TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #607: Bitcoin Is Written In Our DNA with Jesse Myers

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

Marty sits down with Jesse Myers to discuss the key behavioral mutation behind the dominance of our species over other early humans. Jesse on Twitter: https://x.com/Croesus_BTC One-in-a-Species: https://www.onceinaspecies.com/ 0:00 - Intro 0:36 - How Jesse’s hypothesis differs from mainstream 8:19 - Szabo's shelling out and the fashion argument 15:36 - Fold & Coinkite 17:14- The hTKTL1 gene 27:03 - Overcoming Dunbar's Number 35:24 - Unchained Event 35:49 - Public record and barter 42:33 - Money allowed energy aggregation 51:27 - Developing more advanced money 55:35 - Bitcoin is the culmination of our species’ edge 1:01:39 - Fiat interregnum and bitcoin’s addressable market 1:10:33 - Digital age is an accelerant 1:16:34 - Final thoughts Shoutout to our sponsors: Fold https://tftc.io/fold Coinkite https://coinkite.com Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. 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 if you're not paying attention you probably should be probably should be all right jesse welcome back to the studio good to be here it's good to see you you're not too far away but i don't see you that often yeah just an hour away but

that's enough huh yeah people really like uh really like the secluded nature of cities just right outside of austin a little less crazy yeah yeah like you were saying the city's blowing up yeah it's unbelievable that you know i went to i went to ut for uh my master's and gosh 15 years ago now and so you know seeing the level of change from 15 years ago to now it's unbelievable yeah and did you study neuroscience while you're at ut or is that at stanford uh neuroscience was undergrad um at usc and then i couldn't get a job because it was the great recession i had a neuroscience degree and i wanted to get into business so i mean so i couldn't i couldn't get uh my foot in the door anywhere like all right i'll go get a one-year business degree and i came

here for their masters of accounting which was the best idea because it's it's the foundation of business you know it's the language of business so um that has been very helpful to me in my career i've just you know kind of understanding the number language of business yeah yeah well the numbers language revolves around money which is what we're here to talk about and we were laughing about it before it seems like this recent piece that you wrote last week or published last week is the culmination of the different areas of study that you've explored in your life and so this whole concept of really going back and looking at the divergence of neanderthals and homo sapiens sapiens which is us humans in trying to make the argument that

it's not just that we were smarter uh more bruteful or whatever there actually was something that happened neurologically at some point between was 160 000 300 000 years ago yes yeah yeah um basically i in in zabo's shelling out he talks he's just kind of like tiptoes into this topic of like maybe money is part of why um humans were able to support a population density 10 times greater than neanderthals so this is a strange fact of of paleolithic history that you know the cave sites in Europe, Neanderthals, you know, they're dated by the sediment layer. And you can see roughly how many were living in a cave. And then, you know, 35,000 years ago, humans come, Homo sapiens sapiens come from Africa and just take over in about 5,000 years. Neanderthals

are gone. And then it's us from that point on. And then suddenly this population evidence is 10 times greater um but it's the same land so how is that possible and zabo just just tiptoes into that maybe money was a part of it um and that has been kind of rattling around in my head ever since i went down the bitcoin rabbit hole five six years ago um and i talked about on preston's podcast in 2021 of like maybe maybe money is a part of why we were able to thrive and um basically i've been working on this idea for four years and then i finally sat down and did the heavy research a few months ago and it all kind of came together and all these pieces of my life became relevant which i wasn't expecting and i was frankly pretty surprised and thrilled at

at what i found and kind of i find myself breaking new ground in like intellectual academic discourse um which was quite a surprise and pretty excited about that yeah and so let's set the stage what has you really throughout the piece you're sort of prodding at the study of anthropology or the popular understandings that anthropologists put out there about why there was this divergence between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens sapiens. Why don't we start there? What is the mainstream anthropology reason

for why Homo sapiens sapiens inevitably won out the race against Neanderthals? Yeah, so we first found Neanderthals mid-19th century. And, uh, so from that point on, we needed a reason for like, why did we out-compete them? And back then the answer was, well, we must've been like more evolved. We must've been better, smarter, something, you know, um, very Victorian thought. Uh, and then over the last hundred years, it's kind of been the mainstream understanding of Neanderthals as these like brutes, dumb brutes, um, that we were better than.

and uh as we've learned more especially over the last couple decades um we've figured out that no actually the neanderthals were pretty sophisticated they were they actually had slightly bigger brains than us um their tools were just as sophisticated as as humans you know and technically they were humans also but you know colloquially we refer to ourselves as humans so go with that um and so you know the list of of theories over time of like maybe we had better better brains bigger brains nope that's not true uh better tools nope that's not true um we were capable of symbolic thought it turns out the neanderthals were also um doing various gestures of symbolic thought ranging from um from having ornament ornamentation and jewelry to uh there's one cool anecdote of

of perhaps um there's a there's a bunch of uh flower pollen at a neanderthal grave site like right on top of the bones so that the theory is that maybe they were buried with flowers which is you know symbolic thought and very humanizing sort of notion for neanderthals And then the most recent sort of new theory as to why humanity out-competed Neanderthals baffled me. And it was kind of stupid in my opinion that, and this is from Oxford PhDs a few years ago, that, um, that humanity, our subspecies is, uh, uh, generalist specialists is the phrase they used. And basically they're saying that because we succeeded everywhere, that's why we succeeded. and obviously that's pretty circular logic um and and i and i think doesn't provide any root cause for why we did well why you know why are we here and all other early human subspecies of which

there were like a dozen in the last million years um why are they all gone and why did we just take over in the last 40 000 years in particular um and so then pulling on the threads of monetary history and then discovering something recent in neuroscience uh and then tying that back back into bitcoin sort of helped to anchor me to a new answer in a piece that it's uh what i fully explore yeah this is where it ties back to zabo because shells come into play yes yeah um um so zabo uh um if if you haven't read shelling out it's seminal and i think on my bitcoin journey it helped cement like bitcoin's place in in money um in terms of just wrapping my head around what makes you know what is money it's really kind of a nice answer

