[00:03:22] Brandon Quittem: But the reality is that it’s an enormous kingdom with tremendous diversity. There’s some of the oldest multicellular life on our planet. In fact, one fossil the oldest multicellular fossil, we found is 2.4 billion years old. And it’s some type of fungi. This is a recent finding that sort of breaks our whole long view of history because we thought other things had evolved first, but it turns out that fungi might have been primary.

[00:03:47] Brandon Quittem: And we’ll kind of figure out, kind of talk through how they fit into the ecosystem later and where that would make sense. And so the mushroom itself, most people think about, that’s just the sexual reproductive organ. It shows up just for a brief moment. It produces spores, which are like little mushroom seeds, and then the mushroom quickly disappears.

[00:04:04] Brandon Quittem: But the majority of most fungi life are spent underground or in a tree in a form that we’ll call mycelium. And mycelium the most interesting part of the kingdom, in my opinion. And it also, as we’ll find out soon, ties directly into Bitcoin, which I know sounds totally weird, but it is true. And that mycelium form, think about an underground network of tubes.

[00:04:28] Brandon Quittem: So one cell wall, very tiny little tubes that branch and fragment and connect trees together. The recent studies are showing that they send information bidirectionally, they trade resources. And so underneath a forest is this enormous network of multiple fungi plants working together and trading and it, it actually resembles an underground economy.

[00:04:52] Brandon Quittem: And we now affectionately call this the wood wide web, right? This underground network there. And so that’s sort of the framing of what this thing is. But let’s do a little more fungi stuff just to make sure everyone’s on board with how cool this stuff is because it’s really a forgotten kingdom. And as late as the late sixties, it was considered a lesser plant, right?

[00:05:12] Brandon Quittem: So not that long ago, we didn’t even know it was its own kingdom. And a lot has changed since then. And the more we study, the more this this whole kingdom starts to unfurl. And okay, so fungi and animals are actually very similar, much more similar than we are to plants. So both animals and fungi inhale oxygen.

[00:05:31] Brandon Quittem: We exhale carbon dioxide. Plants obviously are the opposite. And we both find our own food, whereas plants make their own food. Okay. The major taxonomy the branch where we sort of forked off from fungi is because animals put food in their body. Okay? And fungi actually go into, put their bodies into the food.

[00:05:52] Brandon Quittem: And so that mycelial little tube structure, it dissolves its environment, it consumes its environment through chemistry, and it’s actually a master of chemistry. A lot of our medicine comes from fungi. And because our biology is similar, fungi have evolved to learn these little defense molecules to protect themselves.

[00:06:11] Brandon Quittem: And it just so happens that those same molecules work on us most famously was penicillin, right? And humans have been deploying fungi as a tool for as long back as we can remember in World War I, people would put moldy bread on wounds in the trench warfare, and we actually didn’t even know it was due to penicillin on the bread.

[00:06:30] Brandon Quittem: We just knew it worked. And if we go back even further, let’s say about 5,000 years ago, we found a famous ancient man in the Swiss Alps. He’s called Ötzi, the Iceman now, and he had a few possessions on him, a knife, a little satchel, and two mushrooms. So half of his possessions were fungi. Okay? The two fungi.

[00:06:51] Brandon Quittem: One is Tinder polypore. This is a unique mushroom. It’s found all over the world, and when you dry it out, it makes really good tinder for starting a fire. Okay? Super valuable. You’re crossing the Swiss Alps. Obviously a fire’s important. The next was a birch polypore, which is a mushroom that when it’s dried out, it actually becomes so hard, you can sharpen a knife on it, and if you like boil in water for a little bit, it produces some antiviral and antibacterial properties.

[00:07:18] Brandon Quittem: And what we found is this Ötzi Iceman was so well preserved in the ice that we could actually check his stomach, and we found pathogens in his stomach that that Birch Polypore was active against. So very, very important for this guy, and that’s true all over all of history. It’s the humans who partnered with fungi, they’re the ones who out-competed others.

[00:07:39] Brandon Quittem: For example, beer is made with yeast, and yeast is a fungi. And in a time where waterborne pathogens were very, very destructive to societies. If your society could brew beer very low alcohol, beer, you can drink that cleanly with no problems. Whereas the neighboring tribe would be grabbing water from some other source and have a much higher risk of waterborne pathogens.

[00:08:02] Brandon Quittem: Quick tangent. Some people believe that the answer for why did humans go from hunter gatherers to agricultural society was because they discovered how to brew beer. And maybe it was at first because it keeps you safe, but later it turns into, you know, beer’s pretty cool. So people like it and they want to settle down, but that’s entirely possible that we didn’t settle down for food.

[00:08:23] Brandon Quittem: We settled down for beer. I’ll let the reader navigate that one. Another question here is around the, the honey mushroom. What is the largest organism on our planet? Again, just going through fungi facts. The honey mushroom in eastern Oregon was discovered not that long ago, and it’s between 2000 and 8,000 years old.

[00:08:42] Brandon Quittem: And the only reason why they discovered it is because they were hiking around this mountain. They’re like, why are all these pine trees dying? They got in a plane and flew over the mountain and they observed that there was this huge swath of the forest being decimated. And then they figured out that it was a single honey mushroom who was consuming an entire forest.

[00:09:00] Brandon Quittem: It’s thousands of acres in size and still growing. And since we know so little about fungi, it’s entirely possible that there’s larger ones, other parts of the planet. That’s just the largest one we’ve found so far. People talk about plants, and I actually want to break down a difference between a micro centric world in a phyto centric world, meaning plants get all the press plants, get all the love, because we see them, we know them.

[00:09:25] Brandon Quittem: Whereas fungi are mostly out of sight and out of mind, and so they get no love. And so if you view the world, let’s, let’s look at a forest for example. So, what is it for us? It’s a whole bunch of trees competing, right? And those trees actually connect with fungi underground and they form a symbiotic relationship.

[00:09:41] Brandon Quittem: The mushrooms burrow into the tree roots and they create trade networks, and there’s trade policy. There’s buy low, there’s cell high, there’s hoarding resources. You reward your, your good trading partners and you, you stiff the other ones. And it very much resembles a human economic system in, in that environment.

[00:09:59] Brandon Quittem: Most people would say a forest is just competitive trees, or maybe it’s a symbiotic forest working together and they just use the mushrooms for their capacity. Right? And let me break that down. Fungi use chemistry to dissolve things in the soil. And what they’re doing is they’re liberating minerals and valuable resources, which the tree needs to grow.

[00:10:20] Brandon Quittem: And what the trees do is they use photosynthesis to create sugars and fats, which are food for the mushrooms. So the tree sell the sugars and fats in exchange for these minerals. Prior to that symbiotic relationship, trees were only about a meter high and they didn’t have really any root structure. And so the leading hypothesis now from the mycology side is that tree roots are actually evolved to go search underground, to find these mycorrhizal fungi partners to trade.

