all these scams. And so, yeah, I I think we're nearing towards that point from a macro condition, but it takes a while to filter down to the masses. And I think that is where the Bitcoin community can step up. And so I would say in the last couple years, just like looking at the attendance of Bitcoin conferences, the revolutionary energy is watered down in a huge way compared to when I first started getting involved. And so in many ways, I think the community naturally already is trending down that adoption curve. But again, if you're here to do your tour duty and you want to help, um, look up just put the Sentinels in your claw, come up with marketing plans going after the Sentinels and and do what you can do there. Do you think that there's also, you know, despite being wired in a certain way, we also, all of us, right, kind of like lack this this fundamental intuition of like a trustless system, right? We're kind of like programmed by a central authority for so long that it is just really hard to even even fantasize or visualize that something else is also possible and that there are certain benefits and also risks and whatever, right, to that. But I feel like a lot of people aren't even able to make a certain comparison just because their mind is just kind of like kept. >> Yeah, I think that's a good point. Um, like when I when I think about what is the core of the problem, like if we get to the heart of what's going on in mass communication and why people are so it it seems like people are voting against their own interests in such a large way. And I think the the core of the problem is that we are biological creatures that evolve to live in a small king group of 100 150 people often called Dunar's number. All of our hopes, wishes, dreams, desires, fears, all of our hardware is forged in that period. And then we fast forward uh thousands of years later and culture grows exponentially and our biology can't keep up. And so we're hunter gatherers living in a futuristic techno society and we can't quite figure out how to make that work. And so I think the outsource the thinking thing is very real and that feels like a defense mechanism to try to survive and not go crazy in an overly complex world relative to our biology. And and so yeah, we we outsource our thinking to our political team, to the influencers we follow, anyone we believe has the answers. And that feels good to us even if we're we're being led off a cliff. Um the psychological burden is reduced so we do it anyways. And that also brings up the point that if you are a sophisticated actor in today's world, a state or someone else with lots of power, u deep state, whatever you want to call it, there's a lot of incentive and a lot of capacity to manipulate the masses because we all live in our little information bubbles and combining lots of data and targeted messaging and then this pointed out human weakness. uh living in a complex world uh it's very easy to manipulate the masses into thinking certain things and you can point to like mass psychosis type events we've experienced in the last few years and I think technology plays a huge role in that and so when we go back to that pendulum are we swinging back towards decentralization um I don't think we're there yet in in my opinion uh agricultural society is decentralized by nature everyone has a plot of land All your food and commodities are local by design. Then you industrialize. Okay, now we need more people. We centralize capital. We create more stuff. People move to cities. That's centralizing. Um, after World War II, we move into the Brettonwood system. Eventually, um, come off the gold standard entirely in a fiat system. That's centralizing. And I think the information age had promises of decentralization in the sense that, okay, we're on the internet. It's a free flow of information and technically the internet could be architected that way. However, we essentially gave up the decentralized principles of the internet for some vague sense of convenience. Um, living in the walled gardens of the mag 7 essentially. And so the next the next phase in my opinion here is AI which it could become the most centralizing force in history of technology and we could all live under this like technocomunist superstate ruled by AI everywhere. That is a risk we're about to face here. And so to me that will be the final boss on the pendulum of decentralization versus centralization. And we were talking earlier, obviously Bitcoin represents a decentralizing force. And so it feels like a race between Bitcoin capturing the consciousness versus this AI techno state being set up. And it does feel like the pieces are being put in place for that AI techno state. And I think if nothing big happens, we're going to sleepwalk right into that. And so I think from a you know preserving the spark of freedom or markets or individualism or whatever we want to call that that counterforce um now is a potent time to take that seriously. It it really matters right now. The forces are shifting around. We can talk about the fourth turning and we can talk about geopolitics. We can talk about new technology. Whatever. Um but we're setting up the battle lines right now for the big one, the biggest change in our lifetimes by far. And so yeah, I guess my my thought here is we need to take it very seriously and we need as many people as possible to have uh enough conscious awareness of what's going on to participate and with economics making that hard. people are time poor. Uh the deck stacked against us. But I think Bitcoin is uh properly understood. Bitcoin is a radical idea that captures the imagination of people. And you don't see many people who fall in love with Bitcoin uh all of a sudden change their mind. And so it does feel like a slow, steady one-way street towards the Bitcoin side of the house. And maybe we're just slowed down right now um with that crossing the chasm period. Yeah, that's >> in this article you talk about, you know, we're we're the pioneer species, right? We took the earliest action