BTC Sessions - This Bitcoin Rally Feels Fake (The Data Says Otherwise) | Michael Sullivan

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

Mentor Sessions 092: Michael Sullivan explains Bitcoin sentiment analysis, emotional cohort signals, OG optimism, narrative shifts, and why the data may point to a bottom.Bitcoin sentiment just did something it rarely does after a 22% rip: it stayed calm. No euphoria, no desire spike, no retail flooding back — and that gap between the price move and the emotional data is where the real signal lives.Michael Sullivan — an engineer and fiction writer turned Bitcoin sentiment analyst — breaks down how he tracks 14 distinct emotions across cohorts of Bitcoiners, from OGs and technologists to MSTR treasury speculators. You'll learn why he cohorts the crowd instead of scraping social media, why the Fear & Greed Index misses all the nuance, and why he reads OG optimism as one of the most reliable early signals that positive things are on the horizon. You'll see why 'desire' language sits inversely correlated with price, why the near-total absence of a new narrative can be wildly bullish near a bottom, and how the BIP-110 debate produced algorithmic engagement patterns that looked artificially farmed. He also lays out the AI-bubble-to-Bitcoin thesis and why he's personally bearish by instinct but bullish on the data.⏱️ Timestamps:0:00 - Intro0:38 - Why this rally feels like disbelief1:09 - Massive sentiment phase shift after crash2:01 - Rally lacks expected euphoria levels3:05 - Tracking caring language in ColdCard event3:58 - Technologists impressed most during crisis5:12 - Studying Saylor's four Bitcoin cohorts6:33 - MSTR shareholders as conviction outlier7:18 - OG optimism as reliable bullish signal7:59 - Are OGs turning optimistic now9:56 - Emotions linked to time and excitement11:40 - Downturn negative language uniquely severe12:40 - Desire language at market tops and bottoms16:52 - How language analysis became his focus19:11 - BIP-110 debate through psychology lens21:09 - Algorithmic engagement that felt farmed26:55 - AI bots distorting sentiment data29:47 - Spotting leaders and narrative first movers32:56 - Narratives shaping markets and price34:37 - Absence of narrative as bullish signal36:42 - Does price or emotion move first40:03 - AI deflation versus Bitcoin scarcity thesis40:30 - Euphoria missing at prior all-time high45:17 - Bitcoiners versus treasury company speculators50:07 - Conviction language versus hedging explained54:03 - Denoising sarcasm with cohort analysis59:31 - Signals needed to confirm bearish view1:00:06 - Data pointing bullish over coming months1:02:10 - Where to follow Michael's latest workMichael writes deep analysis on Bitcoin sentiment and shares it on X and Substack — links below.🔗 Links & Resources:https://x.com/SullyMichaelvan⚡Previous Episode - Tom Luongo: https://youtu.be/zkvdfR7LTuU🔔 Subscribe for weekly Bitcoin Podcasts🐦 Follow on X: https://x.com/BTCSessions🐦 Follow on X: https://x.com/theBTCmentor⚡Sovereign Sessions — AI, Privacy, and Bitcoin education: http://youtube.com/@SovereignSessions?sub_confirmation=1💡BOOK Private Sessions with Nathan, Ben and the BTC Mentor Team: Master self-custody, hardware, multisig, Lightning, privacy, and more. 👉 Visit btcmentor.io ⚡ POWERED by Abundant Mines: Fully managed Bitcoin mining. Learn more at https://qrco.de/bgYKPB⚡ Sponsored by BITCOIN WELL: Best Place to BUY & SELL BITCOINhttps://qrco.de/bfiDC6#Bitcoin #BitcoinSentiment #BTCSessions #BTC #MarketPsychology #MichaelSullivan #DisbeliefRally #BitcoinRally #BitcoinBottom #BitcoinCohorts #BitcoinOG #CryptoPsychology #FearAndGreed #NarrativeShifts #OnChainAnalysis #BitcoinAnalysis #CryptoSentiment #BitcoinTwitter #SelfCustody #BitcoinTreasury #MSTR #StackSats #BIP110 #BitcoinInterview

I'm wondering if we can hold it going into next week, if we're going to maintain here, if we're going to go back and test lower lows again. So now people are expecting to get slapped in the face again. This feels like a disbelief rally. I think we're going to go back down because we've been slapped in the face so many times. But the data, to me, is not confirming that. Humans don't make decisions rationally or logically, they make them emotionally. And if you really, really take that to heart, the world makes a whole lot more sense.

Kind of give you a lens of where the crowds are at, where the new people are at, where traders are focused in these kinds of things. When the OGs are more excited than the newer investors has been. a pretty good signal that positive things are on the horizon. It's going to be really interesting to watch that the next week or so. All right, good morning, Michael. Thank you so much for joining me today. Very excited to have this conversation. Very curious, actually, to have this conversation. Because if we go back like three weeks, you want to ask me about sentiment, I would have probably said, I don't think

it possibly could have gotten any worse. Like, it was really hard being a Bitcoin in the space. But now we had a little bit of a rally. We're peeking up a little bit. We're tapping 80K. Seems to improve. But if I'm being honest, it doesn't feel as bullish as I would have necessarily anticipated. Now, I could be wrong. That's just my read. So tell me, what are you seeing in the data? What are things looking like for you behind the scenes? What's up, Nathan? Good to be here. Appreciate you having me. That's kind of my take as well. So I've been obsessively focused on sentiment here. And it's been really interesting during the cold card stuff, BIP-110 debates, like just how checked out, angry at each other's throats people have been. And that's sort of been the story for a while now. It's

been a continuation of that things have been getting worse and worse. But we just had this massive flip of sentiment here, basically, like a phase shift that happened. So after this happened, I was like, again, like, let's look at all my metrics here because I track these things intensely. We can get into that. I'm sure, like how I'm doing it, what I'm looking at. But it really wasn't as pronounced as I was expecting. Like a lot of the times on really large, volatile moves, especially to the upside, like this one, you'd expect just like engagement to skyrocket, excitement to go through the roof. And there's some of that for sure. And there's people talking about like options and more speculation, these sorts of things. But every single person that I see

commenting about it, and some of them that I've actually like studied through their language as well, like it's not as euphoric as you might expect after something like this. And I think that's kind of what you might expect in sort of a disbelief rally. Everything's probabilistic. I'm not like 100% locked into that worldview, but that's kind of like the lens I'm looking through right now. interesting it's almost like there's a too good to be true kind of assumption underneath that they're just not okay or not willing to accept that we might be moving up before the end of summer before the fall a little bit I want to backtrack for one second, and we'll get into metrics and some of the other things, but I'm actually curious because I wouldn't know what to anticipate. During the cold card, like the height of the cold card situation, what was the sentiment like?

Because you kind of got, there's so much going on. There's mass panic. Everyone kind of freaking out. There's questioning self-custy. But the same time, too, I saw a lot of, we'll say, like, not necessarily optimism, but re-engagement with talking about self-custody. A lot of people volunteering their time, their efforts. There's kind of like this community rally.

what did it look like in the data? You described it pretty well. So one of the things that I've always really felt was lacking in sentiment. Like the fear and greed injects just loses all nuance. I resent the metric, to be honest with you. Humans are really complex. We have lots of different emotions. And one of them is like how much you're caring for another person.

And that's not, I track a whole bunch of different emotions. I've almost never looked at how much people are expressing caring for one another. But it was crazy because the day of that event, days after that event, there was more than that than I've ever seen in Bitcoin's history. because people were kind of going out of their way to, like, express how frustrated they were about the situation, how much they cared about other people. I was so impressed by the response to the events to. And who was responding to, it was interesting as well. Engagement was way higher because people just, like, flood to social media to see what's going on. So that was a big thing.