[00:10:48] Brandon Quittem: If you look at it now, that’s the phyto centric view, right? It’s a forest and they, they, they borrow from the mushrooms, from the micro centric point of view, mushrooms and especially mycorrhizal fune, the ones who trade in the roots, they are actually just tree farmers, right? So they connect with all these trees and they’re growing the forest in the way that best suits them.

[00:11:07] Brandon Quittem: And we’re starting to uncover these, these trade relationships. And what we find is that it looks like a tree will give resources to another species. So an oak tree gives a birch tree a whole bunch of carbon, right? That makes no sense. From a biology standpoint, they have separate genetics until you involve that mushroom trade network, right?

[00:11:28] Brandon Quittem: Where the mushroom wants to broker a healthy forest. And sometimes that means taking some carbon off of this big healthy tree and giving it to a smaller tree that needs it. Yeah, let’s just keep Myco centric for centric in mind. There couple other interesting ones. Here are the leaf cutter ants, which Andreas Antonopoulos actually put on one of his books.

[00:11:47] Brandon Quittem: So he, he understands this sort of network intelligence type thing, which we’ll talk about, but the leaf cutter ants, they’re one of the most populous organisms on the planet. And what they do is they go out and they forage leaves. They bring him back to their underground layer, and they put those leaves in a pile and essentially ferment them.

[00:12:06] Brandon Quittem: And so that fermentation process of course happens with a fungi and that stores a food cache underground and then they can come and and eat off of that mycelium for a long time into the future. Right now, if you look at it from the fungis perspective, what’s happening, the fungi are hiring these ants to go find them food and bring it to the mother source.

[00:12:26] Brandon Quittem: So the fungi has more to eat. It’s kind of an extended phenotype for the fungi, right? They deploy the ant like a beaver makes beaver dams, the fungi hires the ants to bring it more food. Yeah. And if you look at biology one step deeper, and this is getting into I would say, the tip of the spirit of biology.

[00:12:43] Brandon Quittem: It’s a little more esoteric. It’s not necessarily mainstream approved, but I think all the interesting stuff in science is on the edge. And you know, 50 years later we’ll look back and be like, oh, that’s obviously true. And the point I’m talking about here is about symbiosis. And so pretty much every scale of biology there is some sort of symbiosis.

[00:13:03] Brandon Quittem: And what that means is two separate organisms are cooperating. And in that environment it’s a little bit of cooperation, a little bit of competition. But the point is that they worked together and one plus one equals three. And a fun study here was they looked at a certain medicine, I don’t remember which one, and they said, oh, this medicine comes from a plant.

[00:13:23] Brandon Quittem: And then they look a little bit deeper and they realize, wait a minute, that molecule is actually produced in the fungi that lives inside the plant cells. And by the way, 100% of plants have fungi embedded into their cells. That little mycelium thread, like stuff works its way in. So not a single plant have ever been found in the wild without a fungal ally.

[00:13:42] Brandon Quittem: And most plants with roots also connect through the mycorrhizal network underground. And back to that story, the fungi actually created the, the molecule, not the plant. Right? Then you go even deeper and you realize that bacteria is inside the fungi, they’re even smaller, and they find out that the molecule is actually created in the bacteria, and you can go one step lower and you can say, oh, it’s actually the virus in the bacteria that’s in the fungi, that’s in the plant plant that creates the molecule.

[00:14:10] Brandon Quittem: And so I, I bring that up just as a, a launch point into symbiosis because I think it’s important to have that sort of idea in the back of our head that these are cooperative and competitive ecosystems and humans play the same game. You look at our gut, it’s full of a microbiome of all these tiny little creatures that are not human cells, right?

[00:14:29] Brandon Quittem: 90% of the cells in our body are not human cells. And we need these organisms to, to survive. And that’s how we evolved as well. And one last thing on, on this one before I get off my diatribe is that about 500 million years ago, all complex life lived in the oceans. Okay? There was no terrestrial plants.

[00:14:51] Brandon Quittem: There might’ve been some insects on, on dry land, but it was pretty much all the action was underwater. Then there was some fateful occurrence where a fungi and some sort of a plant, some symbio, maybe an allergy, something like that, they washed up on shore together. And what happened was they formed a symbiosis and they colonized dry land together so that fungi burrows into the rock and dissolves the rock with chemistry and liberates the carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, all the things it needs simultaneously, that little algae that it trapped.

[00:15:22] Brandon Quittem: The fungi trap was converting the sunlight and and oxygen into food, sorry, and carbon dioxide into food. And so those two together, it kicked off this enormous process that went from turning volcanic rock into topsoil. Over time, over a very long period of time, we have about a foot or two feet of top soil on, on our planet.

[00:15:42] Brandon Quittem: But it started with that fateful moment. And once a little topsoil comes, it makes way for other land organisms to then colonize the slightly more fertile dry land, right? And fast forward all the way that made room for a US today. And so we and every other terrestrial complex life on our planet owe it to the fungi for creating the conditions on life for which we can emerge.

[00:16:06] Brandon Quittem: And simultaneously that helps the fungi, right? They’re tree farmers. So if they create this beautiful forest that’s more trees producing food for them, and the story continues, so I’ll stop there.

[00:16:18] Preston Pysh: I’m going to take this in the Bitcoin direction faster than I thought I was going to. Simply because as you’re describing this, I can’t help but think about building in layers and how important it is to optimize and not over-engineer a particular layer.

[00:16:36] Preston Pysh: So when we’re looking at biology and we’re looking at Bitcoin, help the listener understand why this idea is so important and why we see natural biology maybe evolve the way that it has.

[00:16:49] Brandon Quittem: Yeah, great question and good tie in here. So the formal story or argument here is called Gall’s law, and it essentially states that to make a complex system, you need to start with a simple system.

[00:17:01] Brandon Quittem: Okay. And that law appears in biology and in Bitcoin. So in the biology, in the biology layer, it might be the, the virus, bacteria, fungi, plant, animal hierarchy. Or it could be, for example, atoms, make molecules, molecules make cells, organelles, organ systems, organism, ecosystem, right? So each one of those scale layers does what it does best.

[00:17:21] Brandon Quittem: And if you zoom in at that little scale, there’s a whole drama happening at the molecule level, right? And you zoom out and those molecules are part of a larger system. And that seems to be a fundamental law of the universe, which is that do what you do best and make that simple and straightforward and robust so that you can layer on more complexity on layers above.

[00:17:43] Brandon Quittem: And so bringing that to Bitcoin, and we can take that, the alternatives to Bitcoin, if we even want to call them that afterwards. But Bitcoin is very, very simple, right? It produces blocks, it’s a, it’s a secure base layer that just creates a transaction ledger. And that’s all it really does. And that’s a good thing.