actually. And I really love that idea, by the way, right? Because, you know, if you think about how many random ideas are released on the internet every day, it's pretty crazy that, you know, something that was released 17 years ago uh is still relevant today and actually, you know, grew to the level of of where Bitcoin is at. So, you know, even if you hate it, you cannot, you know, dismiss that there is apparently some um merit to it, right? And so now we're seeing Wall Street governments move in. And so I'm kind of wondering what you think about this, right? Like so if we're the pioneer species um do we get to decide you know in your analogy how the forest grows or do we just lay the base layer and then kind of like move on as actual mcelium does right in a forest. >> Yeah. Oh, there's so much here. So I'm going to start with the end and then I'll go back to the fungi stuff. So, um I I think that Bitcoin had its genetics, its DNA produced by Satoshi, released into the world. The early community shepherd it, but honestly, Bitcoin hasn't changed much since it was released. Very minor tweaks along the way. And so, I think that early community shepherd it um to get it big enough to where it's hard to kill. uh Bitcoin sign guy had a line I loved a long time ago which is the Bitcoin community is just providing cover fire so that Bitcoin can get through the door and I think that's true. So the early days we shepherd it, make sure it doesn't make sure it doesn't die, get the right people involved but at a certain point and I would argue that point is behind us now. Bitcoin is out of our control. We we individually cannot do anything about it. No government can do anything about it. It doesn't matter what we want to do. This thing's out there. It has its own hopes, wishes, dreams, desires. It interacts with the world. It learns. It evolves. And it's far larger and more complex than any of us. And so I think that's as far as we can take it as individuals. Now doesn't mean we just allow history to unfold. Like we can still on the margin affect that adoption curve. We can on the margin make life for Bitcoiners easy. Um but I think its destiny is already out there as as a system. Now, going back to Fungi, this article, etc. So, I wrote the first part of this article in 2018. I got into Bitcoin in 2017, did some shit coining, thought I was a genius, made a bunch of money, pretty much lost it all in 2018. And then I hit the books, you know, taught myself economics from the ground up through an Austrian lens in university. I was steeped in Keynesianism. So I sort of had to relearn and put Bitcoin in proper context. Out of that exploration, I realized Bitcoin was the thing, not the shitcoins. Okay. Then I kept coming back to, well, if Bitcoin is what what I think it is, won't the governments, the powers that be just shut it down once it gets a certain size? And I wrestled with that for months. Uh I was living in Bali at the time. I went to a Bitcoin meetup and some guy there had a picture of the lightning network very early days and he was showing all the the nodes and the connections of this early lightning graph and what I saw was hey that looks like a mycelial network and all of a sudden the pieces started coming together in my head. I went home that day back to the villa, take the little scooter home, scribbling on pieces of paper, and I eventually wrote most of what was the first part of that my sea of money series, posted it later in 2018. And out of that exploration, uh, comparing it to the biological world, I actually gained confidence that Bitcoin would be very hard to stop due to its fundamental architecture. And now I'll explain what that is. Uh, but first, fungi 101. People generally think about when they think about fungi, they think about like button mushrooms they buy at the grocery store. They think about the red emoji mushroom, the Mario mushroom, and they think about psilocybin mushrooms. All those things are fascinating. However, fungi is an entire kingdom just like we have plants, animals, fungi, etc. And there's more biodiversity in fungi than plants and animals combined. So, hundreds of thousands of species that we know of. And um only like 10% of fungal organisms produce the mushrooms that we think about. Uh the kingdom also includes yeast, saffro, microisa fungi, gourmet mushrooms, psychedelic mushrooms, medicine, all these different things. U if you like beer, wine, cheese, chocolate, um bread, all these things are only possible because fungi do some chemistry that produce those things that we like. Most of our medicine comes from fungi. Uh the oldest multisellular life on our planet was fungi. They've survived all the great mass extinction events, roughly five of those. Um the largest organism in the world is a honey mushroom. It's thousands of years old and thousands of acres large. It's consuming entire forest in eastern Oregon. >> The fungi had their final form 700 million years before people. That's so crazy. Yeah, >> exactly. And Even though this is so fascinating, it's a forgotten kingdom. In in fact, micology, the study of fungi was only introduced into the university setting in like the ' 70s. Before that, fungi were just lumped into the botany department. Okay, just to illustrate how far behind we are. And so there's endless future discoveries, medicines, etc. coming from fungi that we haven't even scratched the surface yet. In fact, a NASA group is trying to to grow moon shelters out of mushrooms. So, you can create a mold and train fungi to build industrial building materials out of mycelium. And you could do this on the moon. You could bring spores, which are microscopic, introduce water found on the moon, and grow moon bases. So, anyways, that's the the precursor. Fungi are amazing, and it's an equally deep rabbit hole. So, go check it out. Now bringing it back to can Bitcoin be stopped. Um the primary form that a fungal organism takes is in the mcelial form. This is a one cellwalled rootlike structure. You can think of it like underground tubes, pumps, pulleys, like