Some of my most fascinating parts of the work are, like, it's not just scraping social media, but it's like spending a lot of time figuring out who to watch. And one of the things I did was cohort Bitcoiners kind of by like the more fundamentalist or technologist's perspective. And the people that are usually the programmers were the ones that impress me the most, that whole period. Their activities skyrocketed. They were helping people. They were staying up all night, just dropping everything and helping people. Like the BTC sessions team, for example, like you guys were so involved in that. And to me, like, that was just such a, it showed who the true leaders in Bitcoin are.

Like, there's kind of like people forget, like, this is truly a. technology. And I could really, that whole event for me, it was personally shifted my perspective on like who really like is the people we should look up to in Bitcoin. Lots of brilliant people across all the different cohorts to the space and whatnot. But that was like one of the really positives for me was just watching how that group of people responded to this event. No, very interesting. It's good to see and it's good to hear. It's, it was definitely nice after what felt like a crab walk sideways kind of making everybody blah and a little bit passive and a little bit kind of removed and maybe stepping back. So that was, of course, the silver line there.

I'm curious kind of further unpacking that a little bit. You talked about the different demographics that you're watching and kind of people that you're flagging. We had technologists, but what other cohorts in Bitcoin are you seeing and are they responding kind of similarly right now with this disbelief rally? So I've done all sorts of different crazy stuff. The fundamentalist, capitalist one came from sailors definitions right here like the four cohorts of Bitcoin. So I just ran with those because I wanted to see what the differences were. The one I didn't highlight is The capitalist, fundamentalists, and technologists, those are one. But like I've done like the BIP 110 debate, I studied that extremely closely.

I've studied people that are like more traders in this space. So like people that are making more short-term price predictions. That's been actually one of the more interesting ones because those people are like, the Bitcoiners are around all the time, right? But some people are kind of shorter term. So if you like follow on chain analysis, these trader groups are kind of more like a short-term holder, potentially. They're like the hot money that moves around.

Found that super interesting. people like in leadership positions is another one I've done. I've followed people in more political space, just all over the place looking at different subgroups because Bitcoin has so many different groups of people doing so many different things all the time. There's a lot of differences there. Also, all the Treasury Company stocks and those sorts of things, seeing how those people are differentiating.

Because seeing people get more optimistic and more fearful is interesting, but it's really interesting we see one group react more strongly to an event than the other. That alone has been by far the most interesting. part of this work. I would imagine that the outlier would be kind of where the signal is. So even right now, is there any one of those groups that's a bit of an outlier from the rest? Are they all behaving the same? So they're definitely not behaving the same. I did a piece maybe a couple weeks ago, week and a half ago. The conviction among the capitalist group like MSTR shareholders was really high comparatively to the rest of the Bitcoin ecosystem, which I found interesting, specifically before the most

recent price run up. The other side of that, the people that were very pro-bip 10, as you might imagine their engagements checked off. Like they would, I kind of compared them to the people, the more traditional, like, investor space. And they were extremely active leading up to the B110 thing, but they've fallen off. Their moods have fallen off. Their angers increased. It's just kind of an out of good situation there.

The two groups that maybe are, some of them was interesting that I totally forgot to mention, actually, are like the, I call them the Puebs versus the OGs, basically delineated by time, the people that have been in the space much longer versus shorter. That's been one of the most interesting deviations. historically when the OGs are more excited than the newer investors has been a pretty good signal that positive things are on the horizon. Like none of these things are perfect, right? There's like different lenses to look through stuff.

I'm not like saying this is like the perfect market predicting signal. But those people have been around a lot longer. They've seen these patterns before when OGs get optimistic. I take that pretty seriously because it's not like them expressively saying, hey, I think we're about to see like some 100K in two weeks. It's just like subtle language shifts, subtle increases in engagement. those kind of things. Like those to me are very interesting events specifically in those kind of groups. Is that what we're seeing with OGs right now? Are they getting a little more optimistic?

Yeah, that's exactly why I brought it up is there is a deviation. We're very early stages in optimism. So I don't know if I can go so far to say they're like super optimistic. But a bunch of these positive emotions are kind of an inflection point right now where we're starting to see a little bit more positivity. We the story has been. We've just been despair. It's been getting like people have been getting more boring, more angry, less desire. They're just checked out and don't care at all. Engagement's been steadily trending downward. So it's not like we're the inverse yet. We're not happy, but we're starting to see like an upward inflection. And to me, that alone says a lot. And that's part of the reason I think this volatile upside move has been confusing to people

because it's the first really good thing we've had happened in such a long time. And humans are like pattern matching an emotional creature. So when we've been in this like negative, down turn, negative down turn, negative downturn. Every time you've been optimistic for the last a year, you got slapped in the face. So now people are expecting to get slapped in the face again, which is again why I'm kind of like, this feels like a disbelief rally to me. Actually, I should restate that. My default is that I'm embarrassed right now. Like my emotions, like, I think we're going to go back down because we've been slapped in the face so many times. But the data, to me, is not confirming that. To me, the way I'm reading it is like,

everybody kind of feels that way. We're like not trusting of this. But like, it kind of counterintuitive way that sort of makes me think that like this might genuinely be a disboy frilly. But again, it's going to be really interesting to watch those proceeds in the next week or so. Yeah, I'm very curious to see if we can hold, because I'm even looking right now, we're just above 80K, and I'm wondering if we can hold it going into next week, if we're going to maintain here, if we're going to go back and test lower lows again. Specifically, again, going back kind of the OGs and what we're seeing with a little bit of an upturn in terms of optimism and positive wording in terms of sentiment, is there any historical parallels?

Have we seen this before? Is there anything in the rear view that like this kind of looks like early 2020, this kind of looks like something else? Or does this seem to be a new event or one that we just don't have the data for? So when I looked at excitement, that's one of the higher signal emotions, kind of to start abstract, then I'll get more specific. Emotions have relationships with time, which is a trip. It's not something I'd considered ever before doing this work. But like, for example, here, excitement is a very short-term-looking emotion. So if you're excited about something, it's like more here and now.

Like for an example in your own life, if you have a vacation out in the future, it's pretty exciting. But when it's like tomorrow, it's really exciting. Optimism is more of a forward-looking emotion where it's like I'm very positive about the future. So differences, right? So when you see a very, like different emotions spike differently too. So excitement goes up really rapidly in short periods of time. So typically after these moves like this, there's a lot of excitement when people are really

expecting price to run up immediately. We're not seeing any of that. But when I look back, like at preview. bare market moves. So I think it was like early 2023. I can't remember exactly the prices, but we were chopping below like 20K. And we had the first move up that was like up

into like the 22 range. Again, don't quote me exactly on that. I did look at this when I was studying it, but I don't know the precise numbers. There was much more excitement that there is right now. Historically, a lot of these moves up that have correlated with excitement. This is like one of the few outliers where there really has not been as much excitement in the language.

And it's just funky because like if you go out and you're scroll your timeline, you're going to see people talking about stuff for like, I've seen people bragging about their call options and whatnot, which just triggered me thinking like, okay, well, this is just speculative activity again. But in general, like, it's really on the margins and algorithms kind of amplify things more, which kind of gives us, like, incorrect views of what's actually happening, which is one of the reasons I like this work because it kind of lets you, I see, like, all right, what's the average individual out there actually doing, thinking, saying, compared to just these outlier ones that are out there. But to put a more clear cap on that,

so much about this recent price downturn has been really unique. Like a bunch of different language types, the whole constellation of negative emotions have been just like so bad. Some of these things, like the boredom has not been lower in many, many years. The desiring language, which is one that is very interesting. We maybe talk about more depth later, but that's the lowest it's been that I've ever measured it as of very recently.

