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- [00:07]
Podcast Host
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.
- [00:11]
Michael Saylor
If you talk about a Fed just
- [00:12]
Michael Sullivan
gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.
- [00:19]
Michael Saylor
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for bitcoin.
- [00:32]
Michael Sullivan
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably, should be. Probably should be.
- [00:36]
Michael Saylor
Michael Sullivan, welcome to the show, sir.
- [00:39]
Michael Sullivan
Thanks so much for having me, man. Really grateful to be here.
- [00:42]
Michael Saylor
Pumped to talk to you. I think it's been interesting observing your, your coverage and your particular, particular analytical niche, which is sentiment analysis within bitcoin. And I think a lot of what you've been putting out there has been confirming. My natural pattern recognition indicators have been going off in my mind, having been around Bitcoin for 13 years now, and I've been saying pretty frequently over the last few months that this market reminds me more of 2015 than any other bear market that I've experienced. And for those who are unaware, 2015 was terrible sentiment wise. Bitcoin Twitter didn't even really exist yet, but the small pocket that did exist basically went away. People thought bitcoin was legitimately going to die for some reason or another this time around in 2026, the sentiment's very similar and I find it fascinating because I've never been more bullish. But people are really butthurt about where bitcoin is right now.
- [01:49]
Michael Sullivan
It's so true. And this happened really naturally for me. I was really into language and just kind of had been noticing relatively recently how kind of the vibes were out there changing and whatnot. And I'm so excited to talk to you about it because some of the people that have been here longer have been more in tune with this, at least from my experience. They've really been optimistic in different ways than the newer folks are. And there's a bunch of potential reasons for that. I have my own theories as to why this might be. I'm sure you do too. Between gold ripping, the AI trade going crazy, and then bitcoin treasury companies burning a ton of the newer cohort of bitcoiners, there's a lot of different reasons out there, but for whatever of them, sentiment is really bad right now, despite so many things being so optimistic broadly. And that's just a really interesting dynamic. So, yeah, I've been really, really really having a ton of fun getting into this stuff.
- [02:41]
Michael Saylor
Yeah. We could dive deep into the details, but just a couple comments based off of that is thinking back to like FTX when we went down to 15, 15K, 15 and a half K. Wherever we settled at the capitulation wick there, there wasn't like an AI trade like sucking or a gold or silver trade that people could point at in parallel and be like, oh, look how great they're doing compared to how poor we're doing. And I think this time around with the AI trade, gold and silver, even though they're off their highs, they're still relatively elevated. I think people look like, oh God, am I holding the wrong bag and beginning to basically do the meme of the stick figure poking bitcoin, saying, do something.
- [03:27]
Michael Sullivan
Yeah, I think part of it too is bitcoiners in general are relatively technologically savvy and optimistic folks, and we've really gotten deep into AI. Myself very much included in that. So to watch something that we're. It just take to watch that narrative and that technological thing get really taken over and be so enthusiastic and euphoric, I think just hits a little bit differently since we're also generally so much aligned with the AI thing in general.
- [03:53]
Michael Saylor
Yeah, I mean, we're talking about before we hit record, but the, the AI energy is real within Bitcoin too. I mean, I've been leaning into it very heavily here at TFTC and other aspects, and I think it's actually helped us to get good information as it pertains to bitcoin out there. So it's been a net positive. But there are many people saying, like, what are you doing focused on AI? You got to focus on bitcoin. It's like, yeah, you can do both and hopefully leverage one to accelerate what you're doing with the other, which is leverage AI tools to accelerate bitcoin education for our purposes here at tftc. But yeah, again, it's fascinating and I think now's a good time. Just like, how did you get into. I mean, you mentioned a love of language and all that. How did you get into sentiment analysis within Bitcoin specifically and what sent you down this particular rabbit hole?
- [04:47]
Michael Sullivan
Yeah, so a little bit of background on myself. I've been an Engineer for like 13 years, a writer for something like 9 or 10 now. Came into Bitcoin around 2021 for a lot of the same reasons that people did around that time with like money printing, going crazy and that sort of thing, and just went Immediately crazy. Deep down the rabbit hole. I was a big writer at the time and was so just like profoundly inspired by bitcoin that I had this around. It got deep into writing. And a lot of people in the bitcoin space know me as the guy who was writing bitcoin novel I did that went really well. It was a ton of fun. But, like, upon wrapping that up, I was so, like, energized for wanting to build more stuff in the bitcoin community. And at the time, like, people were at each other's throats. I think it was like when I really started doing a lot of thinking about this was like late January, early February, when Price was down there and once again saw this pattern that I've been seeing repeatedly of people, like just butting heads. When Price was down for really no other reason other than Price being down, I was like, I always wanted to explore this more deeply because I've been obsessed with language for a long time. I think it's fascinating how narratives kind of flow through systems. You'll hear somebody go on a podcast, state an idea, and then it just proliferate across the entire bitcoin ecosystem. Think that was fascinating. And I think minor language choices that people make hold a lot more information than most people realize. There's these subtle kind of things that you can say to one another that actually give high degrees of indication what the underlying emotions are in people. And it's a really weird thing analyzing human emotion for this analytically about data. But I'd always had these collection of different ideas and knew I wanted to pursue it farther. So I kind of started with just myself. I used my engineering skill set to digest tons of my Twitter data, then throw every single tweet I'd ever done through these AI models to help delineate what kind of language cues existed inside of them. And what I found was really interesting. I've said a lot of dumb stuff on Twitter over the years. I both posted tops. People do come to this thing and have different opinions, emotions, and are inspired by whatever narrative is out there. But looking at it in that way was really eye opening for me of how interesting of a tool this was just immediately for my own person. And I did it for other people. I did it for Michael say, where I started looking at this stuff. And then I just kept going and going and going. Like hundreds and hundreds of hours spent on this now, cohorting different people, seeing what things different folks are talking about, what moods are being different felt in different subsets of the bitcoin ecosystem. And it's just been amazingly interesting to explore kind of all over the place. But that's sort of like the initial evolution here for me. And I've just never been more excited about it because even presently right now, with the most recent sell offs, there's been some really fascinating stuff happening that I'm pretty pumped to share about.
- [07:30]
Michael Saylor
Yeah, I guess let's jump into it. I mean, talking about like cohorts and different cohorts and the sentiment that may exist in one or across many. In diving into the language, like discerning sentiment, you said word choice is very important, and the particular words you use says a lot more than the short sentence. You may include those words in what is the minutiae of deriving specific sentiment from word choice?
- [08:09]
Michael Sullivan
So fortunately, people way smarter than myself have solved these problems in pretty clear ways. The quickest way to maybe conceptualize it, every single different emotion has different words that are more or less likely to be used around it. For example, one of my favorite ones is conviction. To look at conviction over time, how confident people are and those kind of things. And this one's easier to conceptualize because you can basically just search for words like would or maybe, or these kind of things that just are indicative of like slightly more hedging. The inverse of that would be like really confident things, like going to 100k tomorrow, just like a lot of exclamation marks, other things. And basically people have trained these models through Twitter data, which is why it's a particularly interesting look at that stuff, to recognize how much optimism or anger or different moods exist comparatively over time. And then what I do is I take that initial measurement and then compare it to every single tweet a user has ever said or every single post, and then look at how that deviates over time. Because that's what's really interesting is not just like seeing, okay, people are really mad about this all at once. It's most interesting to see how their language evolves when they get angrier, what events they get angry around, what kind of narratives they're talking about while they're getting angry, and then how these moods collide. So, like, conviction is interesting on its own, but it's also really fascinating when it's like people are really convicted and really optimistic, which typically happens around blow off tops and that kind of thing. So looking at all that and then doing it for different cohorts has been crazy. We can take it wherever you want on which one you want to do. But, like, since we were just Speaking about AI, that might be a decent first one to just like look at how this narrative has taken over the entire bitcoin ecosystem.