an entire industrial system. It connects all the trees together. They trade resources. The the fungal organisms demonstrate economic principles. And actually, it's a Dutch uh biologist I had on, Toby Kier. We've done some podcasts together. Um she's like borderline communist admittedly. And when she was studying fungi, she was uh frustrated to find out that the fungi are market actors. They buy low, they sell high, they hoard resources, and they get a better price. And it is an underground economy. >> Mhm. >> And this is just nuts. Okay. that form that network is a decentralized brain. There is no central processing unit. If you cut the mcelial mat in half, you now have two um it sends information birectionally. It learns. So if there's an attacker on one side of the network, the the fungal organism essentially tells the mushroom scientist to produce new custom enzymes and they are the masters of chemistry. produce new molecules for that specific invader, ships them over there, takes care of the predator, and then now it has a new uh a new type of chemistry in its library of defense mechanisms for the future. And so this decentralized uh network intelligence, which is a very old archetype, it survives all these extinction events, which means that architecture is a biologically sound strategy. Okay. Now, bringing it back to Bitcoin, uh the Bitcoin network properly understood is very similar. It is like a decentralized network archetype. There are nodes, there are individuals, there's software, you you add it all up and it it behaves like a biological system. Okay? If there's a software bug in the Bitcoin network, uh the information network around Bitcoin, which involves people, tells the software developers there's a bug. They create new software which is kind of like a new enzyme or a new molecule ships it around the network. The network upgrades and now that specific vulnerability is gone. So it does simulate learning in the same way and you can't there's no CEO of Bitcoin there's no single computer where it lives and so you cut the Bitcoin network in half and it just routes around it. And so it is sort of this anti-fragile system. And because the biological system that we described in my is so hard to stop and Bitcoin shares a similar decentralized network archetype that gave me the confidence that no matter what we try to do to this thing um it is too big to fail. It is very very hard to shut down. And so that was kind of the last piece for me to be like okay this Bitcoin here Bitcoin thing is for real and it's here to stay. And so bringing it back to that, are we captured by the suits? Um, I don't think so. I I think what what happens more likely is that individuals get captured by Bitcoin. And yeah, individuals work at banks who maybe are antagonistic to Bitcoin. However, the individuals are compelled to own it. And all of a sudden, the the calculus on should you attack Bitcoin or should you adopt it comes into question. And historically, and I think we can be confident about this in the future, individuals and groups have more benefit to adopt it than to attack it. And on the margin, that matters dramatically. And so, I think Bitcoin's here to stay. And I think a large part of that is because of that decentralized network archetype. For my European friends that want to buy Bitcoin with ease, check out Relay. I've been a longtime fan and happy to partner up with what I think is the best Bitcoin only platform for Europeans. 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That's firefish.io and code bra. >> Dude, it is still so fascinating that uh apparently something that was made digitally has so many um uh of the of the same principles as as myelium, right? like and and by the way for anyone who wants to dive into this more I loved Fantastic Fungi on Netflix and uh you should listen to Paul Stamuts on uh on Rogan for example he's he's the world's you know best known micologist basically um he for example had an example of how in Japan they used myelium to find the most optimal way to structure the metro system in Jap in in Tokyo or something. And so they had like a plain like map of Tokyo with these nodes and then the mcelium went and actually made a better uh like routing system like track than what was actually already uh in place, right? So it finds kind of like this optimal um state. And so when we translate that to also the tech of Bitcoin, you know, you said, you know, if you if you cut Bitcoin in half, the crazy, you know, that and by the way, also the whole adoption game theory, right? So two things like you know you can fork off Bitcoin right like that the whole point is that you can fork off Bitcoin you can make Brandon coin I can make Blumcoin whatever but the OG idea the idea that has the most um adoption um it eventually it's it's um it is this social consensus right and you you see that currently the social consensus has converged on XYZ characteristics of what Bitcoin currently is But if we fork off Brandon uh coin and we find the the the biggest social consensus then it is Brandoncoin that people adopt but Brandoncoin is not Bitcoin right so I think that's a that's a a very important thing and like on the on the adoption part you know as a plant you can decide not to use Bitcoin right or not to you know use um myelium um but it doesn't really help you to to to grow right so I think it's very interesting that if you are a plant and other other plants are using mcelium and they are actually exchanging information like you said right these trees are actually communicating with each other in terms of uh resources and uh um like they can actually say like I've had enough resources you know do you want some of mine and and that's how they actually communicate which which is just a wild idea um it's it's just so crazy that Bitcoin is is is similar in that uh in that degree. Did you know the Tokyo example like uh >> Yeah. Yeah. Um this is an amazing amazing example. So the Tokyo system was actually a slime mold rather than mycelium which used to be in the fungal