to what is money um because it explores how humanity landed on commodity money and first in the form of shells and then later in other forms of commodities or collectibles um but he does such a good and and rigorous job of exploring all these different examples and use cases for money too like you know starvation insurance or like if you're in a pickle and you need to get accepted into a new tribe or something like that and you've got some nice shell necklaces on maybe that's how you get in right like you can give transfer this wealth because it's hard to come by shells and i think that's the the core idea with shell money that zaba did such a good job of exploring is um if you can think of a you know living in a world of sticks and stones

and then you see somebody wearing a necklace of of beautiful perfect little shells that's special that's something different right and you're going to value that and you're going to want that um and And so I think, you know, that's the basis of money is coveting a collectible item that's rare, that's scarce. And so Zaba does a great job of kind of laying that groundwork and showing that this is what money is, basically. It's an intersubjective value commodity, meaning it's something that we all recognize has value because we know that other people value it. And how do you bootstrap that process? um you know if you logically think through the intersubjective value developing out of nothingness it has to start with like something scarce that's special that you can decide is something you want

yeah it's funny because this subject of the break between neanderthals and homo sapiens sapiens has been discussed i mean it uh growing up and learning about the evolution of of humans from neanderthals to where we are today it's discussed but this whole concept of money being a tool is never really explored that that really led to the money being the tool that led to the separation enabled homo sapiens sapiens to succeed against neanderthals and other subspecies is never brought up and it's funny in your piece you highlight like anthropologists even today they'll look at clasp leads beads and the necklaces and say that was just a social signal that uh the homo sapiens sapiens of the time wanted to portray that they were somewhat respectable to other tribes yeah

yeah there's this hang up um i found bemusing and slash irritating as i was digging through through all these um i guess some context here of uh when zavo put out shelling out in 2002 the oldest evidence we had of of shell money meaning really you know a bunch of the same shells with holes drilled through them which is evidence that they were strung up you know as a necklace or bracelet or something um you know in a cave site buried in the sediment the oldest example we had of that was from south africa that dated to 75 000 years ago And in the last 20 years, we found a whole bunch more that are older than that. And as of now, as of 2021, the oldest we found is 142,000 years old in Morocco.

And so we just doubled our understanding in 20 years, our understanding of how long humans have been making collectible jewelry ostensibly for you know for use as a proto money as a as a store of value asset that you can transfer in certain life events um and yeah and with all these discoveries over the last 20 years all the press releases talk about how like it's amazing that humans have always wanted to look good you know or like jewelry has been a part of us since the very beginning because we like fashion and totally missing that there's like an economic purpose that that much better explains why we would do this behavior of making collecting and making shell jewelry over a hundred thousand plus year time time frame um you know of course it

makes more sense that this had this had like an economic function served as a proto money rather than us just wanting to look good and you know express our identity which is the sort of prevailing orthodoxy of of anthropology these days that like everything has to be understood in terms of self-expression rather than like economic purpose which i think makes a lot more sense yeah it's funny that we're talking about this today i'm not sure if you've been following on the big trend on tiktok right now is chinese manufacturers basically highlighting that all the luxury brands like louis vuitton and um prada whatever it may be like they're showing like how stuff is actually made in the factories and the fact that it's like actually dirt cheap

and they're it the point i'm trying to make is there may be some sort of social signaling involved but it is to typically when it comes to luxury goods or jewelry whatever it may be to show how much wealth you have to a certain extent or to say hey i'm uh in this elite level of society where i can wear a product i can wear louis vuitton it's sort of like an external um signaling signaling of wealth that was accumulated yeah it's not just to look good yeah right and and those things overlap too for sure like fashion and and a statement of prosperity they overlap naturally and and you know there's you know great examples of like a huge portion of the world's gold is you know lives on the arms of women in india you know

or yeah or on our our rings um wedding bands uh and so you know there there is a lot of overlap of like we we like precious things to be part of um you know our appearance but it doesn't really explain like you know why this behavior would happen everywhere um unless there's like a like an existential like like value to if you if you if you manage to make hay while while you can you know and make some some uh shell necklaces they might save your life you know when you're in a pinch down the road. What's up, freaks? Do you have a credit card?

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user of bitcoin like i am if you're running a business on a bitcoin standard if you're just a bitcoin or wants to secure your bitcoin get the most secure hardware wallet on the market go get the cold card queue it's a beautiful thing what you've really honed in on is that there's a key neurological component that may have led to this divergence which is the emergence of this tktl1 nice yes nucleotide yes it's a it's a gene um it's serendipitous how you know i was doing this research in the last four or six months and a lot of these um uh discoveries were made in the last five years uh so 2022 a paper was put out that it showed that um that homo sapiens uh have a different tkt l1 um gene versus neanderthals and other archaic humans and apes they have a

different version of it um and so they did some some really clever laboratory testing to to show what happens like if you have this gene versus that gene what's the difference um and basically that our version of the gene um stimulates neurogenesis in the frontal lobe uh on the outermost layers of the brain and to a greater degree than the other version the archaic tk tl1 which is to say that our you know it's in our dna to have like a more stimulated development of brain circuitry in the frontal lobe on the outermost layers of the brain and and that's as far as that paper goes right it's just they don't even actually specify so much like well they do talk about where it's located but they don't they don't specify like what that circuitry

does um they just kind of leave it there and it's an interesting difference between neanderthal dna and and homo sapiens sapiens dna um and it comes back to a single nucleotide point mutation which is how that would have um that change would have happened and then you can you can deduce when it must have happened um since neanderthals didn't have it no other archaic humans had it it must have happened after homo sapiens sapiens had emerged but since all living humans have this this version of the tktl1 htktl1 um that means that um it must have happened before a genetic bottleneck um when and the last genetic bottleneck was 160 000 years ago when quote-unquote mitochondrial eve lived when um and and we are all descendant uh from mitochondrial eve and which

means that like everyone alive came from ultimately came from her womb you know he's traced back to one single individual so basically she most likely had it's possible there's other variations of the math where you could have had it outside of that time range but most likely it happened between mitochondrial eve and the emergence of homo sapiens sapiens so 160 to 300 000 years ago Yeah. And the consequence of the production of the HTKTL1 in Homo sapiens sapiens and the activity that it spurred in the frontal cortex made us predisposed to find scarce things valuable. Yeah, that's kind of my conclusion. That's the hypothesis I'm putting out there.