So these are all things that you'd see a lot historically in bare market, bottoms, but like we're just not seeing a bunch of excitement come back yet. We're so far from having any retail back yet. It's just like Bitcoin are starting to get a little bit more optimistic. And to me, that's like signal to be more optimistic perhaps because it's like earlier stages than people might feel because we're kind of, again, pattern matching the recent negative emotional biases of the market. You know what makes sense? You mentioned the desiring language. What specifically did you kind of mean when you say desiring language? So this is a fun trip. Again, like I, this has not been as much of a, I don't know, it was not a huge expert in this going in.

I found this stuff incredibly interesting. I've been obsessed with language, studying language, saying the words that people use. But as I've got into this, I started looking through the data. I've came across a lot of observations in that. And one of the strongest correlations I came across with everything was desiring language in correlation with like Bitcoin price. And that means like somebody expressing how much they want for something to happen, basically. And the correlation I found was that this like wanting language happens extremely high levels towards the later stages of bull markets. And this has happened every one of the last three bull markets where it's like in that final stage.

People are just like over there like, oh, I really want Bitcoin to return to all time highs or go to this next level. And it doesn't happen. And I think it's so interesting for a couple of reasons. I'm still to be honest with you thinking through why this happens because it's like a kind of a trippy concept to like why is this emotional mood correlated with the market anyway. I think part of it is like related to human action where like after you've taken action, you're invested. All you have love to do is express that you want for something to happen. There's nothing else you can do.

The inverse of that is just like, okay, I'm cool. Whatever happens happens. I'm along for the ride. I'm just like, I'm going to keep stacking stats, saying humble and doing my thing. Historically, that's usually when Bitcoin does well because people are just kind of like stacking and they're not like obsessed about the price action and checking and refreshing Twitter every day. And that signal alone is like really inversely correlated the price in a really interesting way. Right now we're at like again, or as of three weeks ago, four weeks ago, somewhere in there, we were at all time lows for desire in all Bitcoin's history.

Things are starting to go upward very quickly here, but it's far, far, far from anywhere we've seen with like the high levels in the past. It's very interesting. It immediately kind of reminds me of like the reason you buy a lottery ticket is not so that you win the lottery is so that you can dream about winning the lottery. Like it becomes like a form of entertainment and it's just fantasy. and this desiring language is kind of keying into that for me in the sense that I'm almost imagining it like, you know we're getting euphoric, you know we're getting near the top when everyone starts

checking Zillow. I start thinking about like, oh, if I hit this price point, then I can do this and letting them play and kind of romanticize what they will do when it actually gets there. So that makes sense, that feels kind of euphoric to me. I can kind of locked it. And I'm curious because there was something that you said in there, you talk about like, I want.

I'm curious if you've done any research with regards to specifically locus of control if there's any signal and there maybe something you haven't even looked at, whether or not people are speaking about, like, using terms like we or group turns or if they're speaking about things outside of themselves or speaking about things. So I'm thinking the difference of like, you know, like, we will, we will handle this. We will be stronger versus I want and thinking about like their own personal viewpoint. Like have you played with that sort of a metric ever? I haven't played with a not like

specifically through the lines of locust of control. That's super interesting. There's, there are some group dynamics I've played with like when individuals are deviating farther from the norm, like those sorts of things, because like you'll start to get people who are leading indicators on emotional regime changes, that kind of thing, where, because I'm measuring the average bit-pointer, like different motion levels across a bunch of them. But that's just the average. There's people that are usually early adopters to different regimes or recognize a shift is happening sooner than later, talk about it more, act differently beforehand. And those are ending up being really interesting signals historically. Still, like, exploring some of these things,

though, like, that's a fantastic point. There's a lot of these. things that you can do with this. And I feel as though I'm kind of live discovering, like this new kind of analysis. It's been way deeper than I anticipated right away. And the rabbit hole feels like it keeps getting deeper. The more I like pull on this thread and explore it, which is part of the reason I've had so much fun sharing kind of my learnings in public writing about it so extensively. I'm a writer by nature. I've been a writer for a while. And like just exploring these ideas, writing about them a lot, thinking about them really hard and why these trends exist at all has been like a really interesting ones in human psychology in general relating to markets, but even more

broadly because like Bitcoiners are intense debates with like the BIP 110 thing, which was fascinating, like seeing how these like group think dynamics play out and those kind of things, but through the lens of like psychology. Very, very, I just feel very fortunate to be on this journey doing this thing, honestly. Was there, I'm just kind of curious as a quick side tangent too. What was it got you started looking so specifically at language kind of analysis for sentiment? Was it just a curiosity or what kind of pushed you down the rabbit hole? Basically. So, I've been an engineer for like 14 years building UIs and front ends and visualization, so I was very familiar with this kind of thing.

And I've been a fiction writer for about a decade, written a couple books. And like one of the things in that is you design characters language to slowly adapt over time to indicate character changes. Like if you do it well, you do it really subtly. If you do it really well, you'll like change a character's word that they use over time to indicate that they talk to this character who uses this kind of language. Like it gets wild, the little things you can do with minute language differences. Characters do this.

But humans also do this too. We've all probably had experiences where you can tell that like a friend is in a new relationship. And they start using, they just start talking differently because they're so excited. This different language they use. And the inverse of that is when somebody's getting more nihilistic or depressed. You can like, if you were to track their language for a year, you would see the way they talk about themselves actually changes. this happens with characters, but it also happens all the time. So that was kind of like my idea and I wanted to explore it deeply.

I just looked at my own data first to see if there was anything interesting there. And it turned out there was. I was like bull posting Bitcoin tops. I was like emotionally wrapped up in narratives when I very first got into Bitcoin and these kinds of things. I was like, okay, this is fascinating. And I just kept exploring, exploring, from there. And it's been a really wild adventure. That's fascinating.

So it's interesting. It's a bit of a lost art. my opinion. Like I feel like the humanities and language arts and studying that sort of that skill, like being a very good writer, right, very good speaker, being a very good communicator is unbelievably powerful. But I feel like that whole is a profession has been sciopped by, we'll just call it the communist infiltrating the systems. That there, the value there has kind of gone by the way side and we may have gone a little bit too strong in terms of like we're more traditional like engineering mathematics, that sort of thing. There is value. There's incredible value

even just from a market perspective and being able to maximize and utilize and observe those skills. So jumping back for a second, we mentioned BIP 110. And I know that you were doing, you're following them quite closely. I do want to kind of go over of what you saw during that whole kind of evolution. But I'm really curious, you mentioned that you were still following them a little bit and what you're seeing right now. I'm, I have a way to articulate it. I'm surprised. I'm surprised that there hasn't been, we'll say, as many people kind of like,

returning to the fold. Like, hey, it didn't work. You know, we'll go into the next battle, that sort of thing. It still felt very divided to me. And the, almost like digging the heels in. Again, it could be my feet,

could be the wrong thing that I'm seeing, but almost like digging their heels in. You know what? This is, I am not trying to be offensive, but I'm sure someone's going to take offense to it, but hey, welcome to the internet. So it's going to happen.

It reminds me kind of of a doomsday cult where they're like, the end of the world is coming, and then that date hits and the aliens don't show up. The end of the world doesn't happen. but their conviction's actually stronger on the other side. It didn't be like, oh, here's new evidence that, you know, that wasn't actually correct.