- [09:48]
Michael Saylor
Yeah, let's do that. Because it is objectively true, like I said earlier, I think it's actually like a breadth of fresh air. Personally, while you pull this up, I'll just ramble here, but breath of fresh air. For me, it's like, oh, something interesting to learn more about, to apply, to be on the cutting edge of things and hopefully apply it to what we're doing here.
- [10:15]
Michael Sullivan
Yeah. So I very much share that sentiment with you too. I'm using these tools like absolute crazy, at a crazy rate. And I'm using it to build this stuff for bitcoiners too. Like to your point earlier, where to build this suite of things, I would have had to have a full team of people and tons and tons of time money to be able to do this using my own compute. Basically. It's just been really freeing how much crazy stuff you can build with these tools. It's a profound game changer for how we work. In my opinion, what we're looking at here is the amount that AI, just the phrase AI is mentioned over time. Specifically though, it's among bitcoiners, which I think is the interesting dynamic where we all kind of recognize that AI is this frequent narrative talked about in the world. It's defining 2026 in a lot of ways. I mean, even this longer period. But what was so cool to me was watching the bitcoin community talk about it and you can kind of see it gyrate over time. There's new headlines will release, people talk about it at a higher rate, then it'll lose interest a little bit. But it's pretty obvious to see here. This is a very consistent, powerful trend. Despite there small little euphoric peaks among the bitcoin community. Like this is just a growing mind share happening out there. And I think this really confirms a lot of the stuff that we were talking about where it's like drawing a lot of mind share away from bitcoin and that's clearly even happening within the bitcoin community.
- [11:38]
Michael Saylor
Yeah. And I, I'd actually be interested to see this bitcoin cohort overlaid with others because I was having conversations about this with some bitcoiners and I feel like, I mean, could be wrong, but I feel like we hopped on the AI trend earlier than most because I think what does that say about bitcoiners? Tech forward, early adopters willing to take risks, like my Assumption is that the bitcoin cohort would, on a per capita basis, for lack of a better term, would be like much higher involvement engagement with AI compared to others outside of obviously the AI cohort itself in Silicon Valley.
- [12:25]
Michael Sullivan
I'm really curious to hear your thoughts about this, but when I was in Vegas for Bitcoin 2026, one of the main things I was talking about was AI. That was the panel that I was on. And for me it feels as though bitcoin prepped me in some ways to adopt AI more quickly. For me, bitcoin was kind of this ego dissolutionary thing where I was wrong about it repeatedly before getting into it. I had exposure to multiple years before taking much more seriously in 2021. For me, repeatedly being wrong about a technology than spending more time in bitcoin and growing more optimistic about technology broadly, I do think primed me in a lot of ways where with AI I felt a similar thing where when it was just coming out, I was a very early adopter of the tools the entire time. But during that time I remember saying things like, oh, AI is not going to totally take over this domain or I'll still have to be involved in that part of the process or no, I need to review this, the code. That's something I need to understand deeply as a human. And I've continually had to walk every single one of those statements back over and over and over again and just accept that this is a new paradigm that's kind of happening. And I don't know where it's all going to go, but I think going through that in the bitcoin space around that new evolving technology kind of primed me to adopt the AI tools more quickly. And it's part of the reason that so many of us are so interested in this thing.
- [13:44]
Michael Saylor
Yeah, no, I think that's definitely it. I mean, I think for bitcoin, for me, when I found it, I was very receptive to a bitcoin like solution at the time that I found bitcoin. So I personally had very little doubt when I found it. I was also very young. I was 21 and probably a bit naive, which worked out to my benefit. But I found Bitcoin, I was like, oh, this is it. This is like child of the 2008 financial crisis, going into college right as that was going on and studying economics, basically be like, all right, how did I get this bad? I need to figure this out. And having a sort of innate feeling that the incumbent financial system of banking system and monetary system was Corrupt. And so I found Bitcoin, which at the time yet Andreas Antonopoulos and others, a few others educating about it, and that whole digital native currency for the Internet that can't be controlled by governments or central banks clicked with me and then dove in and try to learn as much as possible about the tech side of it, the protocol side of it and how it works, how to receive, how to send, how mining works, and became obsessed with it. And obviously I'm here now, basically made a career out of continuing to follow the space and help develop it. And I don't know, for me personally it was like, oh, I found it and I dove right in. I imagine there were similar feelings for many others. Obviously there's many who found it, dismissed it, came back and then ultimately said, all right, I was wrong. So I think you have two archetypes there, like the tech forward, hyper crazy experimenters like, oh no, yeah, this makes sense. Then you have the other archetype which is maybe initially skeptical, but a small enough ego to get over any apprehensions or skepticism that existed before and to hold your hand up and say, hey, I was wrong, I should learn more about this and dive in. So when it comes to AI, I think I was very similar. I mean, we've been using AI here at TFTC for over two years, which I think is interesting, is probably like 2024 is when we started using AI, like to help the operations and to run the business. And it's only got like, the tools have only gotten exponentially better throughout those two years. And I feel very fortunate that we started experimenting with this two years ago because now it feels like as new stuff drops, it's like, okay, we've had enough swings at the plate to understand what to adopt, what to ignore and how to implement things once they come to market. And yeah, I feel like it was a no brainer for us in terms of AI too. It's like, hey, this new thing is pretty powerful. Yeah, it may not be perfect, but it's probably going to be a large part of the digital economy moving forward. So it makes sense to adopt it early and figure it out. So you have a head start there. And it's fun too. That's the other thing.
- [17:04]
Michael Sullivan
Very much so. It's. I also don't think it's the entire story either. Like there is other reasons. Potentially the bitcoin sentiment feels low. It's just like one of the many variables. It's like it's so multifaceted. And one of the things exploring this is bitcoin is fragmented in a lot of ways too, where it's not just like single groups. The longer the network has been around, the more isolated different groups have been which have different narratives they latch onto about why things are doing things. And that's been kind of interesting. I've also seen one of the things I'll pull up here momentarily is the engagement on social media from some of the bitcoiner accounts that have been around a while. So yeah, newer retail folks plebs have been tweeting about certain things and angry and we can get to that. But like even in these older bitcoin accounts that have been around for quite a long time, like we're still seeing similar rates of this. So I'll just share this here. This is the specifically like the bitcoin price on top, the middle is the optimism in the language of the OGs over time, the ones that attract in my system. And the bottom one is the one that I wanted to draw attention to. That's really interesting to me. That's the likes per post. So like it's adjusted. So like how much engagement are you getting on X comparatively to back in previous periods? And like the main thing that sticks out to me personally is that like end of 2022, beginning of 2023, bottom where like the moods were relatively good still like Optim, there's like up and down with anger or whatever, but the engagement rate was super high. There was way more activity happening even back then comparatively to now during some more vibes. Right. We're down quite a lot price wise. But back then there was just a distinctively different mood comparatively to where things are at right now.