kingdom. We learn now it's it's it's actually more like an amoeba but the principle is the same. A slime mold is like a community of individual organisms that sort of acts as one little blob. If you go look in the forest and you see like yellow goo on a on some down tree or something, that is the slime mold. And what's interesting here is they're trying to solve what's called the traveling salesman problem. Um, which is like if you're a sales rep and you have to go to multiple stops. The more stops you have, um, it's like an exponential curve on how hard it is to find the optimal route. And so to give some numbers, if there's five cities, there's 24 possible routes between those cities. If there's 10 cities, so you doubled it, it goes up to 300,000 possible routes. >> If there's 30 cities, it's 10 to the 30th. Okay, this is an enormous number, which essentially says there's no algorithm that humans have that can accurately come up with the optimal route. So humans designed Japanese Tokyo system. Then they put a put all the nodes in a petri dish and they put oat flakes on the nodes which is what the slime mold eats. Released the slime mold within 24 hours it grew to find all the food and then within like 12 hours after that it rearchitected its network to create the most optimal route to consume all that food. Then you look at the map and you realize that the slime mold overcomes that traveling salesman problem that our computers cannot do today because it pushes decision making to the edge. It's not one unit. It's a it's a super organism of small units all making decisions in their local area. >> Yeah. >> And that is how you overcome that that computation problem. And Bitcoin is the same. Markets are the same. Markets are individual actors making decisions in their local environment. The sum total of those individuals produces a price signal. It's the most information dense signal in the world. With Bitcoin, we decide what wallet to use, what exchange to use, when to buy, when to sell, when to communicate about, etc. Again, that some total aggregate of individuals creates something that can solve problems in a way that no one could engineer, right? And like a clock or a perfectly German engineered watch is precise, predictable. It's it's uh amazing engineering, but it is a complicated system. It's not a complex system. And mycelium, mushrooms, sorry, mcelium, bitcoin, uh this traveling salesman problem, markets, those are all examples of complex systems. And once you enter the realm of complex systems, our engineering doesn't take us there. And so we actually have to have our machines are made things. They have to start to look like biological creations because that is where the complexity comes from. And so um I don't think it's a surprise that our technology as it becomes more advanced starts to look like biology. And I don't think it's a surprise that our biology, as in humans and our civilization, begins to resemble something more like technology the further we go. And so I think both of those technology and biology are two sides of the same coin. Technology emerges out of the same fundamental forces that produce biology, produce evolution. And so I I just think humans would be better served to have those lines a little bit more blurry in their head because increased complexity those things start to merge. >> And I don't know if you saw that but they found a mushroom in China and in the Philippines I think and they are the exact same species in different locations. and they uh it's not emancia. I think it's related but it's it's called like Goliver something or like it's named after the island island of Guliver and it makes you see little people and it's like confirmed. It's like thousands of years like it's it's thousands of years of stories around this. You should look this up. It's fascinating. you know, shit like Goliver's Island or just, you know, the whole idea of, you know, the fucking Smurfs and the and the and the, you know, the the little mushroom houses they live in. Like, maybe it's just true, right? Like, how why would a weird story like that, you know, live through history? So, yeah, you should. That's a new rabbit hole for you. I thought you >> enough right now. I haven't heard of this. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. And there's another location. I don't know in which country and they're still checking if that's the same species, but they both have legends in that area around, you know, if you eat that, you see little people. >> That is insane. >> Yeah. Okay. >> Yeah. I feel strongly about the myths, the mythology, the tropes, the fairy tales. It's all the same thing. It It's How do we present? >> It's real. It's real. This is like, you know, in one of the oldest caves in France, >> you have the like the oldest uh murals, right? Like um cave paintings. >> Yep. >> And like what did they depict? Random shit like made up stuff or like stuff they actually saw, right? Like Yeah. Stuff they actually saw. Like it's a way for you to save, store, and send, you know, your observation to the future. And so, you know, if you then think about, you know, Chinese zodiac, there's 11 real animals and then there's a fake one. The dragon is fake because, you know, they lost their mind or whatever, right? Like, it doesn't make it doesn't make sense, right? Like, if you want to propagate information toward the future, you package it in certain ways that people will keep on using it so they're reminded of the fact that, you know, this information came from the past that needs to be transferred towards the future. Anyway, you know you amazing topic like the great flood myth. It appears in hundreds of culture essentially all cultures that we studied >> that should be connected. Right. >> Correct. All around the world all every continent different time periods they all share a great flood myth. >> Yeah. >> And you know the naive person or the hard-headed person would say well we don't have evidence of that so it can't be true. But that's insane. Like there's >> there is