[00:18:01] Brandon Quittem: And if you want to do a visa type payment network, like the lighting network on top of that, that would make sense. But you wouldn’t want to combine a central bank with visa, right? Those are totally separate layers with different functions. And if you try to do it all at once, you’re essentially breaking the law of the universe, which is the scale and layers.

[00:18:19] Brandon Quittem: And so thankfully in the block size wars era of 2016, 17, cooler heads prevailed and Bitcoin optimized for that base layer for security. And then we’re going to do lightning network. We’re going to do services on top of that. Like exchanges are maybe a layer, all these new things coming out, and that’s just the right way to scale.

[00:18:39] Preston Pysh: When we look at biology and we look at the Fungi network, and you were saying that they’re great at harvesting minerals in exchange for the energy that the plants. So when we’re looking at how they have optimized themselves, Kind of going back to the original talking points that you have, it almost seems like the fungi, or I’m sorry, the plants are experts at consistent energy flow down into the root structure and the fungi are consistently able to find minerals and then that’s why that exchange relationship, the fungi has trouble having sustained energy sources and the plants have issues having sustained mineral sources and nutrients for them to build as high as as they build outside of the, am I properly describing that as somebody who’s kind of clueless on now on why they’ve optimized themselves the way that they have?

[00:19:35] Brandon Quittem: Yeah, exactly right. And specifically, I’m going to probably refer back to this multiple times, but the kingdom is so diverse that what you described is 100% true for the mycorrhizal fungi. And those are the specific ones that form symbiosis with trees. In order to make the trade. And so in that context, yes, they absolutely need each other.

[00:19:55] Brandon Quittem: And now if we want to shift to another type of fungi, the other primary role that they play is actually as the recyclers of the planet. So the Safi fungi is the technical term, but all it means is they eat dead and dying organic matter, and not even organic matter. They eat anything pretty much, but mostly dead and die in organic matter.

[00:20:16] Brandon Quittem: So the question would be you walk through a forest and there’s all these trees and there’s some leaves and sticks on the ground and stuff, but why aren’t we just buried in leaves and sticks and dead animals? And that’s because the fungi consume all that. And they’re so good at chemistry that they take a, a fallen stick on the ground and they, they’re just the disassembles, the recyclers.

[00:20:38] Brandon Quittem: They just take that whole thing apart, bit by bit, ba break right down to its base molecules. And then that essentially liberates value out of a wasted resource and then recycles that, essentially sells it back into the ecosystem, eats what it wants and sells the rest. And so they perform a very important role there.

[00:20:57] Brandon Quittem: And it’s very similar to Bitcoin mining actually. And you could say that Bitcoin miners are actually converting waste or stranded resources like that fallen tree. They’re converting that into a valuable digital commodity. Right. And before Bitcoin, this often happened with, let’s say, stranded energy in Iceland, right?

[00:21:16] Brandon Quittem: The famous example is they have geothermal in remote locations, so essentially free energy and no customers. What do you do with it? Either you try to build a manufacturing plant nearby or something like that. And what often happened is they would smelt the aluminum there because alum, the highest cost input for aluminum is energy.

[00:21:34] Brandon Quittem: And so they would build an aluminum plant in the middle of nowhere to take advantage of that free energy. And Bitcoin miners do the same thing, right? They co-locate to these stranded energy sources, these fallen sticks in the woods that have no use case. And the Bitcoin miners convert that into a, a digital commodity.

[00:21:51] Brandon Quittem: And the Bitcoin miners are actually going to outcompete the aluminum smelting plants in most cases because the Bitcoin miners have no CapEx on a power plant. As soon as that, the miners are done at that power source, you just move the machines, put them somewhere else, you can deploy them almost instantly at any scale, right?

[00:22:10] Brandon Quittem: And so those Bitcoin miners are just going around trying to find untapped resources and liberating value out of them. And energy itself is kind of a, a passion of mine lately. I think it’s a really important conversation looking at the world right now. And what these miners are doing produces so many second order positive effects.

[00:22:30] Brandon Quittem: Right? And I think that the simple analogy is actually looking at broadband internet. And so as soon as there’s more demand for fi faster speed internet, what happens? More demand tells the market to create more supply. And the same is true in Bitcoin. More demand for these energy sources tells the market to create more supply and more supply of energy is good for humanity, right?

[00:22:53] Brandon Quittem: We want low cost, reliable power all over the world. And Bitcoin miners in their own small niche way are actually helping to bootstrap that process. And of course, human flourishing is downstream of, of harnessing energy, and that’s been true since the beginning.

[00:23:08] Preston Pysh: It reminds me of this quote that I’ve heard on Twitter that people say Bitcoin doesn’t waste energy, it consumes wasted energy.

[00:23:16] Preston Pysh: And what a parallel that is. That’s mind blowing the parallel there to what we’re seeing on this network. Another thing that, like, just from reading the book and just kind of thinking about this mycelium, it almost seems like a neural network of the brain that’s taking place under a force. Like if you were, were able to like peer underneath of a force, it would almost seem like this mycelium is like the connections that you see between neurons and a brain.

[00:23:46] Preston Pysh: Is, is that a correct way to think about it? Or am I, am I making too big of a leap? And if like, so what, like what, what would be your takeaway from that if, if it even would be considered something like that?

[00:24:00] Brandon Quittem: Yeah, I think that’s actually a extremely profound point and it’s hard for humans to appreciate this type of intelligence because it looks so different from us, right?

[00:24:10] Brandon Quittem: We have a central brain, we think very highly of ourselves. Just so happens we think very highly of ourselves with our brain, but we’ll leave that aside. The mycelium is a totally different type of intelligence. What, what it’s like is a neural net, like you described. And again, let’s go back underground.

[00:24:27] Brandon Quittem: These tiny little tubes all over using chemistry, growing, moving, it’s just a process. This anarchic flow of little filaments underground. And those millions of little endpoints are searching for food. They’re defending their territory, they’re inventing new molecules to subvert the competition. And it’s constantly rearchitecting itself.

[00:24:48] Brandon Quittem: And rather than having a central processing unit like we do, the decision making’s actually made at the edge of the network. So the tip of these little filaments, they’re making decisions locally. Do I go left? Do I go right, do I eat that? Do I run away from that? Right? And that whole thing, you know, when do we reproduce?

[00:25:06] Brandon Quittem: All those decisions are made at the end, and the whole sum total of those decentralized endpoints, forms consensus, and that’s where the intelligence is. So it actually pushes decision making to the edge where the information is actually the most relevant. Totally different than us, right? And this actually mirrors the decentralized or inner inner subjective consensus formed in Bitcoin, right?

[00:25:29] Brandon Quittem: The nodes individually determine what software they want to run, which enforces the rules that they believe in. The miners choose the blocks that they want to include to append to the network. The exchanges, wallets, merchants, all the infrastructure above that stewards users. I mean, everyone, all of those little endpoints together voluntarily participate and together aggregate consensus in the network.