And I think it's a hypothesis that fits a lot of these unexplained facts about humanity and our development. But that's kind of the leap that I'm taking here is saying that based on my neuroscience background, I studied neuroscience in undergrad. I was aware of there's kind of unusual brain circuitry in these specific areas, in the frontal lobe, super granular layers, meaning close to the surface. uh there's a pyramidal however you pronounce it variations uh neurons and association cortices which are strange um sort of processing centers um in the in you know the prefrontal cortex in particular and they uh they basically take um information from various domains in the brain and kind of bring it all together and synthesize it into abstract thought that's what that's what these regions do and so if if there's a mutation that happened in our dna that

causes the greater neurogenesis to happen in those specific regions where this kind of processing is going on that would mean that we have a greater capacity for abstract thinking because we've overdeveloped the circuitry in that area versus Neanderthals and apes and other archaic humans. So my leap there is that our greater capacity for abstract thinking might be what explains why Neanderthals didn't seem to collect shells and make shell necklaces. um they just didn't they there are there's one example of that happening

in spain from 115 000 years ago which is pretty cool that it that you know they did they did ever engage in this behavior but uh they didn't seem to have the drive to do it so there's i sort of characterize it as a dim interest to engage in this behavior and this is the handprint on the cave wall so that's a separate example separate example um yeah they uh so neanderthals 20 years ago our understanding of them was that they didn't really do art and they didn't have any shell necklaces or collectibles and in the last 20 years we found a few examples of each like literally one example of of the shell necklaces they collected fossils they collected quartz and and then um literally last year they dated a handprint in uh in a cave in spain

and it was 66 000 years old which means it had to have been a neanderthal and and we didn't think that they were engaging in cave art um but but they were and that was because homo sapiens hadn't traveled north from africa to europe yet at that point that's right yes we we arrive 40 000 years ago and and 45 000 years ago and this happened 20 000 years before our arrival um so it was neanderthals doing doing art and so they were capable of it they were capable of art they were capable of you know realizing that that shells were special and then turning them into a necklace like they were able to do that but they didn't seem to want to do it much And that ties into my hypothesis of if our brains had a more developed circuitry for this type of abstract thinking, that could have supercharged our drive to engage in those behaviors versus Neanderthals who had the capacity but a dim interest in doing so.

um and so you know that kind of nicely explains neanderthals had the capacity for art for shell necklaces didn't really care to do it much but then we come along and we have this drive to do it and so we engage in it a lot and i think the key there is that um because we had this huge drive to get shell necklaces it shows we had a you know because of this overdeveloped circuitry in our brain we had a greater appreciation for scarce assets basically for things that were rare and precious versus neanderthals and i think that um to develop the concept of money which i get into austrian econ um and the origins of of money in particular um to develop the concept of money you need like a critical mass of people in a group coveting a commodity you know have who

have the capacity to recognize it as special and want it such that you can get you know okay this thing is everybody values it and then the rest of the group recognizes that you know there's a group of collectors who want that asset and then everybody else starts to value it because there's market value for that asset you know if you find a really nice shell you can sell it to that to that weirdo over there because he wants it so now a shell has value um you need a critical mass of that kind of thinking and covetous behavior in order to kickstart that cycle of of a commodity turning into a collectible which then can turn into a store of value asset and then it becomes money yeah and i that inability to think abstractly on in the case

of the neanderthals who limited them i think my assumption is that your hypothesis is that the the increased in abstract thinking that was enabled by this gene mutation that happened allowed humanity the scale and mainly because you can get beyond dunbar's number which is probably something we should touch on now is this concept of dunbar's number which obviously homo sapiens living uh over a hundred thousand years ago or tens of thousands of years ago weren't aware of dunbar and his research that was done in our lifetimes but um there are these sort of i guess social limits that exist naturally due to our ability to store information and association associate information with other individuals in our brain and you need to think

abstractly to scale society yeah totally um yeah dunbar's number everybody it's it's gone mainstream enough that people are probably like familiar with it that oh you're you know we're only supposed to live in groups of 150 is kind of like the mainstream awareness of it um so that was like a that was a seminal paper 1992 kind of launched branches of like evolutionary psychology and study of of uh primate behavior um it was really simple i mean what he was able to do back then was limited uh with technology so um what he did was was measure the the um uh prefrontal cortex the neocortex volume of um primates and then he plotted that on a chart against how many um how many individuals did lived in the group that you know that that um animal uh

wasn't a specimen of um and so you see like smaller brained primates live in smaller groups and then larger brain primates are able to live in larger groups and he did a linear regression of okay so what's the line of best fit and pretty strong correlation i think it was like like r of course grade of like 0.7 um which is really good and and then using that uh line of best fit he was able to say okay based on our neocortex volume um humans should therefore uh live in a group of you know be able to live in a group of 147 and you round it to 150 um and that's pretty true you know like there's a lot of examples in in our culture currently and historically of 150 people is pretty much what you can what's what's a natural feel right for how many people

you can maintain stable relationships with as conclusion um you know like i went to a school that was a small high school there were 83 people in my graduating class and so you kind of knew some people in the grade above and the grade below i probably knew 150 people you know it was like a very natural feel and then i went to a really big university and it was overwhelming it was you know it was it was good in the 150 context military units are 150 uh often um so you know there's a lot of examples of this and in our world and um the problem is that it doesn't explain how is it that we do live in, in groups that are larger than 150. Um, so the next year in 1993, Dunbar put out a follow-up paper that added, uh, language as like a, what I call an efficiency multiplier,