- [19:01]
Michael Saylor
Yeah, I agree. And while you're saying that too, I'm wondering if the quick and iterative algorithm changes at X affect us at all. Because I think Nikita Bear came out at some point within the last year or two and explicitly said we're going to deprioritize anybody talking about crypto. And so I'm just trying to think of ways that the data could be not skewed but missing that context. Have you looked into that at all?
- [19:32]
Michael Sullivan
Oh, so at the core of the one of the ways I've done this is like very individualized. So the way that a lot of social sentiment has been done previously, things like the fear and greed, the way those tools work is they'll have a couple different things that they pull in. But one of the main social sentiment things they pull in is Reddit posts recently or the top posts on Twitter at the time, and they'll just pull that into the system and they'll say, all right, well, there's an increased amount of posts around this thing that indicates higher levels of sentiment, and that's interesting. But if I always felt that there was a little bit unexplored there, so I took a different approach than that. A lot of those ways to measure sentiment, just take the main posts out there, which get all these massive engagement baiting accounts, these people that just say dumb stuff to get engagement. There's tons of bots everywhere now that's never been more of a problem. So you kind of get a really polluted data set with those things. So I took the exact opposite. I went and individually found people that I know are real, anonymous or whatever. It doesn't really matter as much as they're a person who posts consistently over time. And I've done some validation that they're a real person tweeting consistently over a long duration. So you can kind of watch their actions over time. So you lose a little bit of that algorithmic sway where we all kind of are filtered through the lens of what our algorithm is showing us. I guarantee you my algorithm is wildly different than yours compared to other people too. We're all seeing different things based on our interest, but the way we're interacting with those things can still hold a lot of data. As we'll get into the anger thing here relatively soon, I'm sure. But if you are frequently having angry tweets out there, regardless of what the algorithm is showing you, that's still a very interesting lens into the eyes of those people that have been here for a while. You can really see there's increased levels of anger right now. If it's because the algorithm is showing them more of that negative things or whatever, the algorithms are designed to give you more of what you're searching for, more of what you desire. And sometimes people are disproportionately likely to click on rage bait if they're in specific moods, that kind of thing. And by looking at this through an individualized lens, you can kind of see that stuff rather than just get this broad data aggregation thing that existed in previous versions of the Fun and Greed index.
- [21:58]
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- [22:00]
Podcast Host
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- [24:09]
Michael Saylor
Check it out. Yeah, and so let's dive further. Like how many, how many people have you, I guess, index with the sentiment analysis? Am I on the list? How many. How do you determine whether somebody's an OG or a pleb? And what are some of like the more interesting. I don't know if you feel comfortable picking out a particular account or particular group of accounts and describing how their sentiment has changed or stay consistent over a period of time. But really nailing into the different cohort construction, how you do it and what you're seeing this year particularly so the
- [24:53]
Michael Sullivan
cohort construction ends up being by far the most important thing here. The delineation there between OGs is basically 10 years or more in bitcoin and consistently posting. But there's some problems where you can't just outweighs. Pick a person and then use their data. There's a lot of things behind the scenes and figuring out which data is most pertinent, which one's most useful, these kind of things. Some people don't post for years at a time, and that kind of stuff is kind of tricky. Where I thought about this in a lot of ways, really similar to the way James Chuck does on chain data. But there's a huge difference here in that social sentiment tweets are wildly different than on chain stuff where people can ghost for months at a time. So if you look at very specific individuals and if you go through my own tweets, there might be periods for a month or two where you're not tweeting as much. The way to solve this problem from the data perspective is you cohort people together. There's always going to be specific bits of noise. I had a child, so I'm really excited about stuff. And you can actually see when I'm having positive noises, life events in my data. But if you get a big group of bitcoiners together and look at the things they're talking about in aggregate, you actually get way more interesting stuff. Like as you can see when they're as a collective talking more about negative things, more about positive things. So I've used this much less to be like creepy on specific individuals and just look through specific stuff and way more to see what different groups are doing. So a lot of my efforts have been defining different groups, seeing which groups are more interesting. And a couple that I've logged into as being really fascinating are the older bitcoiners versus the newer bitcoiners, the plebs versus the OGs. Retail or whatever you want to call them, like newer accounts versus older ones. And a lot of my time spent on this is Figuring out who those folks are, seeing how long they've been in bitcoin for, and then kind of comparing them to one another. So one of the ones that has been more interesting is the pub's anger levels, which is what we're looking at here. And I think again, people kind of feel these things, right? It's not like it's a revolutionary new thing to say, like, oh yeah, the plebs are really angry right now. But it's so interesting to me because sometimes you feel these things. But to be able to visualize how bad it actually is has been eye opening to me to get it by the pulse on where stuff actually is. And as we're looking at here, there's one of the longest, most persistent periods of negative emotion here. Essentially persistent anger since like end of 2025.
- [27:30]
Michael Saylor
Yeah, that's an insane chart. Who are they? Who are they most mad at?
- [27:35]
Michael Sullivan
So that's, that's an interesting thing too. So like I like, again, fear and greed has always been this like one thing. You just get like fear, right? But there is a lot more complexity to humans than just like, oh, I'm in a bad mood, I'm in a good mood. Like different emotions have wildly different things. Like if you are fearful, it's very different than if you're angry, right? Like the, like, people are angry, they're much more likely to make different kinds of mistakes. I wrote a long piece recently about this, like analogizing like if you are in a, in a car and somebody cuts you off, you're immediately like, start building stories in your mind. When you're under the influence of anger about like how stupid this person is. They have like different like opains or like you build up whole thing. Compare like. But this holds true through the lens of markets and bitcoin too. Like when people are prices down, people are like pissed off about that. They're disproportionately likely to try to find villains out there to blame. And I think we're seeing that right now with Sailor getting yelled at for selling 32 bitcoins. Like what people desperately, desperately wanted somebody to blame for negative price action. So it's kind of just like this environment that breeds toxicity and then is just looking for somebody to latch onto and yell at. And it's kind of comical. But when you. The thing that's been valuable for me is like recognizing that people are just kind of on edge and kind of angry. And then as soon as somebody gets yelled at, like sayor, it kind of has been a useful lens for me to be like, all right, people are really overreacting to this silly news right now, you know?
- [29:08]
Michael Saylor
Yeah, it makes you wonder too. The. It is funny. The what can you tell or what have you tried to derive between the difference of sentiment from plebs? Because I think you said OGs are relatively more optimistic than plebs are. I've got some thoughts about that, which is I think if you've been around bitcoin for long enough, you realize like, hey, there's really nothing I want to say. Nothing. But it's basically bitcoin's a beast that beats to its own drum and you have to internalize that. You have to stop externalizing what's happening via the day to day price movements on people like Michael Saylor or other actors, institutions, core devs, whoever it may be. And I think it's fascinating that the plebs as you've defined them in this cohort have been angrier for longer than they ever have been in recent memory. At least going back to 2023.