[00:25:53] Brandon Quittem: So Bitcoin also is that same archetype of the decentralized intelligence network, and I think the, the most, so I wrote the first essay on this topic in 2018, and the crowd favorite of the essay by far was the slime mold. So I gotta tell this story. First, the slim mold is not fungi. It was formerly considered fungi.

[00:26:12] Brandon Quittem: We learn a little bit more now it’s classified as an amoeba, but you can think of it as a bunch of single celled organisms that form a clump and they like to hang out together and they travel in packs because it’s best for them. And so that’s, that’s what the, the slime mold is. And some scientists in Japan put down O Flakes, which are the slime mold’s favorite food onto a Petri dish.

[00:26:34] Brandon Quittem: And they essentially mapped out Tokyo’s subway system, you know, shinjuku this stop. That’s all the stops. Then they unleashed the slim mold into this little maze. And in the course of an afternoon, the slime mold created a network. It grew and formed to create a network to capture all the food. And they looked back and they realized, wow, it created a more efficient, more resilient subway system than the Japanese engineers built, which are world class.

[00:27:01] Brandon Quittem: And so again, the humble amoeba out competes the best engineers on our planet. And I don’t say this to knock the Japanese engineers, I say this just to describe the fact that there are different types of intelligence, and this is an emergent intelligence that it just comes out of the desire to find food and be optimized.

[00:27:21] Brandon Quittem: And I think biology has these sort of base operating parameters, these search functions, these optimization functions inherent somewhere deep down in the algorithm that produces evolution to produce this type of information. And also tells us a lot about Bitcoin. Right. Because these decentralized networks, although not smart like we are, they do make good decisions because we’re each individually on the edge of the network making decisions.

[00:27:48] Brandon Quittem: Which wallet do I use? Which exchange do I use? Which software patch do I, I go for? And we’re all making decisions for us, right? And we have the best information and the aggregate of that creates the network. And that makes it very resilient as a life form, right? Which fungi are extremely resilient. We’ve had six mass extinctions on our planet as far as we know.

[00:28:11] Brandon Quittem: Like, you know, 65 million years ago, asteroids come kill the dinosaurs In that period, asteroid hits, blocks out the sun, extremely cold period. For years. And in that period, all the, at the time it was dinosaurs, right? So cold-blooded reptiles, and they don’t do so well when it’s cold. So essentially the age of the dinosaurs ended.

[00:28:33] Brandon Quittem: The fungi inherited the whole planet. They, they stewarded the planet, they prepare it for life. And this tiny little mole, they call it a terick, but it’s just a tiny little mouse. Essentially, he buried himself underground and and outlasted this horrible cataclysmic event as the mushrooms are preparing the surface or future.

[00:28:53] Brandon Quittem: And then this little mole pops out. I mean, generations of moles, mole pops out, all the dinosaurs are gone, and it becomes the age of mammals, which we’re currently living into. Now, I say that to say that the fungi essentially survive all these cataclysms and they just wait and prepare, and then you know, they’re opportunistically adding other organisms into the mix to suit their own benefits, to be clear.

[00:29:15] Brandon Quittem: But it is that symbiotic cooperation slash competition type environment. Back to that mycelial network, right? Underground cells little tubes everywhere. There’s really no central processing unit. So you could cut the mycelial network in two and now you have two networks growing, no problem, right? So no central point of control, no central point of failure.

[00:29:37] Brandon Quittem: Bitcoin’s the same way, right? You could remove any single developer node, minor exchange, doesn’t matter. They can be as vulnerable as possible, no problem. But there’s no c e o of Bitcoin to jail. There’s no one version of the software to shut down. There’s no essential hardware to seize. There’s none of that stuff.

[00:29:55] Brandon Quittem: And so it forms that same sort of anti fragility in the Chian sense that you attack it and what happens, it actually routes around your attack and the network becomes stronger. So if you think of that underground drama, fungi are fighting off bacteria, other fungi trying to find food, and all of a sudden it identifies an attack around one side, right?

[00:30:15] Brandon Quittem: Information travels on the mycelial network. Literal information by the way, that they’re now measuring electricity and action potential. They’re sending information and it goes back to specialized parts of that fungi to create a custom molecule. Again, their masters of chemistry, they produce a custom molecule, ship that enzyme right over to the edge of the network to then defend its new attacker.

[00:30:39] Brandon Quittem: And what happens over time is the, the fungi itself creates a chemical library of these defense molecules. So it learns, it gets better, more, more fit for its niche over time, which is the only way the honey mushroom could take over an entire mountaintop and lived for thousands of years if it learned and adapted right.

[00:30:58] Brandon Quittem: So these are extremely resilient creatures. And let’s use that same little narrative for Bitcoin, for example, let’s say we find a bug in the code or some attack factor is. Found right. Information travels through the informal network. It gets through a developer. The developers put their heads together, create a custom software patch or enzyme.

[00:31:20] Brandon Quittem: They ship that software patch or enzyme throughout the network. The network updates itself, vulnerability patch, or organisms stronger. And that attack would be harder to execute in the future, right? So again, the system learns, it adapts, it evolves. And in that sense, it does mimic life. And I know that comes across kind of crazy.

[00:31:39] Brandon Quittem: And believe me, I was the most shy to publish Bitcoin’s, a living organism when I did in 2018. Everybody’s talking about finance and software, this and that, and I’m like, I don’t know. I think it might be a living organism. But turns out the analogy is salient. And I think the primary reason why comparing it to living organisms makes sense, number one is because.

[00:32:01] Brandon Quittem: This thing does not behave like a software project or like a money. It really does learn, evolve and it mimics life in all these different ways. And I think it’s a good narrative to explain Bitcoin to people. At least that’s what I found because we intuit biology much easier. You can tell stories we’re, we’re of biology, right?

[00:32:21] Brandon Quittem: So it sinks in deeper whereas like dry technical step-by-step most people that doesn’t really work on, and that’s just sort of a side note there. But the other angle on anti fragility before I pass it back to you is, is the systemic anti fragility, right? So we did the micro, the organism itself is anti-fragile because it learns from a macro standpoint, let’s compare fiat or an inorganic system to a Bitcoin or an organic system.

[00:32:48] Brandon Quittem: Let’s say monocrop. Let’s take bananas. You just bulldoze all the trees and plant a bunch of bananas and you’re dole and you just monocrop one banana all around the world and you ship it around and you make money selling bananas, right? Hyper efficient, extremely low cost, great way to deliver calories.

[00:33:05] Brandon Quittem: True, true, true. However, it’s extremely vulnerable because it’s, they’re all clones of the same organism. They’re all brothers and sisters of the same exact genetics. And so what that means is what happens if a disease vector comes? Okay? And this did happen in the fifties. At that time, there was one banana that made up for the vast majority of bananas consumed around the world, especially the exports.