um, or how humans are able to live in groups of 150 without spending 42% of the day is implication um without having to spend 42 of the day in one-on-one socializing um this is based on his inferences of primate behavior they they groom each other it's like it's one-on-one socializing social grooming um where they you know they groom their their fur and then they go you know reciprocate and that's how they bond in the in a primate social context and obviously we we do things differently but we gossip right we chat we catch up um and that's allows you to cover more ground uh and form bonds faster than if you were having to like one-on-one groom each other so that's how dunbar got around the problem of like well if we live with 150

people and you have to you know engage in one-on-one grooming with 150 people it's going to take half the day but you know with with language you don't need that you can gossip and bond in a much more efficient way the problem is then that it still doesn't explain how do we live in groups of larger than 150 which which we do you know we're now we're in a city with i don't even know millions of people um how do we how do we do that how have we adapted to that and and that's where this um the concept of money comes in as an additional efficiency multiplier that allows us to live in groups larger than dunbar's number um because of what it enables and we can get into that but yeah it's the um the thing about the thing about my high school so i graduated with

250 kids in my class and it was fun i was having a conversation with one of my high school buddies was actually in town a few weeks ago and the night before i had a dream of like two twins that were in her class and i literally hadn't thought of them since maybe like the early years of college and i was like do you remember like tim and uh forget his brother's name but remember the twins and he was like he was having problems uh remembering their names it was like an example of the limits of dumb bars number where in that small group we spent four years together at an all guys high school where like we were at school from 8 a.m to 5 p.m typically every day and uh half a generation later i like can't even fully remember their names right just a few too many

people for you to deeply know and then and then you replace them with other people in the years since yeah and then so you know dunbar's number is just a just a linear regression of like of how much brain volume do you have that can keep track of all this information on relationships and um and you know it fits it fits pretty nicely for for a tribal existence in particular so you know dunbar's number really is you know 150 that's a that's a tribe like if you're if you're living in a group 150 or less you're living in a in a tribe um and and that's very natural i think i think there's some appeal to that too like i think that's part of why it's it's um known in mainstream cultures we really are evolved to live in a in a tribal existence

you know where you have your whole family and um everybody helps raise the kids and you know that's very natural and organic to us but um but dunbar never really in my opinion um addressed or explained how is it that we do all right in you know in a much larger social group context and i think the answer is money this sort of proto money and what it enables and and then that sort of fits in so nicely with you know the other um the fact about about tktl1 and and then And the anecdotes about Ganderthal's behavior versus human behavior, it all ties it together. The new administration is pushing hard for government efficiency, but can Elon Musk and Doge fix the dollar?

On April 16th, PhD economist Peter St. Onge explains why Bitcoin is the most important tool for government efficiency and how the principles underlying the global shift towards sound money can help you protect and grow your generational wealth. Register now at Unchained.com slash RHR. that's unchained.com slash rhr let's jump into how money enables us to scale beyond dumb bars number yeah um so there's there's two main benefits um so zabo kind of touches on on on both of them doesn't really explore them that deeply but um um the first is that

and in zaba doesn't connect it to dunbar's number um at all but the first is that if you're living in a in a pre-money existence you're basically living in a barter and favors kind of existence right where it's like you might have something and uh and you know you want to trade great um or you might do somebody a favor and then you expect that favor to be repaid in the future but you don't have writing and you don't have any way to keep a record of like what was transacted so how do you manage that um and the way you manage it is by having the rest of the group help enforce what happened you know like okay yeah marty owes jesse a favor um that's known and then everybody can like enforce that and if marty tries to to you know renege on that then

it's then marty gets punished by the group um and that's like a that's a very natural sort of human behavior right like you can see that happening it's like honor culture driven yeah yeah and and it's a it's a very um sustainable way to maintain social order um and that's all in our brains right and that's what i end up doing in the pieces sort of suggesting that Dunbar's number might actually capture the limit of how many people we can have in a group and maintain, um, you know, a group level understanding of who owes what to who. Right. So I describe it as like mental ledgers of debts. And if there's 150 people in a group, there's 11 000 something some change um combinations of of uh counterparties so like

marty and jesse's one there's you know 11 000 other pairs and that you know you can't keep track of even that that's pretty hard um so you know in in my high school context i i've been thinking about this a fair bit of like you're kind of aware of of people's relationships with other individuals you know you have like a rough understanding of like okay maybe they have a feud or something and you know why and you can you can keep a very basic high level record of interpersonal relationships and who who owes who roughly um and and then have so that's in the pre-money context then if you have the concept of money um basically that goes away where you no longer are transacting in mental ledgers of debt instead you're transacting in the moment

with like okay i saved your life now you can give me your bracelet you know and okay the our debt is settled right here right now um or you know like oh you you want this nice axe that i have well i like your bracelet and let's let's trade um now we've we've facilitated a barter situation because you have a form of money that you know that it's not that i want the bracelet it's that i want the value that that i know that that bracelet represents to everybody in the group and i can trade that bracelet for some other good in the future um so that that's the way in which a proto-money just removes the cap on how many economic counterparties you can keep track of. You no longer need the group to help police who owes what to who. Instead, you can have the money

take care of that in the moment. So that's the first part of it. And then the second part, the second probably bigger advantage is that uh um in a in a pre-money context um a tribe would have generally very antagonistic relationships with other other tribes because you don't have a medium for constructive dialogue with another tribe all you have is violence right so all you have is grudges and blood feuds between you know your group your tribe and tribe in the valley next door um but if you have the concept of money you have this new transactional medium to enable positive constructive relationships between tribes where you can you can have you can start to have alliances basically you can say