- [30:16]
Michael Sullivan
This is maybe the thing I'm most excited to talk to you about because you locked onto it there already. This is arguably my angriest cohort. It's also across other metrics too. They're much more pessimistic in general. The OGs are not as overly angry right now. Moods are still not amazing, but there is for sure like a huge deviation happening. So in order to get all this data, I need to run these tweets and things through a bunch of AI compute. So it's not a super quick process. Like I don't get all this stuff and immediately have all the information. Like there's a whole like giant pipeline that I've built to get all this stuff. Right. So after the most recent sell off, I was really excited to see like, okay, what is happening here to the sentiment because I collaborated with James Check on a piece called Peak Apathy a couple weeks back, talking about how moods were so persistently just like no one cares right now. I think many of us have felt that. But after this recent sell off, perhaps the time pain capitulation, which he calls it, but I was so fascinated to see how moods had changed. So I immediately just began my pipeline, threw everything through and just looked at it in detail. And what stuck out to me was like the divergence that was beginning has continued to grow both across anger levels and optimism between the OGs and the plebs and conviction, which is maybe the most interesting deviation happening where the plebs conviction Was pretty high. Conviction is a kind of a tricky thing to reason about. I can share my chart here so we have something else to think through. But conviction in general, it's kind of like a non directional metric where you can be convicted for different reasons, right? You can be convicted because things are bad or that bad things are going to happen, or you can be convicted that good things are going to happen. It's sort of all over the place. It's really this. It's in combination with other moods and things that are happening where it gets really interesting. What we're looking at here is the average conviction level in plebs language over time comparatively to bitcoin price. And you'll see that they were very convicted here since the top right, like with growing conviction, this right side here with the higher amount of gold compared to blue. But they were also angry at the time, lots of negative emotions. They've been like highly convicted that bad things were going to happen. But recently their conviction has totally fallen off. The OGs, on the other hand, relatively similar moods in a lot of ways, but the conviction has done the opposite thing. They've grown much more, more convicted around this bottom compared to all the plebs. And to me it just speaks volumes to how much a little bit of experience matters where like, and this is where I'm so curious to hear your thoughts about because like you've been here before, you've seen this before. Like do you not disproportionately think like that experience has given you a different lens to think about this compared to all these new folks who are so scared right now?
- [33:15]
Michael Saylor
Yeah, I think it's definitely, I mean like I said, the pattern recognition, I think. So I got into Bitcoin late 2013 and my first buy was top ticking that bull market right before Mount Gox completely collapsed. And then I wrote it down all the way to 2015 where the capitulation wick was topped out at $1400 in late 2013, early 2014, then over the course of 18 months felt like $200 wicked down to 180 at one point I believe in July 2015. Like I said earlier, the sentiment then was terrible. Then we began to climb back in late 2016, then rolling into 2017. 2017 was one of those surreal years in bitcoin. Probably the most surreal even outside of 21. Last year I would say 17 was probably the most euphoric I've experienced. But I do think, I mean I was writing about it and talking about it a lot on the podcast in the very early days, right when it started. But like the ICO bubble, it was like obvious that was a bubble and there was some animal spirits pushing the markets up in that era. And then you had the fork wars as well. I think that's why, particularly for hardcore bitcoiners, that was an era of relative euphoria, because you had this massive sort of block size war culminate with a legitimate sort of confrontation at the social distributed consensus layer. And depending on who you talk to, I like to think that the good guys won. And that's pretty validating for many people around back then I was like, oh wow, this thing is truly distributed. It's truly run by individuals who decide to run code. So yeah, 2017 was very euphoric and obviously 2018, 2019, it was a bear market, but it was just more boring from my recollection. There was a lot of building going on, there was a lightning network was getting more robust and I think Block, formerly Square coming in, really validating it around that time as well. I think they launched bitcoin buys right, right after the blow off top of 2017. Having Jack Dorsey and Square sort of validate and spin up spiral and everything else that they did was a nice sort of strong anchor indicator, like, hey, we're not crazy. One of the most prolific tech founders in the world is validating this. And then obviously in micro or then you had 2020 Covid and you had that March 12th or March 15th, 50% drop overnight. And everybody's like, whoa, that's crazy. But I think rather quickly people were able to read the tea leaves of what was going to go on with COVID which was massive money printing. And then we had the run up over the next two years and then the Fed started raising rates and that sucked a lot of liquidity out. And then FTX happened shortly after the Fed started hiking rates and you had that. And that was more. That sentiment was more like, hey, there's more bad actors like ICO Bubble Part two with a bunch of sort of easy to call out grifters if you have anything that resembles a bullshit meter. So I think a lot of people, the anger there was like, hey, there's a bunch of grifters shooting in the punch bowl and ruining it for the rest of us. And then you have that roll into 23 in 24 with the ETFs and the government validating Trump running as the bitcoin president, the crypto president. And I think a lot of people, rightly so, are like, all right, the US government is here. That sort of tail risk of government shutdown of bitcoin may be off the table. Run it up to whoever did 126 and then yeah, I think that is where a lot of the divergence I think stems from, particularly if you come in at 2017 or not in 2017. If you came in 2020 and onward, I can imagine a lot of people being like five or six years in like, wait a second, we were supposed to go up forever. The government's on our side, the ETFs are here, gold's ripping, silver ripping, AI is ripping. Why are we selling off? And then you mentioned James Check earlier. I think he's done a good job of reading the on chain data and I think there was a ton of people who held Bitcoin for 10 to 15 years and were saying, hey, I'm going to take some chips off the table, sold into six figure bitcoin. And then obviously on top of that you have just the natural liquidity flows going out of bitcoin after it hit a new all time high into these higher growth opportunities in AI temporarily in precious metals, but I think More so in AI. And now we're sitting here 50% down, people are wondering, when's our time coming? I thought we were going to the hyper bitcoinization. Hand up. I was one of those guys who was saying on the podcast, I was like, I could squint and see like super, super cycle coming. And as soon as the tides turn, I mean, I know I've been around long enough to know like, all right, like you're not gonna like bitcoin is gonna do what it does. It beats to its own drum and it's like hand up, I was wrong. Seems like we got a typical four year cycle here and now sentiments in the shitter. I actually think literally within the last two weeks it's beginning to turn. Because I think some OGs are like recognizing that sentiment is down bad and sort of trying to inject more optimism in the form of like, hey, remember why we're here in the first place. Like we have this peer to peer distributed cash system with a hard cap supply, can't be censored by governments. Look around, do you think government censorship's rising or falling? It's rising. Look around, do you think the government's going to need to print more money? Looking at debt levels and interest expense on debt? Yeah, it looks like they're going to need to print more money. And so it's like, okay, If a B plus a number of other factors are true, then Bitcoin's reason for existing and its fundamental value prop are stronger than ever.