It's no, no, no, no, their conviction's harder and we've now changed the date moved on to the next target. I'm curious what you're seeing in that space. Yeah, I love this topic. Not because I love the B110 debate, because I've gotten inflamed so much for even public. I know. But it's like, it's interesting from a human psychology perspective. So I find that part of it endlessly interesting. I'll start with what I observed first.

So I had been following this since, like, October. over 2025, basically, before it was BIP 110. Just curious. And I was pretty amenable to the points of the BIP 110 side very early on, really open to their arguments and whatnot. I'm still friends with a bunch of people that are in that realm, respect them dearly. The reason I started writing about it all is because I actually had developed a really unique framework to analyze this precise thing. So I was like, man, I have to do something even if I do risk getting yelled at about it. And what I saw right away was like the conviction levels of people that were against BIP 110 were much higher than the people that were pro BIP 110. The anger levels of the people that were very big proponents of Bip 110 were really high.

The way they were communicating was way more aggressive. I had casually observed some interesting algorithmic dynamics that I ended up exploring super deeply with the piece. Maybe the most interesting thing in there was like the algorithmic bump that people would get by posting about BIP 110. and this is not some like conspiratorial like algorithms or like changing debate. It's just like a there's a very, there was a group of people that cared so deeply about Bip 110 that it made, it was their entire personality. It was all they tweeted about and they would like every single thing that had to do with Bip 110 compared to the vast majority of Bitcoiners. They didn't give a shit about Bip 110. So you'd get these dynamics where like Lynn Alden would talk about Bip 110 and then Mechanic and Luke would get 10 times the likes that.

Lynn would get, which was just unheard of because Lynn's usually one ratioing people. Lynn usually dominates everything, yeah. But to me, what that says is like Lynn's audience doesn't care about this debate at all. The algorithm is like, hey, Lynn's talking about BIP 110. We're not going to surface this because we know you don't like it. Comparatively to the BIP 110 crew, that's like, this is our, we will show you everything by Mechanic and Luke. And those kind of, there could be some bot stuff in there.

I don't want to like say that's guaranteed. Some of the dynamics made it seem like that could for sure be a possibility just based on how high the engagement was in some of these things. It was just too much. It was artificial. It felt a little bit farmed. There was just a huge amount of it. And it would happen so quickly.

And I personally, like, I'm getting more speculative. I should, like, be careful. But, like, I have heard from people that they think that they were reported quite a bit when talking about BIP 110. Yeah. If you report a post on X, it is like, like, just like it kills all engagement for it. The opposite side is like people that were against BIP 110 publicly. had terrible engagement.

And I, I, I formalized this against their baselines. So I take people who I talked about Bitcoin before BIP 110 and after Bip 110. After they became a BIP 110 proponent, they got way higher engagement in all their posts. So it's kind of like this incentive to talk about it more comparatively to people that were just started talking against Bip 110. They got way lower engagement comparatively their average post. Like people don't necessarily always follow that depending on the person.

Like Olin is going to just like say what's on our mind probably. but if you get terrible engagement on something and no one cares about it and you get just attacked in droves by people, like you're probably not going to talk about it as much. And I think that dynamic was really at the core of this and why that like algorithm make divide happen between the two groups. And part of the reason I wanted to hear the piece is just to surface this and show people like, hey, I don't, if you're seeing Bip 110 all over your timeline, you are probably in a bit of an echo chamber here. And if you're not seeing it, you might be blind to like how intense these people are. Yeah. That was a very long answer to the first part of your question. The other part was

like where they're at now. I've stopped tracking them quite as closely. I still am. Like they're in general, moods are bad. Engagements just off a quiff more than any other group. They're kind of checked out, understandably running off with their tail between their lanes after they've kind of everything's kind of failed. In general, though, moods are bad, convictions, all these things. But that's an average representation. Like there's different ways to look at these data sets. Like I alluded to earlier with the different individuals, if you're to look like a cratter or something like that. Like you're not going to see the same data. Like some people have doubled down, have went stronger, but it's very much this vocal minority. It's definitely not the norm.

I think the normal person is just kind of like sitting on the sidelines being patient. I don't think they're fully out of Bitcoin. I think they're likely to at least be open to coming back. I don't know yet. I genuinely have kind of like withdrawn from it a bit myself just because I got so much heat for a little while there. I'm kind of exhausted about the whole thing, to be honest with you. You know them. You love them. Longtime supporter of the channel. This episode is sponsored by Bitcoin Well. where you can buy and sell Bitcoin using e-transfer in Canada and ACH in the States, where they never hold onto it. Everything goes directly to your own wallet. And for the Americans, they're launching a Bitcoin IRA and the wait list is open.

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I can even just like personally, it's just anecdotal, but like a few things that come to mind. Like one of my favorite thinkers, God rest of soul, Scott Adams. Huge impact on the way I look at persuasion and communication and loved his work. And I remember I'm talking about, I don't even know if it was the 2016 election

or if it was the 2020 or which one, I think it was mostly the 2021. But he was talking about like voting fraud. It happens. I guarantee it. Like there's absolutely voter fraud. We don't know the scale, but think of all the things that are at stake, and of course, they're going to cheat. People are going to cheat on all sides. It'll always happen. And I think the same thing right here,

like you mentioned, like, there may have been bots. There totally was. I can almost say for certain there was bots. And the reason being is not because I know there were bots is because when you view something is that important. And then the cost and barrier to doing so is so low. Why wouldn't you? I bet you on all sides, I bet you people were spinning up nodes just to play with node count. I bet you people were running bots. I bet you there was some flag campaigns going around. I can, tell you again, it's just purely speculation on my YouTube back end. I can see things get downvoted really fast out of the gate. It is like, that's a little suspicious. Like you would have barely made it past the intro at the point in time. And so, of course, there would be. And which actually

brings up another interesting sort of framework. When we're looking at language and sentiment and trying to gauge where the crowd is maybe heading, it almost feels like we're watching like a flock of birds and trying to see which way they're going to turn. AI, bots, humans writing, less. Is that distorting your data or is that something that you're concerned about kind of moving forward? So, yeah, I love this question. Also, the flock analogy is a brilliant one because like it's really just like an emergent movement pattern that happens. That's great. I might steal that for future analogies. Enjoy. Okay, so this is really fascinating. So again, the fear and greed index, I've resented it. I just don't think it's very high signal. There's some stuff there.

Like, it's, it's sort of pausing on that because I actually don't know. I've looked at tons of times just for the show or just kind of get a rough gauge. What is it even looking at? I don't know where the data be feeding into the few and greed is coming from. So there's a bunch of different sources. It's like multivariate, lots of different inputs. One of the ones that I dislike the most about it is like it just scan social media sources like Reddit and whatnot or like titles of big news articles getting released.

It's like a headline. Yeah. To me, this is at the root of why a lot of sentiment analysis is not very good because it just scrapes all of social media. And when you do that, what you're getting by almost by definition is the loudest voices. So you just think if you scroll Bitcoin Twitter right now, you're going to see a bunch of people that have very low signal that just share like inflammatory news stories on either side of things. No signal there. They just share whatever they need to. There's a lot of AI bots out there like inflating the numbers of likes on these things. So if you just go in and scan like what's the big posts on Reddit, what are the big posts on X today, you're just going to get like the worst information ever. What's way more interesting is actually spend more time. and be more conscious of who you're watching than that, find people on an individual level

and see how they're shifting their individual language over time. To me, that's way more interesting. And that's been like probably the most- Better control group. Sorry, that jumped down on me. It's like, you got to, rather than just looking at the surface headline and once being reposted, and of course, that can be affected, you're right.