you know hey like we're the big tribe in in this area if you pay us tribute we'll be allies and our combined force will be you know we'll be able to protect both tribes better and and that's that's very valuable right like that's a that's a winning strategy and so you you would start to have those relationships and having those relationships then fosters tribes living closer together because you don't need to keep a buffer between you and the tribe um next door because you know they killed your cousin uh and you want that you know major distance between you now you can start living closer together and engaging in trade because you have a money that facilitates trade it's not that with barter you you can't trade but with money it's easier to

trade um and that is rudimentary capitalism really it's like being able to exchange goods and services for a money is essential so now you're you're living in a in a paradigm where it's possible to have positive constructive inter-tribal relationships where there's an advantage to tribes starting to live closer together and that explains the 10 times greater population density that homo sapiens sapiens achieved over neanderthals when they took over neanderthal areas in europe yeah so essentially by solving the money problem the double coincidence of one once problem tribe in the valley hey you guys have blueberries we have lumber uh you're pretty well stocked on on your wood supply to light your fires so you don't need

our lumber but we have this money we need the blueberries we'll give you that it's like okay start these small little economic interactions it's like hey we're stronger together yeah we're more comfortable let's move closer build a bigger city and then go out and so this was happening homo sapiens sapiens while neanderthals weren't developing this abstract thinking to solve this problem and the power of the coordination mechanism of money allowed literal physical kinetic energy to sort of um aggregate to the point where a neanderthal force coming up against uh an economic force if you will yeah and homo sapiens sapiens never stood a chance exactly um yeah you can you can sort of conceive of the you know a scenario where there would be

a neanderthal tribal group living in one valley and they would be living in this moneyless paradigm where like they're very separate from other neanderthal tribes they don't have you know they don't have alliances it's just them um and then here comes a homo sapiens sapiens group they set up shop in the in the next valley over um and it's not one tribe it's five or maybe it's three um and they're living in close proximity they're you know they're in their own tribal units but they have somehow figured out this coordination of the multi-tribe populations and now the now that group of humans is competing for resources and naturally going to expand right into into the neanderthals area into their turf and start taking you know some of that foraging

area or maybe hunt some of their game um but you know what are the neanderthals going to do they're going to try to hold their turf and stay on their ground but they're outnumbered you know they're They're outnumbered maybe 10 to 1, and that's a losing battle, right? So that sort of mental model can help explain how humans came into Europe. Neanderthals had been living in Europe for 200,000 years. They were well-adjusted and adapted to the European environment. And then humanity comes in and just completely displaces them and drives them extinct within 5,000 to 7,000 years. Um, and so, so that, that explains how you could have that, that steep competitive advantage

over Neanderthals is it's just a numbers game. Ultimately, it's that you had this, you had this, this solitary tribal unit going up against like a, like a proto civilization, you know, like a, um, a proto kingdom where they're, you know, who knows who was the top dog calling the shots, um, among multiple tribes. But they were somehow coordinating, you know, who, you know, how these tribes are going to pay tribute to and maintain positive alliances with each other. And then you're going up against that combined force. You're just you're going to lose. Well, because we developed the ability to think abstractly.

Right. and that's that's what i try in the piece to uh to highlight how how strange it would be because this competitive advantage is rooted in like a weird behavioral quirk like we had a mutation that caused us to covet scarce things i think i think that's what amounts to right like that you know neanderthals didn't covet seashells yeah and then homo sapiens covet seashells and and collect them and make a whole bunch of jewelry and and in doing so bootstrap this concept of money and then having the concept of money allows for constructive inter-group relationships which you know also enables capitalism and then this weird behavioral

quirk of coveting seashells becomes an evolutionary advantage yeah and i think that's a one of the important things to highlight in your hypothesis is that it wasn't necessarily that humans set out to invent money it's just like we have this yes this gene mutation that made us predisposed to covet scarce things and then eventually at some point somebody who had that mutation and was coveting scarce things found themselves in a situation where they wanted something and somebody looked at their scarce things like you give me that scarce thing and i'll give you this thing that you want and boom first transaction yep then naturally things just evolve to oh these scarce things should be money yep and and in the time scale of it you know at

the end of the piece i include like a a timeline that i made of going back 300 000 years and then walking all the way through that history of like where does you know there's no there's no money until at least that we know of until 142 000 years ago which is not that long after this mutation might have occurred if that was 160 000 plus years ago um and then money starts to show up right and then we go from just one player in east africa you know this this new upstart tribe to taking over africa slowly right like this would be unbelievably slow progress because there's no technology in place or stability in place to help ensure that any any sort of breakthroughs are propagated through time you know like you probably

had localized breakthroughs of like oh it's you know let's invent a new form of tribute between two tribes and have a really healthy relationship for like oral traditions came in and yeah you had to pass things down right and that was the best you had right um you could have had scenarios where some some relative genius um early human came along and invented some new technology but uh you know maybe pass it on a generation or two and then it's lost right like there's it's very hard to um make lasting gains in a world where you're fighting for your survival in a you know sort of tribal cave existence um without any without much language and certainly without any writing or any any sort of stability that we would call civilization um so you know that's the

context in which this is slowly evolving and our behaviors are slowly evolving around you know it probably started with some group saying hey you know these shells are awesome like i want more of those and somewhere you know 150 000 years ago some small tribe developed this concept of money and it's and it proves some sort of evolutionary advantage and it you know spread from there because they propagated from there like their genes were successful and i think took over europe from other archaic early human species of which there were quite a few living in living in africa at the time sorry in africa in particular um yeah and then the time scale of it is it's hard to overstate how slow the progress would have been and i think it's easy for us to jump to like oh so

they invented money right away and you know you're off to the races but i think the reality is it would have been a very slow organic emergence of this um predisposition to covet special things to slowly morph into like a proto money and then that slowly morphs into like an ability to exchange value between tribes and that slowly turns into alliances and you know like the the practice of alliances between tribes um and i think that explains the sort of 100 000 years it took for humanity to break out of africa decisively um and then and then it was game over for every other uh early human group living in europe or in asia we just took over within within a few thousand years well then not only that once that critical tipping point was reached and