- [40:02]
Michael Sullivan
Yeah, I think there's something beautiful about sell offs too that make people renew their theses around it and remember the actual reason they're here. I feel as though there were so many tourists that have been fleshed out this entire time and kind of remembering the roots to which what is truly profound about this technology, it's kind of a beautiful process, despite it being a little bit painful. This chart here echoes the current divergence that you were just talking about where this is same exact chart measuring conviction and language over time. But this is for the OGs compared to the plebs. And you can see here there's been a lot of volatility in the past, but OGs are disproportionately optimistic right now compared to the pubs who are just. Or not sorry, disproportionately convicted right now comparatively to where the pipes were at, which was much less conviction. And this was one of the more large convergences that I found. I just found this really interesting to your point earlier about the different narratives. There's all these different things that people latch onto, like the four year cycle being dead being a really big and super interesting one. All these different price levels that people latch onto. And they're basically stories that people are telling themselves all the time. Like I mentioned, I've been really into language. Humans are kind of like story driven creatures. We use stories as ways to perceive the world, to think through things. Stories make their way around the bitcoin ecosystem too. Not always based on how truthful they are, but kind of like whatever the market's feeling at the time, people are more optimistic, angry or whatever, and different stories get latched onto. One of the reasons I think this conviction thing is so fascinating is because one of the reasons conviction drops is because your story disintegrates. You felt as though this thing was a truth or a certainty about how the world was going to function, and then you were wrong. And when that happens, you start to have to double check on the things you're saying. You're not as confident comparatively to when your story is proven right. Not necessarily that's bullish or bearish, but just you had a story that you thought defined the way the world worked. If you're proven more right about that story, you grow increasingly convicted. And that's why I think this is so interesting, because we had a bunch of different stories die here and some stories we didn't want to have function like the four year cycle that has continued. And I just think that kind of the different stories that different cohorts of people have told about Bitcoin have been really fascinating to watch through this whole time.
- [42:26]
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- [43:34]
Podcast Host
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- [44:29]
Michael Saylor
Do you have the data on what exactly bitcoiners are convicted on? Obviously it's bitcoin, but what sort of framing they're putting out there that is backing this conviction?
- [44:42]
Michael Sullivan
Well, different groups talk about different things. So like right now, a lot of the conviction I hear is similar things that you just said where it's like the money printing aspect. Just like these fundamental long term theses about bitcoin that are so persuasive to me too, where it's like this thing we're about to cross $40 trillion of debt. There's just all these long term money printing issues that desperately need to be solved. And bitcoin is just this brilliant solution to those things very much come out more. At least I've seen more of them happening currently. The thing I mentioned with different groups too. Saylor just wrote this long piece about different ideologies in bitcoin. I've already started looking at the different people that he was talking about them. One of them he defined as Bitcoin capitalists. That group as a whole is convicted about totally different things than the other bitcoiners are talking about. They're preferred products they're putting out there. And all these other things. Those narratives are disproportionately talked about by that group of people like STRC and SATA, et cetera. Whereas the more technological bitcoiners, people actually building stuff are talking way more about different things. It's like E Cash and building new things. And Quantum is talked about more there. The AI thing is talked about much more frequently in that group of people too, which is kind of interesting. But those are the sorts of things that are different. And that's sort of what I meant earlier about a divergence of bitcoiners. Like these different groups that are almost more siloed and because of the X algorithms kind of breaking us into different chunks, they're not even interacting with each other as much as they may have been in the past. Which kind of farther exacerbates this different little echo chambers that are all sort of segmented. And that's just a crazy different dynamic that happens way more now that probably hasn't quite as much previously.
- [46:43]
Michael Saylor
Yeah, I mean, I remember back in the day on bitcoin Twitter, back in 2015, 2016, when it really, towards the end of 2015, 2016, when it really started picking up, when the fork wars started rumbling and there was no algo back then, it was all chronological. Tweetdeck was the thing. So I would just build list of people. I would personally create my own algos of lists of people. And I have a bitcoin list. You can go to my X profile and find it. I've been building it Since, I think 2013, maybe 2014, but for the longest time, it was just like chronological order of the conversations happening on that list were how I consumed content about bitcoin. And when they took my baby, that is tweetdeck, behind the shed and shot its brains on it really disrupted my information flow. For many years there, I felt like I was plugged into the matrix. And to your point, the algos, I mean, it's very obvious that they're siloing. I mean, not just bitcoiners, Anybody I know now how to manipulate the algo in my favor. If I notice that it's making me angry, it's like, all right, let me go find somebody talking about AI or somebody talking about something positive or somebody doing golf, golf demos, golf coaches showing swing demos and go like some of those suites. So I get more optimism and signal injected into my. Into my feed. But I think it's obvious, once you notice how the algorithm works and reacts to what you're interacting with, you get siloed immediately into what you're interacting with.
- [48:25]
Michael Sullivan
You just showed more and more and more of it. And I've noticed, especially after negative news events, if there's some really bad news item that comes out there and I engage with it at all, all just because I wanted to keep up with the world. I am just given more and more and more and more of that negative content. And you literally have to be conscious about it and try to have it not shoved down your throat by the algorithms. And it's a complex subject because I'm very grateful for the algorithms in other ways so much. The bitcoin community that I know, I came to have some really fantastic friends. And in some ways those have been algorithmically driven friendships in the sense where I had some hobby I was into and we connected with it because of the algorithm. But at the same time, it's so toxic when you're sent down this negative rabbit hole and somebody's spiraling on a topic and the thing they probably need is to have no more of that fed to them automatically, but it's just shoved down their throat. So it's a weird world we live in. I feel that the old just regular social feed days, you just scroll and get the entire history was so amazing in some ways. And I definitely have some nostalgia for that time, for sure.
- [49:37]
Michael Saylor
Yeah. One thing I forgot to mention earlier that I think could contribute to the conviction and the sentiment, the diverging sentiment, even though OGs are still relatively angry compared historically, but compared to plebs, less angry. And obviously, as we can see on this chart, more convicted than plebs are who seem to be losing conviction right now. I think a lot of that has to do with how long you've been in bitcoin and what that means for the value of the bitcoin, the here hold. So anybody's gotten in at 2021, particularly if you got in later that year. I'm just trying to pull up a chart to make sure I'm accurate on these numbers. But yeah, if you got it in 2021, the price of Bitcoin ran up to 60 and you've been in it for five years and you look up and we're at 63,000. I can see why a lot of people are like, oh, this is not what I thought it was, but right where I was five years ago. And obviously that runs with the assumption that you top bought the top and never bought again. I mean, if you DCA'd every two weeks during that period, I think you're still up pretty dramatically considering the bear market of 22 and 23. But I think there is this sort of. People put the mental flag down of like, I got into Bitcoin in April 2021, it was trading at $60,000 and now it's like, oh, it's June of 2026 and it's trading at $63,000. And people are like, what? What did I get? Is it really happening? Is this thing actually valuable?
- [51:21]
Michael Sullivan
It just goes to prove the value of DCA and consistency rather than just yoloing all your money at the top. What's tricky though, is when you look at some of these measures of sentiment and optimism and things, people are so convicted at tops, they're so optimistic at tops, so they disproportionately make terrible decisions when that happens. And I'm not saying this through the lens of Somebody who's an expert at it either looking through some owns data with this. I'm guilty of both of these things. And I think that's extremely common, especially when people come into bitcoin. Because price is basically the biggest advertisement. Right? That's the thing that gets most people initially, no matter how you want to feel about it. Human greed is a really powerful emotion that draws people towards seeing these things. And it's usually after that Price advertisement that you begin to learn, go down the rabbit hole, so to speak, and just do the whole thing and learn how profoundly impactful this technology can be. But very few people at least hear about bitcoin at first because of those things. It's almost always the price that draws people in, which is happening typically when people are optimistic and euphoric and highly convicted.
