I've got to ask, Michael, what's your background in language analysis? How did you get interested in this to begin with? And I guess what makes what do you think makes, you know, language analysis in the Bitcoin space so interesting and interesting? Is it different than other, you know, investment cohorts? What have you learned by, you know, by digging into this analysis in Bitcoin?

I have a really strange way that I got into this at all.

So I've been an engineer for like 13 years working in like FinTech and engineering spaces.

So I was really primed.

I made tools like the kind of stuff I share in the past.

I love building things like this.

I'd always had this experience, but I've also been a writer.

Was there something about the BIP110 project that lent itself to maybe some of that isolation or echo chamber activity?

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 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.

Story was like one of the original forms of human data compression, where you can like pack, like, entire theories, ways of being for a culture into short, compressed stories that are then meme-able and spreadable over time.

And if we don't have those, we try to find stories to latch onto to explain ourselves.

Stories don't even, in the Bitcoin space too, the more I've talked about narratives, 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.

Yeah.

And I think you're also saying the people pro-110 spent a lot more time on that issue compared to the anti-110.

Precisely.

And a lot of people yell at algorithms and echo chambers and say that it's just like completely algorithmically driven.

And I kind of reject that a little bit.

I think that as much as we like to villainize algorithms, they're trying to give us what we want.

This is particularly top of mind right now because Twitter just changed their algorithms quite a bit to show us people we actually follow.

Wild concept.

On the question of OGs versus plebs, can you explain a bit of your thinking there on where they diverge?

I think you can share your screen.

All right.

So there's like a lot going on on these screens, um, but it's-- this has maybe been one of the most interesting findings I've seen since this.

What this is visualizing is showing the average excitement levels in language.

Again, this is like looking through every individual's tweet, seeing how many excited words they're using, and looking at it over time.

And the reason this has been like one of the most high signal things I've found is because of kind of like what's happening on an interpersonal level when you've been in Bitcoin for a longer dat- duration of time.

So something that I've personally experienced is when I first came to Bitcoin, I was disproportionately affected by every new narrative out there.

We're using new words to describe, you know, little issues, um, um, here and there." And so I kind of wanted to ask you, like, do you see that Bitcoin is kind of like developing its own counter language? Um, and is that good, or do you think, you know, that kind of is a, a, a barrier for people, like that doesn't help in, in the, in the paradigm shift? I really wonder what you think of that.

So how do you think about that cyclicality, the fluctuations around it?

I did add two charts here that I think are the most interesting mood thing happening right now that I wrote about briefly.

But before I do, there is absolutely a lot of cyclicality in the mood.

It's not always just up and to the right on one of them.

There's ups and downs.

The chart that you're looking at there does have 14-day smoothing happening on it, like a weighted moving average, basically, for the mood.

Because somebody will have an event happen, or there will be something in the news, and people will be freaking out about it, and it'll go up and down and up and down.

And so if you can, you know, with protecting, of course, what you do on a proprietary basis, just tell us how some of it works, some of You said that you were inspired by others, but how you came up with some of the ways that you're doing this sentiment analysis

Blame your own decisions, because that's all you can control.

That last bit is so interesting to me because like we, we're all like really emotional animals.

Like despite like all the, the Bitcoiner disposition to be a little bit autistic and go deep into numbers and like have all this logic, like we are all predisposed to be very sensitive to our emotions, even if you're not in tune with them.

And that's been one of the more, uh, interesting, optimistic things about all this, is like recognizing that you're not just forming your opinion in an isolated vacuum of emotion or lack of emotionality.

There's like every podcast you go into, every time you scroll Twitter or wherever else, everybody around you is in a specific mood, and it's disproportionately more easy to adapt the same mood as other people.

So just like people have been asking me like, "All right, how do I trade with your sentiment data?" Like, is there like signals that are go off? And like that's not the best takeaway in my opinion.

The better takeaway is like looking what current emotional regime we're under, because you're gonna learn a little bit about the predispositions and narratives that people are more likely to tell when you're under the influence of different emotions.

I guess, what would you say to them about trying to extricate yourself from that herd sentiment mentality that's so easy to get sucked into?

How did you get into sentiment analysis within Bitcoin specifically, and what, what set you down this particular rabbit hole?

Yeah.

So a little bit of background on myself.

I've been an engineer for like thirteen years, a writer for something like nine or ten now.

Uh, came into Bitcoin around twenty twenty-one, uh, for a lot of the same reasons that people did around that time with, like, um, money printing going crazy and that sort of thing, and just meant-- went immediately crazy deep down the rabbit hole.

Uh, I was a big writer at the time and was so just, like, profoundly inspired by Bitcoin that I had this creative energy around it.

Got deep into writing, and a lot of people in the Bitcoin space know me as the guy who's writing a Bitcoin novel.

Or what, what is needed for a sentiment shift?

dude i felt no euphoria on the way to 126k like the rsi was like way too low i don't know i kind of felt the same way if i'm being honest i was like 126k i was pumped but like we haven't felt that euphoria i don't think since the first i don't know when's the last time you felt like a big euphoria or

We're going to see some of that here.

Well, this chart, honestly, does a decent example of it.

For starters, though, I 100% agree with that.

The most euphoric I've ever been in Bitcoin was after the election, probably, and it's 2024.

That big spike at the end of 2024 there when we broached 100K for the first time was not the same.

So what we're actually looking at here is the optimism in the language of OGs over time.

And so, yeah, you're spot on, dude.