you had the multi-multi-generation iterative process of coveting scarce things realizing that they could become proto monies inevitably become a proto money but then you look back the last 4 000 to 7 000 years and things have really accelerated yes money itself is something that ironically people have lost touch with what it should be but i think that's what we'll get to towards the end of the conversation with bitcoin but uh humanity developed more advanced forms of money over time yes yeah um this is something that that zaba does a good job of and and safety does an even better job of of sort of showing how through documented human history so really kind of the last 6 000 years last 5 000 years um we see a sort of darwinian monetary battle

playing out on a global scale safety does a great job of showing how um when when a civilization that used gold came into contact with a civilization that used anything else as money well guess what the the civilization that used the money that's harder to make more of ended up um essentially confiscating the wealth of the other civilization because if you valued as as happened if you valued glass beads and and you know the europeans who came into contact with these african tribes that valued glass beads figured that out they send the message home to venice to the glass makers that have better technology than anybody in africa to make glass beads you send the message home hey make a bunch of glass beads and send them down on ships and

you know we'll we'll be able to buy a lot of stuff and they do that and um the the europeans were able to use these newly created venetian glass beads to buy up all of the wealth all of the land all the assets all the everything from from these africans who thought that glass beads were money they thought you know oh i know how hard it is to make a glass bead and i know that you know that's what i that's what i want i want a glass bead because it's harder to make more glass beads than it is to make more uh seashells you know and that may have been true in west africa they were exactly ignorant of the fact that it was not that hard to make somewhere else in the world yes exactly and so so um when gold emerged in the danube valley 6 000 years ago uh because

of the varna cultures sort of advance advances in metallurgy it's kind of the necessary breakthrough for gold to be possible um as a as a refined metal um from that point onwards we see the pretty rapid takeover of gold as the preferred money for human civilization wherever that has reached you know and so there are examples in more recent history of like islanders in some remote place who had never been contacted by europeans getting absolutely destroyed uh you know having their wealth confiscated very rapidly you know a few hundred years ago um because gold finally reached them but um yeah you know starting six thousand years ago we see the early collectible money being replaced by gold as the hardest best store of value asset that can be used as a money

and you know that's the monetary dar was darwinism at play which is just a it's not that we've consciously decided we only care about you know whatever is the hardest thing to make more of it's just economics it's just an economic reality that if it's easy to make more of something that's not a good place to store your wealth yeah and so is Bitcoin the

I'm trying to figure out is Bitcoin essentially the end all be all of scarcity and proto money proto commodity money

in the sense that it is the most scarce thing that will ever exist and it was introduced to us 16 years ago and we're just going through the phase of more and more of us recognizing that it is scarce and many of us recognizing it without the knowledge of this tk tl1 gene mutation that makes us predisposed to covet scarce things yes that's what's happening i think that's what's um like you know i i had to pinch myself a few times like why why am i finding this hypothesis when you know anthropology should have found this and um put the pieces together between this tktl1 mutation and uh the history of money you know like they're kind of

asleep at the wheel in that sense they just missed it because everybody's so narrowly focused on their own world. And most people haven't studied Austrian economics, and certainly not Bitcoin. And so having that additional information, it helped me to try to put this... We're all trying to understand Bitcoin. We're all trying to understand why is Bitcoin so alluring to us? Why are we all drawn so deeply into it? and this hypothesis would suggest that this is the the fulfillment of a species-long quest that we've been looking for a more scarce asset going back to you know whenever this mutation happened 160 plus thousand years ago and you know we went through seashells and then other

collectible money and then gold emerged as a more scarce asset that we could use as money and now you know we had the very brief fiat era here that's not scarce at all um and then bitcoin is invented and it's the invention of or discovery of absolute scarcity there's a first time in history where there's a an asset that has an immutably finite supply and it's usable as a money it's usable as a store of value that you can transact with And I think that, you know, the last 16 years has been little by little, our species interacting with this technology and slowly recognizing one by one, wait, this is the most scarce asset ever. And I love scarce assets because it's in my DNA to love scarce assets. So I want some of that.

You know, this is huge. This changes everything. This is finally what we've been searching for, for the entire length of our species. And not only, you know, have we been searching for it for the length of our species, but the attributes of this thing is what made us succeed as a species. Like, recognizing that this is perfect scarcity is, you know, it's like saying, I'm able to understand that this thing is, you know, it's a parallel to why I'm here. Like, you know, Bitcoin is a perfect form of scarcity. And I'm here because I value scarcity. and it's this like coming together of our purpose and our identity it's really what makes us human is valuing scarcity and then here's this thing that is you know the instantiation of perfect scarcity this final fulfillment of what we've been trying to find a perfect scarce asset for

142 000 years plus and it's and we've only just begun on that time scale to incorporate that into our lives and into our society but here it is yeah so bitcoin bitcoin status as a reserve currency of the world is literally written into our dna or not that not literally written into our dna but we are genetically predisposed like bitcoin success is literally genetically predisposed in our yeah in our dna i think that's right yeah i think that you know most people most people don't know anything about bitcoin and most people avoid bitcoin because they don't know anything about it but people who learn about bitcoin get drawn in um it's this inescapable gravity of holy shit this thing is incredible it's a it's a perfectly scarce asset and i covet that you know

and it's a dna level fascination that we just can't help but like covet this thing because it's perfect scarcity and i think that tells the story of like going forward what's going to happen here is that everybody has this DNA. Everybody has a brain wired in this way. And it's just a matter of people learning enough about Bitcoin for that wiring that covets scarcity to just get lit up and say, holy shit, this is what we've been looking for, even though we didn't know it for 150 000 years yeah and the ramifications of that collective recognition and ultimate value flow into bitcoin you said something a few minutes ago about recognizing that scarce assets can be this proto money and developing those scarce assets and the

money really helped us thrive and you mentioned we're we live in this fiat era which on the grand scheme of the timeline that we're talking about this conversation is a blip on the radar any blip and we've talked about it a lot the manifestation of fiat money money that can be printed ex nihilo has had negative externalities on the global economy and the quality of life to some extent for many many people so i think there's an incredibly encouraging and optimistic realization that comes in once we revert back to not only scarce money but perfectly scarce money yeah i completely agree you know the fiat interregnum as vj puts it um you know is this tiny blip of of us going away from our dna um we we've switched to a form of money that is easily

printed um and that's that's only been possible because of you know a sleight of hand from government um and the achilles heel of a physical asset like gold you know which allows for that sleight of hand because gold has to be centralized and then you end up with promissory notes on the gold um yeah that you know this fiat era where we've seen that shitification of everything is against our nature. It's against monetary Darwinism. And it's out of sync with our DNA. And I think that, you know,