- [52:26]
Michael Saylor
Yeah, how do we use this sentiment data? What is your hope? By surfacing this data and synthesizing it and making people aware of it. Is there anything actionable from all this?
- [52:39]
Michael Sullivan
Do you think so? I for sure think so. But I'm glad you asked this because I have a lot of people that see it. They're like, all right, man, how can I trade on this? I'm like, that's not really my interest around it. The way I think about it is just to have a more accurate lens of where things are at. Where literally just seeing some of these things for me personally has been valuable. I feel as though I've been more optimistic the more I've looked at it because I see that people are angry. And to just be in your own little algorithmic silo like we were talking about. And feeling angry is very different than if you see like, okay, the broader bitcoin community is pretty pissed off right now. Even if you don't know what they're pissed off at, even if they're having. Talking about different things than you, just like seeing that, like, all right, everybody is angry right now. That means that people are disproportionately likely to believe stupid shit and they're more likely to make bad decisions or want people to blame for stuff. So whenever you see people blaming Saylor for a price sell off because they sold 32 bitcoin, maybe fade that narrow narrative a little bit. Like don't feel quite as fearful because you can see that other people feel that way. That's sort of the lens that I'm looking through things on. Or the other side of that being like, if people are optimistic and really highly convicted, maybe be a little bit cautious or not think that we're going to have a new paradigm thing. It's just a useful lens to be a little bit more practical. Perhaps it's not going to predict to the perfect T some future price, but I think it's a really good way to predict. Make sure you have a good knowledge of where things are at and don't get too wrapped up in whatever dumb story is getting thrown around Twitter at the time and just being able to have a little bit more accurate a lens of where things are going.
- [54:16]
Michael Saylor
Yeah, but I'm thinking like your comments about storytelling earlier, like, is there something. Because I'm conscious about this, obviously just the nature of what I do here on the podcast and in the newsletter and on X to a certain extent too, is that's something I've been fascinated with too affecting narratives. And it's something I became extremely fascinated with about eight years ago when I was working Great American Mining and we were dealing with the ESG narrative headwinds and basically positioning bitcoin mining as good for energy systems, good for humanity, good for human flourishing. Actually counterintuitive to the broader public who thinks that we're wasting energy. It's like, well, no, actually we're being extremely energy efficient by utilizing energy assets that are otherwise stranded or just completely wasted. And we're actually helping bolster the economics of utilities and grid systems so they can reinvest. And then on top of that, like highlighting how objectively absurd the concept of ESG is. And I think whether people want to admit it or not, bitcoin miners or people commenting on the bitcoin mining industry in that period of time did have a positive effect in terms of helping people come to realize that ESG was completely asinine. And so on that note, in recognizing where sentiment and conviction may be at any given point in time and using that as a trigger, not maybe as a buy, but as a, as like a reframing and reinvigoration of the, the fundamentals, which is I think in the last month specifically is really what I've been focusing on. It's like, okay, what's going on outside of bitcoin that is going to drive people to Bitcoin? You look at the straight of Hermus, the weaponization of the incumbent financial and monetary system. Like, it's like, hey, they're preventing people from accessing their assets. And it's even happening on stablecoin Rails now too. Like, if you think, if you approach it unemotionally, yes, you may not agree with anybody or everybody that's using Bitcoin or any one entity that's using Bitcoin. But you have to admit that Bitcoin, due to its design, can be used by anybody. And if it can be and they're being shut out from other means of payment or value storage, they're going to find Bitcoin useful. And that is bullish. But again, going back to storytelling narrative and using the sentiment and conviction data that you've aggregated to trigger an alarm that says, hey, get the good why we're here, content out, or something like that.
- [57:12]
Michael Sullivan
Yeah, there's a lot of different stuff here. This is a fun one. There's all sorts of different stories that get told out there. I think what can be really interesting about this is how the story is told under the context of some of these other things. One of the more interesting ones to me was looking at the strategic bitcoin reserve as a story and how it aligned with other emotions. And Price too. When Price was ripping at the end of 2024, people were talking about strategic bitcoin reserve and there was actually four forward movement on it too, with the government, right? It was a thing, but the narrative out there was it was going to be this persistent nation state buyer and it was just going to be like crazy, euphoric bull run because of it. Right. And it's kind of funny that it was specifically when people were the most optimistic that that narrative took off. Right? And presently there is movement on the strategic bitcoin reserve. Like there's stuff happening out there, there is continued action. But what's crazy is the mention rate is just zero. It is very infrequently talked about. There's like Scott Besson was just out there talking about it as well. That thing that tweet about it, the videos about it that got almost no traction. If that same thing happened back at the end of 2024, that would have been way up there. Everybody would have latched on and say this thing is happening. And I think it's really interesting looking at the same story under the context of really optimistic regimes versus more fearful angry ones where people just don't take these stories as seriously, where they're underweighting the probability of this. It's still all kind of probabilistic. Anything could happen. We could have massive sell offs because something crazy happens over in the Middle east or we could have some positive news that breaks. It's just impossible to really know future stuff in that manner. But it is, I think, useful to think what kind of stories are people underweighting or overweighting. And that sbr, in my opinion, is like one of them where people just don't care about it right now for whatever reason and probably because of a lot of the boredom and the anger and the poor moods. Right? Yeah, like.
- [59:12]
Michael Saylor
Yeah, like the suite, I mean, it's definitely not. It's not a great performer for us. I mean, it got 184,000 views, but 478, like 61 retweets. But yeah. Scott Besson was basically asked by Tim Scott, like, what's going on with all of our initiatives in the realm of bitcoin and crypto. And Scott Besant explicitly said, we're working on the strategic bitcoin reserve. It's going to take time, but we want to do it right. It's important. It's signaling. No, we haven't forgotten about this. We're going to try and get a bill passed, which is incredibly bullish and to your point, not many people covering it. And even when we covered it, yeah, 184,000 impressions is pretty good. But the engagement on the tweet itself was not as high as one might expect.
- [59:58]
Michael Sullivan
And it's like, if you post that same thing, man, in the middle of a euphoric bull market, that thing's doing 10,000 likes, or if not more, whatever the number is. But it's just really interesting because, again, the anger out there, you get the dumbest possible post, people talking about sailor blowing up. And that does crazy numbers because people are desperately looking for villains, and not even just the broader public, but bitcoiners are looking for villains too, because they're angry about something. There's just this residual emotional environment that's out there. And when stuff happens, certain kinds of stories are more likely to latch on into those environments. And I think that lens is really interesting to me where there's all these other positive movements too. Clarity act is happening too. There's a lot of stuff I'm not always the biggest fan of in it. But regardless, it's definitely this narrative that's really positive. Right. And people are not caring about it quite as much because where we're at presently with. With moods, that's sort of those. It's always like the dev or the variance between them. Right. That's most interesting. It's not just like one single metric that's going to be useful, but, like, really looking at these and looking at them in the context of everything else is, to me, is the most fascinating stuff.
- [61:07]
Michael Saylor
And so what do you think could be the Catalyst for sentiment shift here or what? What is needed for a sentiment shift?