evidence. The story is the evidence. The story is evidence. Exactly. And we should take that serious. Now the other counterpoint is certain people would try to send information to the future literally and other people would try to encode that information in symbolism where you can't necessarily understand the intention of the message sender unless you have some sort of key. >> And so that's in a way it's like cryptography uh obiscating the reality. And and so then the challenge becomes as moderns we have to decipher what is the true intention of those messages. >> Yeah. >> Right. Like Hansel and Gretle tells you a story. Uh okay kids don't get lost in the woods but maybe Hansel and Gretle had a deeper meaning and we actually miss that meaning today. I don't know if that's a good example but >> yeah I hearing the folly is deciphering what's the intention. Same with our religions. Was that a literal message? Was that a metaphor where the lines blurred? It's hard to figure that stuff out. >> Yeah, I agree. Well, I think that's a nice bridge. You know, you you talk about Bitcoin being this this organism, right? The essence of Bitcoin is, you know, num numbers and letters, but but how how would you look at it in like the biological way? I found a word called endo symbiosis, right? Where something lives inside a bigger organism. Do you think it's something like that? Or maybe it's even temporary, right? We live in the Trafy organism for XYZ time and then, you know, all the individuals basically figure out that they're better off just having Bitcoin. >> Yeah, lots to think about on that one. So, I I would bring up uh let's anchor with a type of fungal organism called a saprobe. Saprobe, which all it means is they digest and break down organic material. So let's say you're in a forest and you see leaves and sticks fall down and they land on the ground. Uh what happens to those leaves and sticks, right? Mushrooms and also bacteria, they digest those leaves. They break them down. They essentially uh break the chemical bonds and when they break those chemical bonds, they release uh carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, etc. The building blocks of those organic material are liberated and then redistributed through the ecosystem. And I think Bitcoin plays a similar role. Uh when you look at fiat monetary system, Bitcoin comes in and it starts eating away at the certain weakest points of the fiat system, starts taking market share for certain things. Okay, maybe it's better for payments in this geography. Maybe it's better for savings and avoiding debasement in that in that area. Um, I think it starts to eat away at information architectures or uh economic architectures like a company, like a state, like an orthodoxy around uh economics, right? It just starts to decompose those weaker weaker points. And I think another analogy here that's fun is with the miners. So people would say Bitcoin wastes energy or something like that. But what happens uh let's let's take aluminum smelting as a fun example here. Very high energyintensive process. Typically we put aluminum smelting in the middle of nowhere. Let's say a remote geothermal spot in Iceland. Tons of energy production. There's no consumers of that energy anywhere nearby. So what do they do? They drop an aluminum plant right next to it. The Bitcoin miners um and then the aluminum plant just consumes the energy. Okay, that's essentially wasted energy otherwise until you enter the aluminum smelting, right? And Bitcoin miners are just consuming that stranded wasted energy in in a more efficient way than anything we've ever found in the same way that fungal organisms uh recycle and liberate those leaves and sticks and any other organic matter. And so those miners go seek out the energy arbitrage opportunities, these untapped resources that cannot be used. it finds a way to use those resources which then uh improves the ecology or the economy around those certain areas. And yeah, obviously the second order effects of of that symbiosis between miners and energy production leads to more energy production on net and more widely distributed energy production which is ultimately good for humanity. uh energy production is upstream of all the human civilizational stuff that makes our lives good. And so I think it it's just important to understand that um Bitcoin is mimicking a biological system here and it does produce positive externalities in in our civilization. >> A lot of people also talk about, you know, Bitcoin kind of lost this edgy pioneer spirit that kind of got us here, right? So I kind of want to talk about, you know, what what's left for us like for the rebels or however you want to define it, right? Once the institutions have kind of like or are participating in in this thing. Does that make sense? Like I wonder what you think about that. Like uh I think it's a criticism that people use, but I don't think it's a it's a fair one because there are by definition not enough rebels or early adopters or innovators uh ever. Yeah, I I think we sort of hit the saturation point on the revolutionary energy and the type of INTP, INTJ thinkers that we have come to associate with the Bitcoin network. To me, we've passed that phase. It from an adoption standpoint, it might almost be necessary for the suits and the governments and the sailors of the world to sort of take the the torch on marketing Bitcoin. And some would say that's a failure. Um we we're going to lose Bitcoin if that's the case. I don't think that at all. I think that Bitcoin, if Bitcoin is the best money ever, we should assume that at a certain point the banks and the governments will realize this and they want to participate. And so to me, it's a sign of winning. Even though I don't like the feeling, I think it's it's actually a sign of winning. And maybe there's nothing Bitcoiners could have done to attract those sentinels because the sentinels don't want to hear our message. They want Bitcoin to be a part of their world without having to think about it. And so maybe we hit