[00:33:29] Brandon Quittem: It was called the Big Mike, big Mike Banana, and some enterprising young fungi saw an opportunity called the Panama Disease. They figured out how to eat that banana and take it over. And over the course of a couple years, we had a global food shortage because one fungi learned how to eat one banana, and that decimated 80% of the banana exports on the planet.

[00:33:49] Brandon Quittem: And that same story applies to fiat money in the same way because fiat money, hyper efficient, you know, you sender, you can control it, all these different things. And it offers a benefit, which is short term price stability. You have these little ledgers levers and you try to steer the the price and try and keep a stable, but it comes at the expense of that long-term systemic risk, right?

[00:34:11] Brandon Quittem: Every time you meddle with the price of money, every time you bail out zombie corporations, every time you metal, you’re just burying risk and you’re hiding the risk. And that systemic risk builds up, builds up over time, and then the one fungi takes out the whole banana crop and you have some sort of financial collapse.

[00:34:28] Brandon Quittem: And so essentially you just don’t account for fat tail risk. And now let’s compare it to Bitcoin, which is more like an old growth rainforest, not a monocrop, not a single banana. In that environment, fierce competition, incremental progress, thousands or millions of species sustainable. A single fungi attacking a single species.

[00:34:48] Brandon Quittem: There you wouldn’t even notice a thousand fungi attacking a thousand species wouldn’t even dent the complexity and the resilience of the forest. Bitcoin is like that. Bitcoin is this ecosystem, this living, breathing dynamic system. And what it means for money is that Bitcoin accepts the short-term price volatility.

[00:35:06] Brandon Quittem: Bitcoin’s price is volatile and it always probably will be more than fiat money. But what we gain in exchange is that long-term systemic stability, it wears the risk on its sleeve. It, there’s no bailouts in Bitcoin. The, you know, the market clears, risk is cleared and we move on. And in my opinion, that’s a huge win for humanity because it provides a more stable economic layer.

[00:35:29] Brandon Quittem: We connect the whole planet like a mycelial network, where anyone in the world can speak the same economic language. Doesn’t matter what your government says, doesn’t matter what currency you’re supposed to use, you can access this network with a $10 smartphone and you are now economically a viable online.

[00:35:46] Brandon Quittem: And I think what that does practically is it brings more market participants into the global economy, and that’s really good for humans. Because, okay, you’re in Zimbabwe and now all of a sudden you have a good idea, you can fund your business and you can bootstrap that from anywhere on the planet. So not only does that help the individual, their family, their community, but what if that one person is Mozart?

[00:36:08] Brandon Quittem: What if that one person is may angel? What if it’s Nikola Tesla that previously was buried under some country with capital controls and poor internet or something like that. And instead, now what? What if Mozart was born before the piano was created? Right? What, what a shame for the rest of humanity. So by bringing everyone online in this single economic network that no one can stop just like mycelium.

[00:36:31] Brandon Quittem: It will uncover individuals who changed the world and they wouldn’t have had the chance if they couldn’t connect to this global network. And so, in my opinion, it’s our duty to make sure that anyone with a good idea has a chance to bring it to market. It’s the right thing to do, and it’s practically good for us.

[00:36:49] Preston Pysh: So Brandon, somebody that’s listening to that, they might say, alright, so you’re talking about a monocrop, you’re talking about the Big Mike Banana basically being an example. And then you talk about Bitcoin, which to them might sound like it’s a monocrop or as they’re looking at it from their outsider perspective, and they’re, they’re used to fiat money and the way that the system currently exists, they’re saying no, moving to Bitcoin is like a monocrop.

[00:37:15] Preston Pysh: So how would you respond to that person when, if that’s what they’re thinking is they’re hearing?

[00:37:21] Brandon Quittem: So at first, I would say that I don’t see a world where, ever where there’s a single money and nothing that trades like money is, is around. Like there will always be multiple types of money, I believe. And so what I, when I say that I’m more mean, it’s an option for anyone.

[00:37:37] Brandon Quittem: It’s a lifeline for those who don’t have a better monetary system that they can access, right? And it’s 100% voluntary. And so based on your needs locally, you’re going to make the best decision for yourself. Now, from the other side, the systemic risk side, like what happened to the Big Mike Banana, the major difference is that fiat monies are political monies, right?

[00:37:58] Brandon Quittem: And that means that people in charge make decisions, oftentimes short-term decisions, which come at the expense of long-term things. And it’s rational for that to happen, right? The barbarians are at the gate. We gotta print more money to defend ourselves. Super rational, easy to justify. But over the long term, that may undermine the currency.

[00:38:20] Brandon Quittem: And I think that’s why currencies have such a short shelf life is because humans meddle with them. And over time it hides risk. And then there’s a systemic blowup. And so with compare that to Bitcoin, there is no politics there. There’s no one’s printing more, because it’s too hard to make changes and the market clears, it removes the distortion.

[00:38:41] Brandon Quittem: There’s no politics, there’s, there’s very little, if any, systemic risk. And so I think in my, my honest opinion, that’s the most important part of this Bitcoin thing. It is not 21 million. It is not a blockchain. It is not any of this stuff. It’s actually the fact that we have a monetary system that’s extremely hard to change, and historically money’s failed because either they get outcompeted technologically, which I think is what happened with gold and why we moved to Fiat, right?

[00:39:08] Brandon Quittem: We went to a global world, an information world, and gold is analog. This is too slow to keep up. So we make fiat money. The other way monies fail is due to over politicization, which essentially just greed steps in or thinking steps in, and then we just break the money and no one wants it anymore. And so in those situations, money lasts, let’s say 50 years maybe, maybe 30 years if you know things are going well.

[00:39:34] Brandon Quittem: And I think Bitcoin has a chance to not be a 50 year money. I think Bitcoin’s the first chance of being a 500 year money because it can evolve and adapt. So it handles the technology disruption angle, it learns, it gets better. It’s software, we can reimagine it. And the worst case scenario, we can port the UTXO set into a new software system and the UTXO sets where the value is because that’s the network, the holders themselves care about that and it’s backed up everywhere.

[00:40:04] Brandon Quittem: And so you could port that into a new software system. Let’s say we invent something really cool. The other side is the politicization because it’s so hard to change. It doesn’t matter what the politics of the day are. It doesn’t matter what the current thing is. Bitcoin just laughs it, it’s, it’s totally unaware of the, the, the current thing.

[00:40:22] Brandon Quittem: It just does what it does. So I think both of those two combined essentially overcome why monies fail. And it doesn’t mean that Bitcoin won’t fail, but it does mean that this is the first potential money to last 500 years. Right. Let’s 10 x the, the average or, or maybe more. Drew Bansal makes a good case for how, if we’re going to go to space, we’re certainly not using fiat money on a database here.

[00:40:45] Brandon Quittem: We’re certainly not using gold. So maybe we are using Bitcoin, but that’s a story for another day.