Bitcoin can and will simply brush that away as the inevitable incentives of and properties of Bitcoin are more known to people more broadly. And, you know, that's where it's like, it's frustrating to us Bitcoiners of like, why isn't it happening faster? But only 16 years in and monetary shifts of this nature, you can't expect to have them happen any faster than a few generations at a time. yeah and it also begs a question about the fiat interregnum of how many people are okay with this or completely unaware of this interregnum because they view something like dollars as scarce and it makes me think of

surveys that have been done simple like man on the street uh surveys and i think if you sent a survey out to thousands of people around the country and you asked what's backing the dollar the material percentage of them 30 percent yeah yeah so you do have like a subset of the population that still thinks that the dollar is tethered to a scarce commodity in gold but it simply isn't we live in this this era where like i said earlier people do not understand money number one and more importantly number two the money that they're actually using which is being consistently and increasingly debased over time yep people have been duped and um the cost of that deception is their lives get worse you know everything gets more expensive and

and uh wages don't keep up and you know the middle class has been gutted and everyone's a lot worse off on the whole in the last hundred years in terms of their purchasing power and ability to afford a decent life. And that kind of deception can't last, right? That's transitory, ironically. And all of this is this backdrop of this fiat experiment. And it has to end because people are smart enough to eventually say no, or more specifically, eventually transition their wealth into other assets. And we've seen that really, the 401k and rental real estate becoming kind of the de facto stores of value for wealthy people in general is evidence of that. And then along comes Bitcoin and

has better properties than these other assets. I think part of what is exciting to me about this this puzzle piece of TKTL1 and the origins of money in humanity is it helps explain what Bitcoin is going to do to the global asset landscape slide that people have probably seen there. Very famous. Michael Saylor's showing it now. Yes. Yeah.

Which is awesome. So that's my slide that there wasn't a good answer anywhere of how much money is there in the world, how much value is there in the world, and where is it all sitting? So a few years ago, I went about trying to put a number to it all and did a fair bit of research and some math to come up with, all right, this is kind of roughly where it all sits and $900 trillion sitting in these different buckets of which bonds and real estate are kind of the two biggest ones like 300 trillion dollar ones um and bonds in particular is a is a shitty asset uh especially going right now yes exactly um and so i so my mental model of

what bitcoin can do has has for years been based around this exercise i went through of like what's the full potential valuation for bitcoin and the starting point for that it's like how much money is there in the world and where does it all sit? Then once you know how much money there is in the world and where it sits, then you can assess, is Bitcoin a better store of value asset than these other categories, these other buckets? Across the board, the answer is yes, because Bitcoin has perfect scarcity and none of these other assets have that, especially bonds and fiat money, which are so easily printed. And then the question becomes, okay, so how much capital currently sitting in these various buckets might be interested in migrating, in shifting from

these existing buckets and into Bitcoin? And that exercise led me to, I thought, conservative full potential valuation for Bitcoin of 200 trillion of the 900 trillion in today's dollars of capital, which would be $10 million per Bitcoin in today's dollars. And Michael Saylor sort of run with that and built on that valuation framework. And he put out his own model that's sort of built on my thinking there. And he came up with $13 million per Bitcoin in 20 years in future dollars is his estimation for what Bitcoin will do. And that's the base case. He's got the bull case of $49 million per Bitcoin in future dollars, which there's 4x inflation between now and then baked into his assumptions.

But anyway, I think this sort of puzzle piece that I think I've found here of helping to understand Bitcoin and why it is so compelling in the context of human evolution, helps explain why capital will flow from these inferior assets in the global asset landscape over the coming decades and into Bitcoin because of its superior properties as an absolutely scarce asset. yeah and that i can't stop thinking about the timeline of yeah going back because that's anthropologically funny enough like that's that's something that i just am fascinated by like what is the effect of the fact that we live in the digital age on the speed of adoption of bitcoin like like the timeline like we went from 162 000 years ago

this mutation developed in the tk tl1 um part of our dna then 15 000 years maybe glass bead show up and then you have a whole like tens of thousands of years where you're going to that iterative process of creating a proto money then it's okay you have civilization coalesce around gold glass bead gold but ultimately gold and that takes another few thousand years that bitcoin shows up 16 years ago but alongside all this monetary advancement we've obviously had technological advancement enabled by that monetary advancement and most importantly today it's the stands we're here light camera mic

internet like what does that do in terms of distilling information broadly to humanity yeah to have that sort of like critical tipping point like how how how much time is uh taken out of the process of adoption because we have these communication tools yeah a ton i think you know going from six thousand years effectively for gold to take over the world it you know any number any reasonable number for bitcoin is incredibly fast compared to that like maybe it takes 60 years right and and then you're talking about one percent of the time it took gold to conquer the world um and and yet that would still feel like a long time from our point of view right now right like 44 more years seems like a lot of our

it's a lot of our scarce time we only have so much time on this planet but like that would be that would be an incredibly fast monetary revolution um and maybe that's what happens right maybe it takes 60 years for us to complete the s curve but maybe it goes faster and i you know i don't know the answer um i guess nobody does but it is interesting to think about like like you know in putting together that that timeline of human history i kept thinking about moore's law and you know that obviously that's a logarithmic curve of computing power if that's a fair characterization um through time and that means it's exponential right and um the progress that you make in you know in the early days of computing is incredibly slow right and then now