the maximum amount of individual adoption before the suits pump this thing up and people start buying it because they own a piece of the S&P 500 or they own whatever Bitcoin in their ETF. And so I think that's actually what's going on. And it's a little disheartening, but I don't think it's that big of a deal cuz as you said earlier, um we all had the opportunity to frontr run the banks. Not everyone did, but it's not realistic to assume that everyone would. Um and so I think that's where we are in in the thing and we should accept it. It doesn't mean we we stop participating. We can still help on the margin. We should make self-custody as easy as possible for the people who want to go down that route. We should communicate it as easy as possible for those to understand. But you can't, you know, whatever lead a horse to water analogy I think is very real here. And I think sadly tradi governments, the sailors of the world, they're going to be leading the horses to water going forward here. >> Yeah. And I also think it kind of takes time, right? Like this is kind of the the the Trojan horse type idea. I think we should or I want to emphasize just for myself. I I also think it's a pity the suits figured it out, right? Or at least to a degree. Um but you know, although we say Bitcoin is for everyone, not not not everyone will adopt it like we adopted it or or even you know, super cyber punk people adopted it in the beginning, right? Like uh I mean I got into it in 2014. That was way beyond this initial way riskier phase, you know, where people uh bought a shit ton when it was like 50 cents or 30 cents or or whatever, right? Like these people even had they had way bigger foresight or when you when you read, you know, what the hellfiney talks about like how Bitcoin gets to a 10 million valuation, etc. like those are the true true um innovators and and and pioneers that uh you know could actually zoom out to a bigger picture and then go back down again to actually you know the the technical thing which is just very cool but I I think I I agree it always kind of works like this but I would add the caveat that um this is what Ta told me once like we are in a monetary war in a sense, right? Like centralized control over the money means there's centralized control over your literal, you know, absolutely finite time and energy in your life and your psychological well-being and your idea of the future and and all these things, right? And for me, the culmination of that is that, you know, now there are people that don't want to have children because, you know, they're so uncertain about the future or they're super niilistic, you know, or, you know, I could never afford that, etc. And so now we're at a point where, you know, a man-made structure, a matrix, however you want to call it, you know, is actually working against the biological urge and nature of of people. And so I really view it as a as kind of a a battle at at that level. And I do think we should continue, you know, having the edge or turning up the edge or whatever. It needs to be clear that although you know you can participate and use Bitcoin in you know these more traditional ways uh you know trady whatever but that is not what is actually going to help you in in my opinion right because if we tie it back to you know the pendulum the centralized forces etc you know the incentive for the centralized forces is to keep on being centralized forces right there's no one that's going to wake up in the morning and be like you know I'm I'm just going to give up my power. So, I do feel that we have a very long battle to go still. What do you think? Yeah, a couple points here. So, I think I think Bitcoin isn't for anyone or sorry, Bitcoin is for anyone, but it's not for everyone, right? And I think that distinction matters here because not everyone is going to put in the reps to learn what this is, especially early on. And so although it's available to everyone, not not everyone will participate. And that's okay. It's still the most free, most egalitarian, best opportunity for the little guy ever. And we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of the good here. Uh it was a success in that way. Um one other comment you mentioned on Hellfiny in the early days talking about Bitcoin banks and $10 million Bitcoin whatever. Um, the think boys on Twitter, myself included, would like to believe we come up with new ideas and new arguments and new ways to evaluate Bitcoin. However, pretty much every topic we've discussed since I've been in Bitcoin was already discussed in the first 3 years on the Bitcoin talk forum. And so I find that very humbling and it makes the genesis of Bitcoin even more special because the group around Bitcoin at that time was special and they birthed a technology that might just save humanity from uh a very dark path. And so that's amazing. We should be proud of that. Next one, monetary war. 100% this is a monetary war. Um, the fiat system empowers those who control the money printer and their allies and it is nothing short of stealing time from people. And so we should take it serious. It should offend people deeply as soon as you understand the fiat system which I think sparks much of the evangelism out of the community is hey we've been wronged for a long time. And this is a systemic drain on our society and we as the larger group should do something about it and you know stay humble stack sets is plenty to do for the average individual. Um I think another part here is that the arrogance of the state played a huge role uh for us give an advantage to Bitcoin because in the first 5 years of Bitcoin's life it could have been shut down by a a wellresourced state. I believe that and maybe it wouldn't die entirely, but you could kick the can down the road 20 years to the point where it might never emerge properly. However, the state was way too arrogant about that. They never believed it could happen and so they let it evolve in the underground for so long and too many people are captured by it, too much technology written