[00:40:51] Preston Pysh: Love that response. Talk about the fungal life cycle and how this mimics Bitcoin cycles.

[00:41:00] Brandon Quittem: I made this thread in the last bear market and it kind of went viral. I put some visuals here. I think he does a good job telling the story of fungi too.

[00:41:07] Brandon Quittem: And caveat, I’m like secretly trying to teach all the bitcoiners about fungi. I think it’s an equally deep rabbit hole. And another quick tangent. My personal interests in life, or what am I good at? What am I here for? I believe is to pursue the frontier of knowledge. And I think that means overlapping industries.

[00:41:27] Brandon Quittem: This is biology and technology, right? And if you are in decently obsessed amateur in multiple fields, which I am, you can actually produce novel insight that the experts in those separate fields would totally miss. And they’re obvious to you because you have that overlap. And so I guess this is me saying we need more generalists in the world, right?

[00:41:48] Brandon Quittem: It takes like 25 years to be an expert cardiologist. And great, you might contribute 0.1% more in cardiology, but you know nothing of food dynamics, so you’re going to miss how blood flows through the, the veins, for example. That’s probably not even a good example, but you get what I mean. Yeah.

[00:42:04] Brandon Quittem: Multiple layers is key. And so let’s come back up to fungi. The life cycle here, most of a fungi life is in that mycelial form. It’s out of sight, out of mind. You walk through the forest, you don’t even see it. And then when the conditions are absolutely perfect, humidity’s, right temperatures, right, moisture’s, right, et cetera, it concentrates all its energy to produce a mushroom.

[00:42:27] Brandon Quittem: The fruiting body, and some of these are actually among the fastest acceleration things we’ve found on our planet. So little tiny mushrooms, which are mostly water and cell walls made of chitin, which is the same as like a crab shell, so very, very hard, rigid, mixed with water, produces a unique form and it can actually burst through asphalt.

[00:42:49] Brandon Quittem: They can lift a concrete paver off the ground and it accelerates. I forgot the number, but it’s like a jet engine acceleration. Which is insane. So quietly underground when the condition’s right, produces the mushroom, and as soon as that mushroom reaches the peak, it releases all its spores. Tiny little mushroom seeds, and they’re lighter than air.

[00:43:08] Brandon Quittem: They flow all over the place, and the most of them die. But a few land together, they fuse and they create new fungal colonies. They go underground, and then they’re in that quiet place for maybe years before they reproduce again. Right. That’s the life cycle. Now what?

[00:43:23] Preston Pysh: For years. For years, you said before they reproduce-

[00:43:26] Brandon Quittem: Potentially.

[00:43:27] Preston Pysh: Wow.

[00:43:28] Brandon Quittem: Yeah, it could be years. It could be an a lot of, a lot of, I mean, the diversity is so large, but certain mushrooms come up in the spring every year or the fall, right. So there’s patterns, but a new fungal colony probably doesn’t have enough energy to reproduce for a while. So it’s just underground foraging, building, forming relationships, building its own mass.

[00:43:48] Preston Pysh: Now let’s talk what the hype cycle in Bitcoin, right. Bitcoin is mostly in a bear market. Mostly normal people don’t talk about it. They don’t know about it. That’s the mycelium form of Bitcoin. We’re still in that now. Then we have a bull market that’s like that mushroom being reproduced or being produced.

[00:44:05] Preston Pysh: Everyone’s talking about it, news, everything’s going wild, and then it hits that peak, that euphoria when the craziest things happen imaginable, and three months later we look back and like, oh yeah, that was clearly the top. We got a little, we got a little euphoric there. That’s the spoilation part.

[00:44:22] Preston Pysh: That’s the mushroom sending out spores and reproducing. Then the price crashes. Now you’re into this sort of integration period. Most of those spores or new market entrants leave. They write it off. They leave with their tail between their legs, but a few of them plant roots. They’re like, whoa, there’s something deeper here.

[00:44:40] Preston Pysh: They form companies relationships and they’re the toddlers, right? They’re the weekly DCA army that maintains the price floor. And so that’s sort of the colonization period. And again, it goes right back into that quiet lull for a few years as we rebuild the hardened strengthen form new relationships, and the mycelial network gets bigger in that bear market totally out of sight.

[00:45:01] Preston Pysh: And then all of a sudden, another raging bull market comes bigger than the last one, and people are caught off guard. That’s fascinating.

[00:45:09] Preston Pysh: I’m speechless. I I’m absolutely loving this conversation. And so in the book Entangled Life that you recommended for me to read, there’s this topic called dark matter fungi that’s brought up.

[00:45:22] Preston Pysh: What is this? Do you think that it relates to Bitcoin in any kind of way and yeah, just generally what are your thoughts on it?

[00:45:30] Brandon Quittem: What he’s ascribing there with dark matter or dark matter fungi, is that there’s a whole lot of fungi that we don’t know about. And the more we explore, the more we realize that there has to be another participant in the market in order for everything to balance out.

[00:45:46] Brandon Quittem: Right. So dark matter is essentially our laws of the universe don’t work unless there’s this magic other variable that we can’t measure. So we’ll just call that dark matter. And then the equations balance the exact same thing’s happening with fungi. Hmm. And so I think it originally was brought out into the oceans because number one, we don’t explore the oceans that much.

[00:46:06] Brandon Quittem: Number two, we don’t explore fungi very much. So fungi in the oceans are definitely not getting a lot of attention. And so as we explore the oceans, we’re starting to realize that there’s so much more complexity than we thought. And fungi are, are buried in the oceans pretty much everywhere. How this relates to Bitcoin, in my opinion, is, is kind of a haste, makes waste type thing here where we’re, we’re sort of just marginalizing the mushrooms, right?

[00:46:32] Brandon Quittem: And we just sort of make up our mind and we find out later that we’re wrong. We know nothing essentially. And the same is true with Bitcoin, where first of all, only a tiny percentage of people around the world understand Bitcoin on any sort of deep level. And so well, number one, that gives us our chance for price action upside, right?

[00:46:51] Brandon Quittem: Number two, I think we should accept the fact that it’s hard to grasp and it’s really easy to write off just like it’s easy to write off mushrooms outside out of mind. People think they understand Bitcoin right away, right? It appears simple at first glance. So you’re like, oh, I get it. It’s this. It’s easy to dismiss because I heard one argument.

[00:47:11] Brandon Quittem: But if you go a little bit deeper, you start to realize that this thing’s way more complex and way more interesting. And a fun analogy here is a mountain climber. So you’re climbing, climbing, climbing a mountain and you see the peak and you’re so excited. You’ve been hiking all day and you finally get to the peak and then you look up and you realize, oh, that wasn’t the peak.

[00:47:30] Brandon Quittem: That was a false peak. I gotta keep going, you know, a few hours later to get to another false peak. And you’re just getting demoralized until you finally reach speak. And the same is true with Bitcoin. You quickly reach these false summits and you’re like, oh, I got it. Figured it out. And if you don’t look up, you, maybe you stop there.