You're probably getting a much better analysis by looking at the directional changes on the individual level from a baseline that you already had previously. Sorry, I interrupted. I just wanted to get that in there. Yeah, you're spot on there. That's what, it's frustrating because like people want a singular thing like, oh, you can just like scrape and get sentiment. And you for sure can do that to some degree.

But the way I'm describing is more problematic because it's very expensive data. It's a lot of effort to go through there and like manually verify that things look good. This person fits into this group, this group, this group. So it ends up being a ton of work in doing that sort of stuff. But the output you get is so much better, so much more nuanced and like isn't just influenced by AI. Because I don't, like I just straight up just don't. get bot accounts. I don't have this problem because if you're one of those big aggregator accounts who just shares inflammatory stuff, I don't care. I don't follow you at all. That's not to say like people

don't comment on those that I do track. So that could like put there's always like these dynamics out there. But it basically sidesteps a huge part of the problem with traditional social scraping analysis. I think it's just like an objectively better way to do it. I'm very biased because that's what I do. But I like, I think it's a way better way to solve for the problem on an individualized basis. Very interesting. Okay, I would agree. You also mentioned earlier the idea of kind of identifying leaders and first movers, ones that tend to react a little bit sooner. How are you identifying those outliers? Is it just by looking at the data and seeing which one moved historically first or is there in some other metric or things that you're considering? That's basically it, yeah, because this is a hard thing for me to do visually on my own. And there's so many different metrics, too.

And this gets tricky because there's so much noise out there as well. Like somebody could be shifting because they had a death in the family or they have some crazy business opportunity that hasn't really excited. Like there's so much emotionality that could be totally separate from Bitcoin. So you've got to be careful with this and you got to look over the longer term. But basically, like what you said was accurate where you could find. these people see if they consistently are leading. So if the crowd is starting to become more optimistic, whether they early to that move or were they're going to lead to that move. You can do the same thing

with narratives, which is like a whole other part of this kind of work where you can track a narrative over time. Like, were they earlier to start talking about like the strategic Bitcoin Reserve, where they later, were they earlier to talk about like STRC or whatever the thing is, whatever the new thing is, right? A really good example of this would be Saylor with digital credit. Oh, yeah. Let's unpack that a little bit. Yeah, he's ground zero for that narrative, right? But then there's different ways to visualize this again. But he says that word.

A bunch of people in the treasury space also attached to that word. It becomes a thing. And now it's said by everybody, basically, in the Bitcoin community, varying degrees of connotations around that. But in general, like that, that's a narrative that he coined. And that's just one example, but there's a lot of that. And this was one of the things that, like, the writing thing made me very sensitive to. because like actually like in podcast you'll probably recognize this too like you'll see somebody say a word in a podcast and then other people will say that word too like a bunch say order has a ton of these he's always like

that great example because he'll like say something crazy and other people will say it too and kind of like you can tell without them saying who they learned it from you know that they just listen to that podcast or heard that person talking because the language they use because again we're like the flock of birds to use smart guys analogy that he just gave me Like we follow those people and like subconsciously like lead and our words are not just like this Direct representation of our underlying thoughts. It's also like a A way that we follow the crowd kind of we say things that the people around us say It's a social signal. I'm immediately reminded of

President Trump actually because there's for all the love and hate that he might get there are some things that he is incredibly good at and One of them is those sticky naming convention right like sleepy joe biden right he would just drop these he seems sometimes tease them a little bit but from a persuasion from a leadership perspective he would introduce something new into like the lexicon and you just see everybody pick it up and start using the same words even if it was in opposition or if it was just signaling alignment with them but you're right you'll see those little moments narrative is incredibly important right it's it's how we make sense of our world and our reality and everything that we're seeing we almost need to attach the narrative to it whether it makes sense

or not, which it can be, it can be both fun, and you can have those moments of kind of realization, like, you know, why is, why is Bitcoin rallying right now? Okay, it's a treasury secretary, Scott percent is coming out there, and we're doing the treasury buybacks. That's not, that actually hasn't happened yet, right? That has not happened at all. But it's really good story, and it kind of fits with the timing, so maybe that's the explanation. Like, we're always looking for something to grab onto. So with regards to that, we're talking about these, these narrative shifts from the leaderships. What narratives are you following right now? What's kind of maybe popped up on the radar that might be a shift or something that's, that's,

of new interest. I got to talk about the story thing first because again, background as a fiction writer. Like this was huge to me. And like I don't think people realize like how much story is intertwined with human history. Like we are storytelling machines. A story was like one of the original forms of human data compression where you can like pack like entire like theories, ways of being for a culture into short, compressed stories that are then memeable and spreadable over time. And if we don't have those, we try to find stories to lash onto to explain ourselves. Stories don't even, like, when the Bitcoin space, too, like the more I've talked about

narratives, like, I've noticed that people that have been around longer find this more interesting in general because if you've been in Bitcoin for a while, you've watched different language be used to describe what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin's just doing its own thing, splitting out blocks every 10 minutes. but the way that humans relate to, it changes in the stories we attach to its shift over time. And I find that so interesting. So some of the people that are generally longer in the market have been here have been asking me like, hey, man, are you seeing anything like your question here? Like, where the new narrative is popping up?

Because this always seems to happen, right? Like price goes down. People are checked out. There's no more hope. One of the things that made me extremely bullish, like that I wrote a piece like two weeks ago now. It was like right before the last pump. One of the things that I've closed that with is like people don't have any narrative right now. I talked to a lot of people and they're like, there's no new narrative for Bitcoin.

There's no new narrative for Bitcoin. And their perception was, this is bearish. I disagreed completely. I also actually thought that the complete absence of narrative is insanely bullish because, like, that's exactly the kind of thing you find at bottoms where, like, people can't find a thing to latch onto. They really, really want something to watch onto to make them feel all warm and fuzzy because they're all fearful and angry, but they don't have anything. Like, that's exactly the kind of behavior you'd expect around bottoms, especially with boredom to.

well, we're starting to get new narratives since that. It doesn't even matter how true they are, to your point. It doesn't matter if he hasn't bought anything yet. They just wanted something to latch on to do to make them feel good about the Bitcoin price moving up. And that is a kind of a core thing I think about a lot where everybody thinks that like these narratives are the thing and you need to find a new narrative. But oftentimes, like the emotional regime often like predates the narrative.

Like if you're pissed off, you'll look for certain things because it biases you to think a certain way. If you're optimistic and you hear any whispers of a strategic Bitcoin reserve, you disproportionately give a probability of that happening higher than it should be potentially. And you just can't get away from that. We all live in like a sea of sentiment or like an emotional soup. And these things don't exist in isolation. We like latch on to narratives more if whatever emotional state. Like people will latch on as sale or selling a thousand Bitcoin more or 32 Bitcoin or whatever the first number was more when they're angry. That same thing happens at a bull market top, it's a very different reaction. So there's like a interrelationship

between sentiment and narrative in that way and you can't escape one versus the other. I still don't have a narrative that I'm like totally convinced is going to be the next one. Watching it super closely, the best in one for sure is where stuff's at right now. But yeah, I think people are very much like watching this right now. And I don't know that I have a super clear answer yet. Interesting. Kay, I want to unpack that a little bit more and kind of get your thoughts. And I also, I'll throw it out there just to don't forget as well, too, the idea of like price versus emotion, which one's actually moving first in terms of the data. But yeah, because that's an interesting point that I've been kind of stuck on.