you get massive progress um for each incremental year um and i think that's sort of the same thing with call it information exchange in humanity right that that now with the internet is global and instantaneous and very very rapid versus you know in a tribal setting 100 000 years ago you You would be limited to the transfer of ideas, you know, through tribal valleys, right? Like it would take time. So, you know, who knows how much that accelerates this process for us. And of course, the other thing is that, you know, we're limited by our wetware, our hardware upstairs of how quickly we can all come around to the realities of Bitcoin relative to every other asset out there. And I think part of that story is, I come back to like, if you grow up in a world where Bitcoin

exists, then Bitcoin's normal. And if you didn't, then Bitcoin's always going to be a little weird to you. And so I think we might be limited by that ultimately, and that would require like a generation or two for adoption to really happen. So anchored to the life that we knew before bitcoin was launched yeah i see it i see it in my five-year-old even my three-year-old now um they both watched the tuttle twins they know what bitcoin is my oldest for chores he demands bitcoin nice demand sats or for getting chores done he's always trying to think of competitions that we can do so that he can win more sets that's cool i think it's it's just you know it honestly i've said this before and it is earnest i did not push it on we

uh got a subscription to angel studio um for the cartoons that they have for total twins specifically and i didn't push him towards the bitcoin episodes he was naturally drawn i'm sure it's because he's heard me and my wife discuss bitcoin and he knows that daddy talks about bitcoin and so i think there's probably some daddy's interested in this i should be too but you ask him what bitcoin is and what money is and those two bitcoin episodes they do for total twins do a great job of distilling that information to a five-year-old where he's like bitcoin's hard money it's like why is it hard money he's like because it's hard to make you can't can't print more of it that's how you know that's amazing we may be at the point where at least a subset

of gen alpha or whatever i don't know what generation my son would be in um what they're calling it these days but he's gonna know what bitcoin is his whole life yeah that you know in the in the grand scale that's all it takes right there right like that that will sort of ensure bitcoin um is able to become what we think it can be uh if we're right you know if we're right about its properties uh and how attractive they are then that will bear out through that generation yeah and then you have i mean so multivariate too because you have the external sort of forced recognition of what bitcoin is with what's going on in something like the bond market and what has been glued to u.s 10-year treasury yields for the last two weeks with

the post-liberation day chaos that we've that we've seen in global markets and i think whether it was intentional or not the the moves that have been made from a global economic policy perspective here in the u.s is forcing people to really think like what are what are these treasury bonds like why are people so focused on why is some of my 40 40 of my 401k portfolio in these bonds and then you have like an acceleration mechanism from some external factor which is the fact that the u.s treasury market is not stable right now it's relatively unstable which is forcing people to question like what is the why does this market even exist in the first place totally all of that and and then it comes back to like you know i love this little

factoid about michael saylor's model um that in there he sort of expects like eight to nine percent real asset inflation every year for the next 20 years and so if you're if you're parked in treasury bonds getting i don't even know what it's at right now four and a half percent four three and four and a half somewhere um you know for a 10 year um then you're destroying almost four percent every year in real terms every year that you hold this asset that you think you're getting an you know a nice yield from you're actually losing in inflation adjusted terms because you're not keeping up with that eight or nine percent of real inflation yeah it's fascinating the uh this is i don't want to blow smoke up your ass players say right across from me but

when i read the piece the uh most interesting sort of breakthrough in human psychology behind bitcoin is in your piece or your hypothesis i guess we haven't rigorously tested it got peer-reviewed or whatever but i think it does logically follow that if that mutation did manifest at that point in time and shortly thereafter uh class b orxemia the shells shell necklaces became popular and then they became really popular and then humans beat out neanderthals right it's 10x population density what's going on there it it it does compute with me that that is a narrative that makes sense and a timeline that makes sense and a progression of monetary technology leading to humans homo sapiens sapiens sort of beating out neanderthals

yeah and logic follows yeah thank you um yeah you know i i don't think that anthropology will uh as a as a field will be very welcoming to this new outsider's theory um you're not an expert not at all uh the problem is i uh have interdisciplinary awareness you know and And that was what made it possible, I think, for me to come up with this theory when the current leading-edge theory in anthropology is that we are generalist specialists, and that doesn't explain much at all.

Yeah, what's the circular logic? We won out just because we were... So this team of Oxford PhDs pointing out that we... Succeeded, therefore we won. We inhabited... biomes that were not previously inhabited which meant we were just so good at living everywhere and that since we were so good at living everywhere that's why we live everywhere like that doesn't really explain you know why we had an edge over neanderthals or other humans yeah

maybe it's because we figured out what money was enabled the division of labor some of the tribe can go hunt bears for for fur so that we can live in the cold weather others went and gathered firewood so you could heat the fire yeah and have multiple tribes coordinating for greater security and force yeah insightful stuff jesse uh here's hoping it resonates with people you know um i wrote it to be very uh a fun ride so you know recommend to anyone it's an easy read too it it takes like 15 minutes if that yeah yeah that when i plugged it in to see how long it would take spat out 14 minutes so you know i i keep it pretty short and uh it's a fun ride it is i think we can get a great meme from it hyper bitcoinization is predisposed in our dna hell yeah and uh also

some people have pointed out that uh it sort of suggests that um uh alt coiners are neanderthals for not appreciating absolute scarcity when they see it yeah they'll come around they'll they never really come around you know but yeah they are neanderthals there's a lot of neanderthals holding on to their eath bags right now yes watching it go down let go let go go check out once in a species is it once in a species that's substack.com it's once in a species.com shit.com yeah awesome

it's yeah powered by Substack but yes hell yeah Jesse it's always a pleasure sir great to be here you gotta come by more often

yeah I'm not that far yeah peace and love freaks freaks thank you for listening to the show I hope you liked it if you did like it please make sure you subscribe

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