[00:47:46] Brandon Quittem: But if you look up, you realize that it’s way more complex than we thought. And so has makes waste bran do this for us.

[00:47:54] Preston Pysh: Take us, if you were going to describe Bitcoin for somebody now that we’ve talked all of this and we’ve looked at things from very interesting and different angles than I know I’ve ever covered on this show.

[00:48:05] Preston Pysh: Orange peel the audience. Tell them why you’re, why you are such a hardcore Bitcoin or why you see the technology to be so promising. I know you’ve covered a little bit of it throughout the show, but if you were going to take a, a very high, 40,000 foot view for a person who’s hearing this conversation and saying, wow, some of these, some of these ideas are really fascinating, but let’s just talk about Bitcoin now.

[00:48:27] Preston Pysh: Like, what, what do you say to that person?

[00:48:29] Brandon Quittem: There’s so many angles in this question, number one, but I’m going to pick the one that I’m most passionate about, and that is that money is a social technology, a psychosocial technology. It is an abstraction layer that binds humans together. And we use money because we have these neo frontal cortexes that allow us to form abstraction, right?

[00:48:49] Brandon Quittem: So it’s a technology and it allows society to scale our networks and scale our productivity, right? Without money, you end up in maybe 150 or maybe a thousand person groups. Because you’re essentially trying to keep track of kin and are we friend or fae based on our genetics? And you know, I caught the wooly mammoth last week, so you gotta get this one this week.

[00:49:13] Brandon Quittem: And you can kind of keep a ledger in your head. You don’t really need money. But as soon as you want to have a global complex society, you’re going to need some sort of a abstraction layer to represent value or energy or time or work. It’s all the same thing. And that’s what money represents. And so if we have a money like we do today, maybe we have a good money, maybe we have a bad money, but no matter what, if we can have a better money, that’s going to have tremendous downstream implications for our society.

[00:49:43] Preston Pysh: Because you’re not corrupting information because you now have a ledger.

[00:49:47] Preston Pysh: That’s not the information of exchange of energy exchange is more sound than what it’s ever been before. Is that where you’re going with it?

[00:49:55] Brandon Quittem: There’s a whole bunch of ways why Bitcoin would be superior to our, our fiat money system, but that’s one of them, right? It creates the, the scarcity element represents the scarcity of natural resources on our planet.

[00:50:07] Brandon Quittem: So it’s important that those are in symbiosis or in symmetry, right? You can’t have a money that prints forever when resources can’t be printed forever. And so that one-to-one helps bring more economic reality to our trade. It, it creates the economic signals to be a little bit more clean because there’s not this politicking essentially changing the rules all the time, so it maps to reality better.

[00:50:30] Brandon Quittem: And that allows us at the edge of the network to make better decisions. And that’s what the market is. That’s where wealth is produced, right? We can specialize at a higher rate, we can make decisions at a better rate, and that alone increases productivity and life satisfaction for everyday people. And so at that level, it essentially scales us socially at a better rate.

[00:50:53] Brandon Quittem: Nick Zabala has the term social scalability, right? Which is essentially way, how do we increase cooperation over distances, right? How do we flexibly cooperate over distances in time? That’s social scalability. Things would be like property rights or rule of law, or various things like that. Communication networks, money.

[00:51:14] Brandon Quittem: These are social scaling technologies, and what Bitcoin does, in my opinion, is it allows us to go to a whole nother tier of cooperation. So if we zoom way out, I view we’re stuck at this sort of nation state industrial revolution game, and that game is who has the most resources, who can then deploy the most power.

[00:51:35] Brandon Quittem: So it’s a magnitude of wealth or magnitude of power game. The US has the industrial base, the economic base, we have the best military. We we’re in control. But what this leads to is this nation state politicking over resources and that comes at a really high cost, right? Go read Alex Gladstein for a, a taste of how destructive this game can be.

[00:51:55] Brandon Quittem: Whereas with Bitcoin, it sort of dissolves that industrial revolution game and it creates more of a networked game where your place doesn’t matter as much, your government do, doesn’t matter as much. We form networks online and we trade through those networks. And so I believe it actually shatters that glass ceiling of social scalability and allows us to unlock more human potential by having an economic system that no one can stop and can go pretty much anywhere.

[00:52:22] Brandon Quittem: And the minor or the micro scale, that means individuals can bring their, their skills to market and benefit from that in their family. At the city level, we can have more robust cities with more wealth and at the, at the macro scale, we just generally have more wealth at the margin because everyone can participate and because the economic signals are clean and because there’s no politicking to blow up the game and change the rules every 50 years, that allows us to have a strong foundation to build civilization so we can have that 1% growth compounded forever rather than these volatile periods that sort of like set us back and yeah, that’s what I would say.

[00:53:02] Preston Pysh: Earlier you had mentioned about this fungi that decomposes biology, organisms, plants, in order to prepare the soil in the environment for plants to regrow and to basically a new forest to basically flourish. When you look around the world and, and you were saying this was a lot like mining. Do you see miners playing that role in certain parts of the world where they, where there has been this really corrupt political environment and has had an enormous setback for the population and the society that’s in these regions?

[00:53:41] Preston Pysh: Do you see mining actually providing this similar type environment where it’s going to go in, it’s going to, it’s going to incentivize energy to be built with a buyer of last resort already in place through mining that can then energize and provide energy to that local community. Do you see that happening or is there any other parallels similar if, if you agree with that one or not, that you think are maybe representative that we can learn through biology of where this hap what basically Bitcoin’s going to do next?

[00:54:16] Brandon Quittem: Yeah, a hundred percent. So we, we touched on part of this earlier, which was the story of how did complex life go from the oceans to land, right? And that was a lichen, a symbiosis between a plant and a fungi. And in, in ecology there’s a unique type of species that sort of describes that process. These are called pioneer species.

[00:54:37] Brandon Quittem: And their job is to go colonize desolate landscapes and they prepare the land for a more complex life to then come and join the party. And I think bitcoin miners play this role extremely well. They go find energy sources that are being untapped and miners just due to profit incentives go, they set up the, this infrastructure and they turn that energy into a commodity, right, like we described.

[00:55:03] Brandon Quittem: But the second order effect there is that now you have a buyer, like the economics of bootstrapping energy assets just got way better because you have a customer from day one. So the Bitcoin miners go to some rural mountainous region in Africa where there’s a whole bunch of rivers and maybe the, the startup cost to build a hydro facility there is too high because it might take you three years to transport that power to the consumer.

[00:55:31] Brandon Quittem: And so the project dies on the vine, right? The, the startup capital doesn’t form. Whereas with Bitcoin miners as that pioneer species, they go join the party and they say, Hey, if you build out this hydro, I’ll buy all your power from day one. And they do. And then over time, let’s say three, five years goes by, they build out all the transmission and they bring that power to market to a local city, let’s say in that type of situation, the Bitcoin miners get priced out of the equation, and instead all that energy is then sold to the end consumer who will always pay more than the miners.