And thinking about a lot more during, we'll say like the bear market kind of doldrums and boredom there is what's going to get people excited again? It may just be price ripping. Like the story might be like, this is the million dollar run, right? It might just be we have some sort of volatility to the upside so large that actually tracks attention from outside the space again and kind of bringing that all in because I'm curious specifically with the idea of the traders, the short-term guys here. If we look back at the previous bull run, actually, if we look back at the previous all-time high at around 120,

I'm curious, it never felt euphoric to me. Again, it could be in my own little echo chamber, my own little algorithm feed. But I'm curious on the level of like excitement, euphoria, did it feel like a bull market top? Or did it feel like something different? Because it felt like we never really got there. Like we were always just waiting for a little bit more. It was good, but it wasn't necessarily that great. And I never got, like, if I compare it back to 20, when we were getting the, like, the cab driver, your aunt, your dad, your uncle, your cousin, everybody's talking about it. It's all excited. It seems like the AI narrative sucked all the air out of the room. And we did not have the same level of excitement in Bitcoin as I would

have anticipated, which brings me back to the whole idea of like, what's going to have to happen in order to bring them back in? It may be, even if I'm just speculating completely off the top of my head, that the next kickoff for Bitcoin's narrative isn't even necessarily coming from our space originally. If I'm thinking about people outside coming in, it may be a failure of a different narrative. AI bubble pops, but Bitcoin doesn't react. And do you get to like, holy crap, it is the store of value savings and people flooding in that sort of way? Tons of random stuff there, Michael, but give me your initial feedback. Give me or read your thoughts. Yeah, we got to go through all. There's some good ones. You might have to refresh my memory.

But the AI one in general, I think, is really interesting. This is a narrative I specifically studied because it's been a huge one that's taken the wind out of the sales for Bitcoin. It's not evenly distributed either. That's another one of the ones that I found that OGs talk about way more than newer folks, which was interesting. Like they've been way more into the technology in general. Kind of to give you a scattered answer to your scattered question, I also think that the AI narrative is going to be closely related to the future of Bitcoin too. I don't think this is a short-term price move kind of narrative. But of the long term, to me, it's like this brilliant intertwining of two technologies.

One brings about deflation, essentially, indefinitely, as we are able to solve problems cheaper, better, faster. The other one is perfect scarcity that, like, is everything gets cheaper and easier to make for humans. This thing is just consistent. That's kind of a more complex thing to conceptualize for people. I don't know that that's going to be something retail latches onto overnight, but it's just like a fundamental truth, in my opinion,

that those two things, like over time, are going to lead to Bitcoin going up in very large amounts and more abundance for all of us, very kind of intertwined with like the Jeff Booth thesis, right? Those sorts of ideas. So AI has me insanely optimistically for Bitcoin. I think they're a tightly coupled idea personally. Yeah, I think that those are the AI thing.

What was your question before that one? Speaking specifically towards euphoria during the previous all-time high, that I'm curious if you have any information regarding the data when we were around that was like 126 or whatever the hell it was, when we were up at those levels, it didn't, it didn't feel like 20,

I'm losing my timeline, it didn't feel like 2021. It didn't feel like the previous cycle, the previous bull market where like everyone was talking about it outside of our space. We had captured the imagination even briefly for retail at large. I felt like retail didn't really ever come in at the 120 point. It didn't feel super euphoric. I didn't see,

I wasn't seeing too much of like, you know, we're going to a million this time. limits over super cycle. It felt much more muted specifically in the desire language, specifically in the excitement as compared to the previous time four years ago. I'm curious if that's what you've seen. And then that just brought the idea of AI because I'm trying to think like what gets retail excited again. Because I don't think they, I don't think they really showed up. I didn't feel like they really cared this time around. And I'm wondering maybe it has to come from

a position of pain, which was the idea of AI trade going bad. or something else like another COVID lockdown, something else sparking them to look for the defensive versus the optimistic sort of side. Lots there. But euphoria at 120. Yeah. So I actually, I do think retail came.

I just think it was weird. Like compared to 2021, so I actually measured all these emotions, the broader Bitcoin cohort. Typically, you get excitement early and excitement around peaky volatility times. You get optimism rising. And then after that, you start to get the higher levels of desiring language. That's kind of like a bull market. if you've seen those like charts a bit.

At least, it's not what's showing the chart, but that's kind of what my historical data has showed has happened relatively frequently for Bitcoin. We actually saw all those dynamics, but what was unique about them is they were not evenly distributed in the Bitcoin community. If you just stacked Bitcoin,

you had a very different emotional experience compared to if you were somebody who bought Treasury Company options at the top. Oh, okay. They came in, but they bought Treasury companies and they bought it at the top. They bought MSTR, like in general,

a ton, a ton of interest came into those things. And at some margin, like people that really wanted the crazy speculation bought call options and stuff this time and got absolutely hammered. And like basically those people have experienced a bear market the likes of like 2015 or maybe even earlier because some of them are down 100% or down like 99% to focus on the other treasury companies.

There was a dual leveraged MSTR ETF. I was looking at like two weeks ago. I think it was like 97%. It was like, oh, ooh, that's, rough. Oh, yeah, that gladiator guy went all in that one in particular. Yeah, there's a lot of that out there. And those people are adjacent to Bitcoin. So a lot of the new speculative money went into those things and didn't like fully do all the self-custody like Bitcoin didn't own the real thing. So like that's another reason I've been enjoying the cohorting because like you can totally lose

sight of that depending on your algorithm. I really like to just, I kind of a diverse range of interest. I love exploring like different spaces. So I was embedded into kind of all the different ones even back down. I find it interesting. But you could easily, like the Treasury folks are oblivious to some of the things, the more privacy, my Bitcoiners you've been talking about. Some of the folks like building new stuff in the space, they just have no idea. If you go there are mentions of like talking about nodes or self-custody or like any kind of like multi-sig, like, well, that increased after the cold card incident. But like before that, they just didn't care at all. On the other side of that, people that are more into those things just didn't follow the

treasury space as much either. And they didn't realize how much speculative means. was happening inside that. I think that was a huge, huge factor of the last bull market phase where lots of new people came into those instruments and just got murdered. I'm very curious about them in particular because, like, did they completely leave? Did they end up buying real Bitcoin? What are they going to do moving forward and how are they going to act? Because I think those people in particular are going to be really interesting to see if they

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Is there anything, I'm very curious, between those kind of two cores, because you're right, I mean, I was not aware that there was this huge speculative mania in that space. I think I picked up on like a little bit of it, but not necessarily to the extent that you're talking about. Is there anything that you can see in terms of demographic information between those two cohorts? Like I'll give you an example.

So for me, I find that like Bitcoiners are going to be high openness. They're going to be extremely disagreeable, usually, right? Tend to be a little bit more intellectual into ideas rather than people. And you can kind of see that kind of reoccurring personality trades kind of across the space. And mostly dudes. I can tell you in the YouTube demographic, it is hugely male skewed. For the women watching, I love you, and thank you for being here. But it is mostly male.

I'm wondering if you've noticed any trends, correlations between that treasury group versus the Bitcoin group. Because it seems so obvious, but I never actually intuitively or internalized splitting those into different camps. Oh, there's for sure differences like that. I have, there's some things I want to do, but I haven't done yet that get into the kind of questionable realm of like, I'm curious about like how intelligent of words people are using. Like you can like actually track differences like that between groups. You can get crazy with this and it's sort of like, I just haven't done it yet,

but I'm kind of curious. I may in the future, I may not. Some of these get like I sort of feel a bit creepy if I get too granular with some of those things. I've been wanting to do like a Myers-Briggs style analysis on language. There's limits to how much you can tell just by language. Like you can't always get somebody's like deep thoughts on how they think about a topic that can do any if they're in one group versus the other.