- [61:16]
Michael Sullivan
So again, plebs are not very convicted right now. They're basically another way to frame that is they're like looking for a story to latch onto because a new story that they can latch onto and allow them to have new conviction. Basically people are. Humans are always looking for new stories to tell. We're always looking for a thing to latch onto to understand the world better. So stuff will come up. What that'll be I have no idea yet. I'll for sure be watching it because one of the interesting things is like seeing what early trends are starting to be talked about disproportionately. A really big trend was like the STRC thing as like this perpetual buyer bitcoin. Monetizing the bond market, that was a really big thing. I don't think that is done yet as a narrative. That one was very consistently growing over time. That's something. But sometimes narratives, like the relationship between price and narrative is interesting too. Like narratives pop up because of price oftentimes don't necessarily weed it. We're kind of looking for stories, not necessarily finding them ahead of time. So it's always interesting thing there. Something else I will mention that's kind of interesting to me here in this specific market dynamic is the four year cycle. So like we've talked about, when stories are proven incorrect, it's really volatile, right? Because it's a thing that we all locked onto as a truth that we were setting as like this is our new barometer for how the world works. So to me one of the interesting things right now is the four year cycle where everybody is super highly convicted. The four year cycle cycle is just not going to break. It's this reality. A lot of people are very convicted. So I haven't done this crazy deeply because I'm not quite as interested in the crypto space. But I did want to look at them a little bit to see what the crypto folks were doing. They're doing terribly, just really bad. It's hilarious. But a lot of those folks now are so convicted. The four year cycle just mathematically guaranteed that we're going to bottom in October and then have another four year bull run. So to me this narrative is absolutely fascinating presently where people are pretty locked in that that's going to be the thing, right? So if anything happens where that narrative is challenged at all, even if it's like, I'm not saying like we're going to see a run up, like who knows? It's still like just this crazy different. Like there's so many things that can happen. All I'm saying is that if something does change here, if we do see any positive price action or even months from now, like before the four year cycle, bottom should happen. If those things do start happening, this narrative unravels very, very, very, very quickly. Because normally when narratives are destroyed, there's volatility around them because people realize they were totally wrong, offsides, their view of the world was just incorrect. That is going to be so interesting to me watching the four year cycle narrative, how it gets talked about more when it gets talked about more and the conviction around it specifically.
- [64:04]
Michael Saylor
Yeah, yeah, the four year cycle. I'm trying to think of like what? Because I mean I was like, I said hand up. I was like, super cycle. I think the strategic reserve was like, governments are going to be buying, like, we're done now. It's like, all right, four year cycle safe. And Dina miss was right. He's been talking about this publicly on X. I think he was one of the more level headed bitcoiners reacting last year. He was like, nope, I'm convinced the four year cycle still a thing. We're gonna, we're gonna drift lower for the next year. And up to this point that's proven to be true. And like who, like you said, like some catalyst will emerge. We'll latch onto will. The word I'm looking for it will confirm our priors and the conviction will rise. I'm like, yeah, we were right, we were right. But I'm trying to think of like the but again, going back to what I've been trying to do the last few weeks, is there any consistent persistent narrative catalyst that or could there emerge a more persistent, inconsistent narrative that sort of does take us to, oh, bitcoin's here. It's not going away. Everybody needs to get some adoption. It's just going to experience an iPhone moment where it goes from this niche asset that a bunch of us crazy people are into in some institutions and now nation states are as well too. It becomes a, oh, you don't have bitcoin, you have bad money. Like, you need to get better money.
- [65:45]
Michael Sullivan
Sometimes I think it takes pain too. Like the trucker protest being an example of that, where you literally see people use bitcoin in a way that like nothing else could have solved kind of thing. Like sometimes it takes these negative events to prove out the underlying thesis and why that's so important. Like sometimes it's not even necessarily a positive narrative. It's like a bad thing about money printing or like the way the government, our financial systems work. That's the thing that'll set people over the line because like, I don't have any charts of it, but one of the things I did look at was the phrase cold storage. And that being so much less of a primarily talked about thing than it was even back a few years ago. But these properties of bitcoin remain unchanged. And I'm certain that during specific regimes of monetary action by our governments, these things will come back again. These properties are profoundly useful, but we kind of forget that at times, especially in a first world country like the US it's just not as needed for a lot of people in the bitcoin space and they don't see that. But there will be events that happen inevitably that prove out the value of this thesis once more.
- [66:56]
Michael Saylor
Yeah, it's like proof of keys day. Proof of keys day used to be a big thing until Trace mayor left. Like every January 3rd people would go to their exchange and sweep the bitcoin they had in the exchange to cold storage. And that that narrative's completely died. I do think it's beginning to re emerge, but just from a different angle because I think one of the anger, one of the points that's driving people towards anger, as they believe of paper bitcoin summer and obviously the assumptions of paper bitcoin are that there's rehypothecation going on at the. The largest buyers over the last two, three years are black BlackRock on behalf of their customers. And these treasury companies that are custody at Coinbase people are just running wild like, are they actually buying the bitcoin? Is it there? And I think you're beginning to see a reemergence, at least from my sort of anecdotal observations that people are coming back to, oh, you may need to put this in cold storage. And it's not because it's the safest way. It's because you need to incite the bank run to unearth every hypothecation that may exist.
- [68:16]
Michael Sullivan
Paper bitcoin was a phrase I was super curious about. It's definitely been a narrative popping up. The whole paper bitcoin really took off in summer of 2025. Paper Bitcoin Summer was a whole thing. But what I found interesting here was it's really risen up more recently, but in a negative context. I have it labeled here. It's. It really peaked as a narrative alongside high levels of anger because people were looking for somebody to blame for stuff. This is not to say there is not some blame there. There very well could be not. Well, there's for sure price manipulation happening out there. Right. Especially because in the paper bitcoin markets, you're able to do these kinds of things. But it's kind of interesting to me that the narratives come and go with the emotion. It's not necessarily like, it's not always based on truth that stories arise. It's often based on, like, what people want to hear, what they're like, looking for out there. Right?
- [69:12]
Michael Saylor
Yeah. No, you can see this resolving in many different ways. Like right now, Stretch, I think it traded at like $91 over the weekend or late last week. I don't know where it is now, but it looks like it's drifting back to par. But you have this temporary two day sort of blow up on Twitter over the weekend. We're like, oh, Stretch is going to lose its peg. It's the next Terra Luna. It's going to blow up. It's going to be massive. Yeah, it's back at like almost $97. Like, stretch just reclaims the peg. It's like, oh, well, maybe the mechanisms are working and this is a perpetual bitcoin mining machine.
- [69:51]
Michael Sullivan
So this one's maybe been maybe the most interesting narrative I've looked at. This is Stretch talked about over time across the bitcoin community. And you can see when it came into existence in July or end of July, I think it was literally the last day, like the 31st or something. And then you can see it grow over time. But what's so interesting about it, in my opinion, is the variation, the volatility of the narrative, which is kind of a cool concept. Like, narratives are not always linear up into the right. There's a lot of up and down based on how news comes out. Right. But Stretch in general has been this persistent and growing narrative over time. The first time I looked at this, it was just so obviously up in the right. It's been kind of falling off here more recently. But even still, it's like lower lows, higher highs generally when thinking about it. And it's kind of non directional in a way. Right. It's not just that people are really euphoric about it, but sometimes people are talking about it in a negative context. But still, all marketing or all PR is good pr, even if it's negative sometimes this is becoming a thing that people are talking about and it's growing consistently. So this is definitely, in my opinion, a narrative that's not going anywhere. At least apparent anywhere right now. And this has been much more durable of a narrative compared to some other ones.