that I don't think they can do anything about it now. It' be so unpopular. And so, um, I think that's just a win for Bitcoin that the hubris of the state, uh, kind of bit him in the butt there. And then last point, you mentioned the matrix. So, I saw a YouTube video recently of, uh, some dude evaluating the matrix, uh, in 2026 terms and kind of looking at the arguments presented, what can we learn, how should we analyze it now? And what was amazing out of this conversation is before the actors came on set, the creators of the Matrix, they had to they they made everyone read three books. One of those books was Kevin Kelly's first book written in the '90s called Out of Control. Kevin Kelly was the founding editor of Wired. He's written many other books. He's absolutely fascinating, like one of the biggest influences on me ever. And what Kevin Kelly argued was that, and we talked about this earlier, as technology becomes more complex, it starts to resemble biology. And biology starts to resemble technology as it becomes more complex. And that fundamental thesis is actually the inspiration of the the Matrix story. Most people think the story is, hey, the machines harvest our energy and they create the matrix. Machines bad, humans good. And that's more or less what the first uh movie was on the Matrix. But if you look at the sum total of the trilogy, it's much more nuanced than that. Um by the end of the story, what happens is the humans and the machines make a deal. And the deal is the machines can harvest some amount of human uh embryos as energy and the humans can live underground and take advantage of the technology they need to survive. And so it's actually a symbiosis between man and machine. That's the story of the matrix. And what's what's uh personally humbling here is I discovered Kelvin Kelly after I wrote my ceiling of money. >> And in my head I thought I was coming up with these biology and technology merging symbiosis ideas on my own. Then I go back and read Kevin Kelly and 20 years before I discovered Bitcoin, um, he's already written all the same thesis. And so, um, I just think it's amazing for Matrix fans to re-evaluate it with that new lens. And also for, uh thinks on the who who attempts to think on the vanguard of culture and tries to come up with new ideas. Um, we should humble oursel and realize that most everything has already been discussed. If you want new ideas, go back into history and find forgotten ideas. Um, they're probably still salient today. >> I would want to point people to a YouTube series you might know. It's by Kirby Ferguson. It's called Everything is a Remix. I don't know if you know that, but I think I think you will like it. It's like there's like two or three videos, and it kind of revolves around this idea that, you know, nothing is actually really new, right? like every every new idea is basically a synthesis of things that existed before your own assumptions or your own discoveries or whatever and you package that in a certain way and that is what eventually is presented as an idea or a concept right like that could be a technology but it could also be a movie or music or whatever and it's it's very cool like you maybe know that you know the Disney movies have had like these frameworks for like scenes for example right like you see someone I don't know you you know, walking through a door or jumping off something or whatever. And they just had the framework and they used it in in many different movies. But then people also started doing that from other movies. So in this in this series, this guy shows that Quinton Tarantino basically stole the concept of a lot of scenes from many other movies that that came before him, right? But because the context is different and the actors are different, etc., you know, you it doesn't really matter. It's actually more like an homage to what came before, right? it was that good that I used it um again basically and I think what is so interesting uh with Bitcoin it's kind of similar right like Bitcoin itself or like the the combination of technologies and research uh you know made it into this new thing and obviously you know Satoshi solved Byzantine general problem right like there's there's something new added but that is maybe 10 15% or something right like all the other stuff that came before it um he or they actually synthesized into what is this um new thing and and um I love that Bitcoin aligns so much with kind of like these these guiding principles like it is not a random idea right it's it's not a random reason of existence first and and second it's also not random technology right it is um a combination of things that people have looked at and tried to achieve um for for years already and uh yeah that's something that I really love because it also shows you that there is a certain type of of of merit to it or else it it would have already died way way uh before you know like I said before like do you know how many ideas there are released on the internet right like that um just that point by itself I hope maybe it triggers some Sentinel people to you know spend a bit more time on it >> yeah I think what you just said is absolutely fascinating. I think it's a good critique of the previous common argument that the blockchain is the innovation here. >> And that is a false understanding of what Bitcoin is. People think, oh, the blockchain's new and a blockchain in and of itself produces the properties that we like about Bitcoin. The fact that >> hard to change and to centralize and double spend all this stuff. No, not even close. Satoshi just built a Franken technology to your point combining previous technologies that have been out for a while in a new way and he organized it in a way to solve a specific problem um which is a decentralized money and a blockchain on itself cannot provide those things. And so it's really the constellation of technologies that allow the emergence of the values that we like out of Bitcoin. They're not inherent any of those technology. It's a system that >> Yeah. properties