With that entire list of qualifiers out of the way, though, I do have some thoughts. And that's like there is for sure a difference between these groups. I totally relate to the higher ideas thing about the older Bitcoiners generally and people that are more like into just holding Bitcoin. I just think about my own journey into Bitcoin, like reading like Gigi's books and stuff like that. Somebody's like deep ideas, like just getting totally wrapped up in that. Like that's definitely did not happen in this.

same way to people that came in in like 2020-24, 2025. The big differences, though, are the who of that group. Like these, in my opinion, this is not something I've actually seen through the data. This is just kind of my own observations through watching it quite closely. There's people that are much more traditional market folks over there. So they're not responding in the same way. They're not reading the Bitcoin standard and yolowing everything into Bitcoin a week later, like some people may have done. Like those kind of things happened a lot with Bitcoiners, where you go down the rabbit hole, you go down it quick, you get euphoric into Bitcoin. That's myself included. That I don't think happen in the same way with these folks. They were much more methodical.

They average into positions. They like the DCA component is just happening, but it's in like a fidelity account or something like that instead. They average across these other investments. And because of that, there's like, there's just way different dynamics for them and how they react compared to the regular Bitcoin are folks. They're just doing different things, thinking about different things. They have different narratives they care about and all these sorts of things. This is also another argument for why we may have had less euphoria because some of these folks were likely to like enter iBit or whatever. Price went up a lot and they started averaging out because they just wanted to like make their portfolio, have a certain allocation to Bitcoin.

By rebalancing. Yeah. And on the opposite side of that's true as well when Bitcoin starts going down again, well, I need to get back up to 5% allocation. So I'm going to buy a little bit more. And it kind of like reduces volatility, the upside and downside across the asset. So I think there's some dynamics there. I've heard other people articulate that argument pretty well. And I do think there's a lot of validity to that. I find that to be pretty compelling. But we're all kind of on the ship together now, right? Like there's all sorts of different groups that we're all here on the same orange coin together. It's kind of interesting how the different groups interact. But at the end of the day, like one of the most beautiful things about Bitcoin to me, in my opinion, is that like it marries

the incentives across all of them. You could be some Wall Street guy. But as long as you is you're holding Bitcoin, you're actually like helping somebody who's using it sovereignly and privately in the jungles of Costa Rica, right? I just think that's beautiful. I do still think that's still a thing that's happening. No, I completely agree. And even one reflecting on there, one thing that said is, I wonder if the MSTR group ties less of their identity into Bitcoin as well, too.

I imagine you'd probably see that divergence. Excuse me. And then with regards to even like, you know, everyone's coming in and everyone, it was Jeff Booth, who said it to Ben, who said it to me many times. was the hardest thing about Bitcoin is your worst enemy using it, makes it stronger for you. And that honest to me felt like one of the lessons I think was maybe lost, even in the Bit110 saga, that like agreeing with concerns and problems and a lot of the ideals that they were putting forth, it's regardless, it's like the people you hate are going to be here.

So don't crash out. Like everyone's jumping on this thing. It's going to be like hating somebody for using email at some point in time. It'll be ubiquitous. And so it was always going to be messy. You're going to be people that you really don't like in the space. and that's just kind of nationally moving forward. Jumping back a little bit, because I think we mentioned it early on with regards to the sentiment analysis,

specifically of the MSTR cohort. I believe, if I remember correctly, you said that they were, I think, quite bullish right now. There's quite a lot of positive talk coming out of the MSTR group right now. Do I have that correct, first and foremost? Kind of. There's some granularity here with emotions, too. A conviction doesn't inherently mean they're optimistic. Okay, so, yeah, they're very convicted, correct?

Yeah, very different things technically. They're also more optimistic in general. So but conviction language basically is like confidence. The inverse of conviction is hedging. So you put a lot of qualifiers on stuff. That means you're probably not very convicted. Um, so it can be really indicative of where people are going because like optimism is one

thing, but to be optimistic and really convicted at the same time typically shows up around tops like people are convinced we're going to see really positive features, right? The opposite shows up around bottoms where you see like higher anger, fear, boredom and conviction. It's same high conviction, but very different meaning in that context. So yeah, there's some differences there.

Conviction is kind of related to stories and storytelling to get back to that point, too, where if you're very cautious about your view of the world, you'll use more hedging language. And your view of the world's related to the story that you tell about the world. So whenever I hear conviction or think about conviction, I also think about through the lens of the stories that you're telling. Like, how confident are you in your worldview? So really, I thought about that a lot when I was looking at the biblical.

110 debate when they were much more or much less convicted overall. So they were still in this debate, but like you could tell early stages before any of the forking happened, they were starting to use more hedging language compared to the people that were vocally against it, weren't doing it at all. And they maybe, the language happens subconsciously. It also happens consciously. You can try to like use words. But if you talk over long enough duration, there's like little cues that'll come out, you'll hedge more. I do it. Everybody does it. It's hard to get away from. It's just a human thing. And I think those were some of the early end. caters for that. Interesting. All right. Okay, so with regards to conviction, the idea that I'm playing

around with you, tell me where I go astray. And first and foremost, I'll use some hedging language. You can absolutely kind of turn this on me as well. I know where that it cuts both ways. I'm wondering in the conviction of the MSTR group specifically, and this could not necessarily now, but it could pop up kind of continuously along the way. How would you distinguish between conviction and like the gambler's dilemma. The kind of the like, I'm, are you saying it for the crowd or are you saying it to assure yourself?

Do you kind of get what I'm getting at here? Yeah, for sure. Well, because that's why I was saying the last one. Like language isn't always indicative of the underlying emotion. It's like sometimes you say you something to try to convince yourself. It's true. People do that a lot. And that happens too.

The thing is like you can't, you just got to study it. You got to see how it shows up and see when it trends certain ways. Like, when you do it for an individual, there's more of that too. That's one of the reasons I think the cohorting is so powerful because like, like I mentioned before when you get an individual who says something or has something crazy happen to their life or they're maybe levered long and they got liquidated. Like, I mean, as that approach is maybe they use more conviction.

That's one thing. But like not every single person that cohort is doing the exact same thing at the exact same time. They could be to some degree. But if you cohort a big enough group of people and you look at the language across them, you get a decent representation for that community overall. There's some of that happening. I can't, like, say I've eliminated that at all, but the cohorting does solve a lot of that individual noise.

And there's some of that, too. Like, I kind of just make, format the data, find the people look at them and then try to understand what's going on rather than be like, all right, well, maybe they're talking about this thing. Or maybe they're using sarcasm here. That's a question I get a lot because, like, people talk differently, right? Some people will be sarcastic around tops. They'll say, I go, I'm selling all my Bitcoin now, and clearly that they're not.

If you look at them and you look at their individual history, they're all, they're sarcastic once every three weeks. So it's like not as meaningful, right? So you kind of like denoise that if you cohort people and look at an individual. Love it. All right. I asked a little bit earlier, at least I brought up to the idea of the emotions versus the price in terms of looking at the data. I would assume price moves first, but I'm wondering if you're able to get an early detection on where we might be going from emotional shifts within the flock of bird. So the two, I did a, after I've been doing this for a while, I was like, all right, I'm going to analyze this as deeply as possible from like higher level signals.