- [71:09]
Michael Saylor
What are some other narratives that you're following that people may not be obvious to some people.
- [71:16]
Michael Sullivan
So it may not be obvious. Like a lot of the ones are relatively obvious because it's like the ones that are talked about the. The most frequently are the interesting ones to look at. Quantum was one that I've looked at pretty closely because that also so many of these actually have really similar chart dynamics where it's like if it's in fearful, negative, fearful narrative, they are up into the right recently really high mention rates. If it's a positive narrative, they are low currently. Clarity act was another one that I looked at pretty closely that's getting talked about more now. But people are kind of underweighting generally. Stuff like recession as a word was interesting. There was a couple spikes to talk about that. Things like MNAV over time where people. You can really see the rate at which MNAV was talked about in these treasury companies was blowing off. Right. As well as all the euphoric MNAV valuations, where that was kind of a fun one. I'm sort of all over the place with it because it's interesting to look at and it's interesting to look how to different groups talk about different things too. I don't have any charts with it to share today, but MSTR as a narrative is talked about 10x more in the bitcoin capitalist community that Saylor has coined. Compared to the technologists or the fundamentalists, just different groups care about different things, latch onto different narratives, especially because we are all siloed by our algorithms again. And despite trying to stay up to date with things, you probably have a better pulse on this than the vast majority of people. But a lot of bitcoiners are kind of in their own siloed algorithmic world and don't always have insight to what other groups are talking about. So it's really interesting now seeing what other people are thinking about and when it's different from you. And the capitalist group in general are actually very highly convicted right now, which is another interesting thing.
- [73:09]
Michael Saylor
Yeah. Do you think there's value? So I think I would fall into the hardcore bitcoin technologist bucket because I talk about it a lot. It's what I care about and that's actually what interests me the most. To that point though, I do follow what's going on with Stretch. What's going on with mstr, the M. Nav. Com. I feel like just Due to the nature of what I do, I have to have a sort of well rounded understanding of what's happening across the spectrum. But to your point, these silos do exist. And do you think it would be beneficial for people in certain silos to really understand what's happening in the other silos? And if so, how do you, how do you do that?
- [73:56]
Michael Sullivan
That's already been one of the benefits to this for me is like seeing what people are talking about and seeing how moods are different between them. Seeing the mood differences too between the technologists and the fundamentalists and the capitalists has been really interesting. You can really see the moods are pretty poor generally among the more fundamentalist group of people, at least those in my system. I literally just did this this weekend, so it's kind of new to me. I haven't explored it quite as deeply as some of the other ones, but seeing how those things differ is fascinating. Another one is bip110. I specifically have cohorted the bip 110 users and how they're doing right now and their moods are even worse than the plebs that we've looked at across the board. Anger, fear, us, optimism and lower conviction too. Just the whole host of negative and then not convicted about stuff. Those sorts of things are interesting because maybe I was plugged into some of these communities, but seeing where they're at and where their specific sentiment is, that has been interesting to me to get a pulse for things too, because you can take what you want away from that. I know it's a pretty charged topic, but that does give you a pretty good lens into how confident different groups are that their thing is a winning thing. The capitalists on the other hand, are extremely confident and not necessarily always positively happy right now, but they're a very high conviction that they are right. And that alone is a very interesting takeaway in my opinion.
- [75:21]
Michael Saylor
Yeah, no, the BIP 110, I can just tell from experience they like to reply guy. Me and the TFTC account a lot because we're not as supportive as they would like us to be. And it's always very, very vulgar, very negative. I'm an enemy of bitcoin now.
- [75:40]
Michael Sullivan
Yeah, there's a lot of that going on. And again, people are looking for villains, right? Doesn't take much to become a villain when everybody's kind of pissed off.
- [75:48]
Michael Saylor
Yeah, I'm just some guy. Just doesn't agree with bip 110. I'm a villain now. This is fascinating. What else can we pull from this. What action should people take after listening to this episode?
- [76:05]
Michael Sullivan
Well, I think having continued conviction in bitcoin right now would be maybe the one thing I'd like to leave people with. It's so easy to get wrapped up in the more human side of stuff and fall into whatever narratives out there and fall into the fear that prices are down. But in my opinion, it's just never been a better time to revisit the reasons you're here and double down on your conviction. Again, it's in times like these that really do separate people. Right now is the precise time you should be stacking in the same way that James Check has the quartiles. People are super pissed off right now. And rather than that be a reason for you to get wrapped up in the anger and check out and get bored, double down. Now is a great time to buy bitcoin. I am buying bitcoin hard right now. Don't want to tell people what to do, but to me, kind of fading that. And when you see anger and fear, I know talking so much about negative emotions is not always this positive thing, but in my opinion, the takeaway is you should be freaking optimistic. Optimistic right now. Like, this is exactly the things you would expect to see during bottoms. Like, who knows what the price will do in the short term. I have no freaking clue. But this is your signal right here.
- [77:18]
Michael Saylor
I think one thing we do have a clue of, we could say with a high degree of certainty, is that there's blood in the streets right now. That's. That's typically when the best buying opportunities arise. And again, we don't get financial advice on this show at all. But I think I concur with you that using my personal pattern recognition of sentiment over the years without the help of AI tools, but my own AI brain, my meat AI tool that is my brain. It's one of those periods where it's like, yeah, everybody's pissed. Nobody's paying attention to bitcoin because AI is taking the window of sales. And those historically have been the best times to double down. To your point, where should I send people to find out more about your analysis?
- [78:10]
Michael Sullivan
Yeah, so the best way I'm pretty active on X. My handle is Sully Michaelvin. Like my name, but just inverted. And then I have a full archive of this work that I've been really pumping a lot more effort into on Substack. Or you can just search by name. Michael Sullivan and I do all sorts of stuff there and have a full, like way in depth versions of some of these charts, writings about them, videos about them, et cetera, et cetera. I'll be sharing a lot more my stuff over there, too.
- [78:33]
Michael Saylor
Well, thank you for doing the work, sir. It's fascinating. It's a fascinating sociological dive into what's going on in the bitcoin markets. And I've been loving watching you put out the charts and following it as you've been sort of iterating on, on the analysis and diving deeper into certain cohorts and basically surfacing what, what people are actually thinking right now. I think it's highly valuable data. And to your point earlier, it's like it's not going to tell you when to buy or when we're going to bottom tick or top tick, but it'll. It'll help you out directionally, which I think is extremely valuable.
- [79:11]
Michael Sullivan
Yeah, exactly. That's how I'm thinking about it too.
- [79:14]
Michael Saylor
Awesome. Well, Michael, this has been an absolute pleasure. We'll have to do this again at some point, catch up. If sentiment gets worse, if it gets better, I'm sure we'll have something to talk about. We'll be able to pick out narratives that arise and drive sentiment certain ways. That'll be a fun, ongoing conversation.
- [79:33]
Michael Sullivan
Yeah, these things are a certainty. I guarantee you another story will evolve and become the thing. It always happens.
- [79:39]
Michael Saylor
Ever. All right, that's all we got today, freaks. Peace and love.
- [79:44]
Podcast Host
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