emerge. >> Fully agree. Did you know the longest running blockchain is actually something from 1995 and it's an uh it's an ad? I don't know if it's Yeah, it's in the classified ads in the New York Times and it's just a hash of the Did you know this or not? >> No, I did not know that. >> Yeah. So, uh yeah, you should look that up. It's a it's um published by Shy. It's a spin-off of Bellor, which I think is a very old like computer science company. So since 1995, they placed small classified ads in the New York Times containing the unique hash of the previous week's uh digital document seal. So whenever I hear a suit talk about, you know, I love blockchain as the innovation, you know, it's it's it's actually it actually shows us we still have an opportunity to frontr run them, by the way. Like they're not they're not at the level, right? And I had I had American Hollow on and he said, you know, we're we're probably like eight years ahead. And this is also why I think, you know, Hall of Trefi is going to have their crazy NFT crypto degeneracy moment with tokenized stocks, right? I I really think it's going to be fucking chaotic and will blow up a lot of stuff to then eventually, you know, realize that Bitcoin is the only thing they should they should be paying attention to. Yeah. Um >> 100%. I had a tweet uh when Trump was launching his stupid meme coins where um Trump is trying to speedrun Trad through their shitcoining phase over the weekend. >> He launches Trump coin, Melaniacoin, goes up, goes down, everyone loses their learns their lesson in 48 hours. Let's move on to Bitcoin. >> Maybe it was a heroic action. >> Agree. >> Not intentionally, but maybe serve as a touch the sto moment for Trafi. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, maybe to wrap up, um, I think this was really nice to to kind of explore this, right? Unpack this together. Is there anything from like your journey where you know and maybe we talked about it right the acceptance of the suits for example but like was there like an original idea you had that was really profound to you but that actually changed later on or you you abandoned or it had like a certain evolution like something that you were wrong about or maybe now even see in a different light that you know um actually actually taught you something. Uh let's see. I think the first thing that comes to my mind is that early on, let's say 2020 to 2024 period, we're going through the COVID era. At that point, I thought that Bitcoin would be like widely accepted by individuals because from my point of view, the the debasement problem was so glaring, so obvious. There's no way out. And so, Bitcoin's destiny felt predetermined to me at that point. And I I still feel that way. But what I got wrong is I thought the individuals around the world, let's just say the Sentinels, now that we know more about that, I thought those folks would come to that conclusion much sooner. I did not expect retail adoption to slow down, I thought it was going to accelerate. Um, that was wrong. I think the next thing I got wrong is I thought during the COVID period and and even during this quote fourth turning we're in now, we're going to redo the geopolitical order. I think that's pretty obvious. I used to think that Bitcoin was for sure going to be global base money during this rearchitecture period and I still think it's possible today, but I think my timeline for when that is likely to occur pushed out quite a bit. And so I think what I got wrong is that I assumed other people would approach Bitcoin the same way I did. And I think people are way more diverse and that's not the case. which means we should uh humble our expectations on when Bitcoin will be quote the base money of the world. Um I think it takes maybe a generation maybe more for that to be true. And so I think it just comes down to human nature. We have a hard time adopting new technology. We resist it. And at the same time, is Bitcoin ready for this geopolitical reshuffleling? I don't know the answer to that question. It doesn't feel like it today. you know, counterpoint to all that maybe considered doomer bear take is that um things do happen fast and at the last minute when we make changes. Right on the heels of World War II, we came up with Breton Woods, World Bank, NATO, IMF, um redo the lines geopolitically, like a lot of stuff happened in a really dense, stressful period. And so I'm not going to say we're not going to be base money in the next 5 10 years, but it appears much much much less likely than I once thought. >> Yeah, I agree. I And and also, by the way, that's why your your research also helped me a bit. I always thought, you know, it would go way faster and that everyone is logical and rational and acting in their own self-interest and in their best interest. But apparently we have to have a bit more um patience as I would say with everything in life, right? Like maybe it's not maybe it's not even good if it goes too fast. So uh yeah, I uh I think we'll both be following it with interest, right? Like uh I I I think you also want to see where this where this eventually ends up. >> Absolutely. Yeah. I mean there's still nothing more interesting is that story. However, I do think the AI story is taking a lot of the juice um off Bitcoin right now. For for a long time, Bitcoin was the thing if you were trying to outperform the market. And what we've seen with AI is that's taking a lot of the shine away. And so, we might need an AI pullback before Bitcoin regains its edge. Um yet to be seen. >> We'll see. Well, thanks a lot for your time and your insights. I hope people found it valuable and uh yeah, man. Let's stay in touch. >> Awesome. Thanks, Ram. >> Cheers. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, you can click here to find more just like it. And click here to find all Bitcoin for Millennials podcast episodes. Also, if you want to help me shine a light on the message of Bitcoin, please like this video and subscribe to stay connected. I hope to see you for our next episode. Bye.