There's a lot of different ways you can look at emotions. I talked about all the moods, but you can also look at them with different granularities with different smoothings and different weighted averages because, for example, you could have a one day where there's really high anger or excitement. And it could be because of like an earthquake or something happened in the world or like that flood that happened in the podcast. Paul, right? There could be a lot of different emotional swing. What's more interesting, in my opinion, is when you look at like an emotional regime, consecutive days of really elevated anger or consecutive days of excitement optimism. So I'll do some of that. And those seem to be significantly higher signals. It's probably not going to tell you where Bitcoin's moving tomorrow, but from a really broader zoomed out lens, they seem to be historically pretty darn good signals. The low desire being one,

one good one, excitement being really high one. One of the highest ones I ever did during this analysis. One of the higher correlations was looking at the OG's excitement levels, comparatively the Puebs excitement levels. When they got really disproportionately excited, that was super interesting. It's preceded quite a few runups. That's why I really like to watch that closely. Again, it's like I'm really not like a traitor. This is not like, I came to this way more through like a language interest, but those trends do exist out there. Whether or not they remain true remains to be seen, I'm going to keep studying it exporia and sharing it close. but that stuff does exist out there

but there's relationships in that way for sure and to answer like the main core point there about like what leads because like it's the narrative leading price to price lead narrative thing but it's like that but with another element with sentiment included in there with emotion and I think they're all very much interrelated

I really love on chain analysts analysis in general one of the reasons being human action like I mentioned like if you move a UTXO on chain, that's a really, really strong vote that you believe this thing strongly. Maybe you had an emergency that you do to do something, but in aggregate, when you look at all of them, if a bunch of people are moving, UTXO is on chain, it's probably good indicated that they're doing something. Price is high. It probably means they're selling for a gain. Price is low. It probably means

crashing out. Those elements are like a high signal. Language actually lets you study human action as well, but it's just way less valuable of a signal in the sense where like, If you actually decide to type a word online, like you had to choose to do so. Like it gives you a lens into the action they're taking. It's not as high signal as somebody moving 100 Bitcoin on chain. But it's still, if you look at a ton of people across the crowd, you do get a lot of that. So I do think that like through that you do see some underlying sentiment do stuff. Like you people will talk a certain way like I alluded to with the emotions or somebody

getting more nihilistic or excited when they're in relationship. your mood will start to shift before you make a decision, right? Like you eventually have a decision you make, but like you can, people's moods change slowly. They get more bored. They maybe start posting less before doing the action. This is very much like a thing I'm actively exploring. I don't know that I have a definitive answer to how this works,

but I do think there's like every decision is made through the lens of a mood. Like you are in a certain mood, then you make a decision, especially like financial ones, right? So I do think there's a tight relationship there. people very much underweight, like, how important sentiment is out there, where even, like, on your own personal thing, like, if you're really scared, that's likely to make you take different actions than if you were really optimistic, right? It's fascinating.

It's funny. It's one of my favorite little heuristics that ties directly into that. One of the most powerful things I ever learned was that humans don't make decisions rationally or logically, they make them emotionally. And if you really, really take that to heart, the world makes a whole lot more sense. You can point to like the most extreme, the most important decisions that you'll make over your life, where you will live, your house, your wife, like all these like major, major life-defining moments.

You might rationalize them afterwards, but it wasn't like you were picking your spouse based on an Excel spreadsheet and all the best data coming in. It was emotional first and then reasoned post hoc justification later. So I think that's fascinating. Even thinking about that framework kind of pulled within. I cannot more strongly agree with that. That's like the way the world works. And also what's unique about Bitcoiners,

They're very logical people, right? A lot more engineers, technical folks. These folks, and very smart people too. But the thing is, just because you're smarter doesn't mean your immunity or emotions. It just means you have better stories and abstractions and arguments for why you're doing something.

But the underlying emotions are still driving people. And you can see this all the time over Bitcoin where people have all these like articulate arguments and like really good technical reasons for why they should be right. But like underlying that is actually some kind of emotion inside them if they're pissed off about something. That happens all the time.

I honestly think like that shift alone of thinking. It makes the world make way more sense, like you said. I completely agree. I used to work in academia. I've seen some brilliant, brilliant people make some dumb, dumb decisions. Because again, it's not about the intellectual horsepower. It's the little guy on top of the elephant driving everything around, or least he thinks he is. Michael, I wanted to make sure we touched on this.

At the very beginning, you talked about how you were feeling bearish yourself still. You're feeling bearish yourself. So two sides of the coin, what would you need to see to confirm that you are right? no, it's not over. We're going back down. We're still trapped in the bear. And what would you need to see in order to actually allow yourself to maybe be a little bit more optimistic personally, be a little more bullish? So yeah, I'm just because of the pattern matching thing, man, like I'm a little bit bearish because I'm just like so used to seeing downturns now. Having explored the data more, I am very bullish right now. I retain bullish. I think we're

kind of in a disbelief rally. I think a lot of people are still sidelined, especially in the broader crypto community. I've seen hilarious videos on that. I'm sure you have as well. A bunch of people, I bookmarked so many of these folks and I have looked at some of their data too. And like I know they have not bought back in yet and are just like they're getting more aggressive and more. Yeah. It's been an interesting. Yeah. There's some of that. I find that very interesting. So from a data perspective, the things that I'm watching are again like options stuff. I really have been watching like leaps, calls like these kind of terms because it's indicative of people taking more speculative bets. I wrote about. this in this week's piece, but there's a lot of that language out there right now, and there's a lot of people showing it. I saw tons of these things in my timeline recently. The interesting thing is this is very different than when like MSTR was at its peak and everybody was talking about it constantly. It's like a couple small people who get really amplified by the algorithm,

which is different dynamic. But watching that, I'm watching those kind of things closely. I'm also really, like there's all these emotions now that I've mentioned throughout this conversation, like the desire, the excitement, the optimism, the OGs specifically I'm watching closely to see if their engagement and activity across all those ones continues training upward. If so, I'm very, very constructive here. If that doesn't happen, I will have to shift my viewpoint. This is all, again, like one lens, though.

I get hyper focused on just sentiment because that's kind of my expertise is what I've been focused on and really deep into, but like I can't know if there's some macro economic event that happens in a day from now that sends us down to 45K. Like that can happen. That is 100% always on the table. And that is outside the realm of world. what this kind of analysis can do. But what it can do is kind of give you a lens of where the crowds are at, where the new

people are at, where traders are focused and these kinds of things. Because of the margins, those people do. I do make financial decisions. But, yeah, I'm feeling extremely constructive. So even though my like emotional state is like, oh, man, we're going to crash again because I'm used to that pain. I actually, from a logical perspective, and the more time I've spent with the data, I'm very positively biased right now over the like a couple months timeline, that kind of thing.

Beautiful. I couldn't agree more. Mr. Sullivan, where can everybody go to check out your work, your links, all that fun stuff? Yeah, so thanks so much for listening, everybody. I really appreciate it. I'm on X, Sully Michaelvin over there. I'm constantly sharing this stuff. If you want to follow this more deeply, I'm on substack as well, where you can sign up for my newsletter where I send this stuff out basically every week,

whatever I'm seeing, my thoughts, all these things where I discuss and explore them more deeply. That's called Bitcoin Sentiment Weekly. And yeah, that's the best way. Feel free to hit me up if you want to talk about anything, these things too, because this kind of analysis is so interesting. I feel like it can be applied to all sorts of different things. If you enjoy this episode, please do like and subscribe.

It really does help us out and check out the previous episode with Tom Luongo.