[00:56:05] Brandon Quittem: So it’s sort of a bootstrapping mechanism to bring new energy assets online. Just like the pioneer species, right? They colonize the land, they make the soil, then it becomes a complex ecosystem. At that point, the pioneer species gets out-competed. That lichen can no longer survive. Cause the giant oak tree shades it out and then that lichen hopefully reproduces and, and starts the process elsewhere.

[00:56:28] Brandon Quittem: Just like the mining machines, right? As soon as they get priced out, you can go bring those miners to some other site with very low cost energy and you essentially put them in a retirement home to convert any free energy you have in into money. Right? because the CapEx already depreciated. And if we look at real examples, right?

[00:56:47] Brandon Quittem: This is kind of esoteric maybe for, for people who are new, these ideas. But let’s talk about a company called Grid List. It’s a company in Africa. They’re doing this right now. And what we’re finding in Africa is that there’s a last mile problem with energy. So the cities more or less electrified, I mean, horrible conditions compared to here, but the cities mostly have power most of the time.

[00:57:10] Brandon Quittem: But if you’re rural, there’s no power and there’s no, there’s no path to power because it’s not economical. So that last mile problem, now enter microgrids. Okay? Micro microgrids are just tiny little energy assets that are designed to serve these marginalized rural communities. However, funding a microgrid is really cumbersome.

[00:57:32] Brandon Quittem: It usually relies on foreign aid or some government programs, things like this. It takes years. It’s super inefficient, and you gotta ask yourself, why isn’t it happening, right? It’s hard. There’s reasons. Now enter the Bitcoin miners. They have an economic reason today to go start up these micro grids and they’re doing it.

[00:57:51] Brandon Quittem: And guys like Eric, the CEO of Griffis, are reporting that they’re bootstrapping energy assets, which leads to more power at a lower cost. So they’re lowering the price of power, increasing access to power to rural communities. And it might not sound like a lot to you or I, but decreasing power or increasing power in in these communities is enormous for their lives.

[00:58:12] Brandon Quittem: It’s the difference between being able to read after dark. It’s the difference between having a mobile phone. So you can call your family more than for five minutes a week. Right? I is the difference of educating your daughter or your daughter just stays in the village, right? So these are huge life-changing things for those on the margin, right?

[00:58:31] Brandon Quittem: A little energy goes a long way. Not to mention the fact that if they don’t have, I dunno if we scale this way out, that’s the MicroG good example. If we provide more low cost energy at a wider distribution around the planet, It is the single biggest humanitarian thing that you can do for the marginalized parts of society.

[00:58:50] Brandon Quittem: It, it allows these communities to be competitive with their exports because they can actually make things inside their country instead of relying on all their imports as well. It provides jobs about a personal one. I’ve got a nine month old son upstairs, new parent, while that process is crazy and in Africa, if my son was born prematurely in many places there wouldn’t be a hospital with an incubator to keep the child alive.

[00:59:16] Brandon Quittem: We take that for granted in the west, but that is a function of baseload power not being economical or available in those countries. I guess I’m saying that because there’s a huge humanitarian benefit from spreading energy, and I think the zeitgeist today is kind of a, more energy is bad, right? These sort of New York Times type talking points or WEF talking points.

[00:59:38] Brandon Quittem: And I think the counterpoint to that is that you’re depriving people of basic human needs, and I think energy is the master commodity of which all human flourishing flows. And so I think we should lean into things like Bitcoin or any technology or any process that does spread more energy at a lower cost.

[00:59:56] Brandon Quittem: And so I’m very, very, very passionate about that one.

[00:59:59] Preston Pysh: Wow. Do you have any pet peeves about Bitcoin or the Bitcoin community or naysayers of Bitcoin? Like think through something that you love to talk about. That maybe few talk about or few address, but for you personally, it’s a big deal.

[01:00:18] Brandon Quittem: Yeah, I think it, it goes back to what I think is the most important part of Bitcoin, which is that it’s hard to change.

[01:00:24] Brandon Quittem: Okay. And so the, let’s say the Ethereum community or similar type thinking, they’ll quickly say, well, Bitcoin doesn’t do anything and it’s too hard to change. So you’re going to get out-competed by features. And the key is we need control to change this thing, and all we gotta do is have a nice democratic process to make change.

[01:00:43] Brandon Quittem: I think this is the biggest folly in the whole industry. And because what you’re doing is you’re creating a political money. Which is what fiat money is. You’re creating a a, a political money just with a new software system. There’s absolutely no difference. And they could be successful for 20 years, 30 years, right?

[01:01:04] Brandon Quittem: But inevitably, either it’ll get out competed by better technology, or more than likely it’ll be co-opted politically and it will corrupt itself from the inside out. And in my honest opinion, Ethereum is already past the point of no return for many different reasons. I guess I get frustrated when non Bitcoiners make that argument because they’re essentially building a, a monetary system that’s easier to control and they’re handing the keys to whatever political power captures it.

[01:01:34] Brandon Quittem: And I view that that process as inevitable. It’s just a matter of time. And if, if Ethereum gets big enough, it will happen. We want to lean into the fact that this thing is out of human control, right? Greed is built inside of us, and that’s okay, but let’s harness greed for good. And Bitcoin essentially forces people who are greedy, which is a normal thing to be greedy on some level.

[01:01:57] Brandon Quittem: It forces that into a market where you have to provide value for someone else in order to gain value yourself. Whereas in a political money, the incentive is why not just capture the game? Why not just change the rules? Why not just lobby the politicians? Why not just get close to the money printer? It’s rational to pursue that rather than go compete out in the market.

[01:02:22] Brandon Quittem: And so what Bitcoin does is as soon as the market realizes you can’t change this thing, it forces all the would be political capture type people. The central planner types, it de-emphasizes their value. It defangs them, it essentially forces them to go get a job. It forces them to learn to code. It forces them to create real value.

[01:02:42] Brandon Quittem: And marginally that adds tremendous amount of productivity to society. And it, it sort of reduces we’re, we’re fighting this ongoing force of political capture or the revolving door. All these different ways to look at this, but we’re constantly forting that, fighting that force. And why not just get rid of that thing altogether?

[01:03:02] Brandon Quittem: And if so, more economic, more, more humans will put their energy towards productive economic needs rather than political capture.

[01:03:10] Preston Pysh: Brandon, you have written some just prolific pieces on some of the things that we talked about today. One of them is called Bitcoin is The Mycelium of Money. Bitcoin is the pioneer species.

[01:03:21] Preston Pysh: We’re going to have links to those. We’re going to have links to some of the other writings that you have had. I know you recommended to me the book. Oh my gosh. Entangled Life, which we had talked about earlier. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes. Are there any other books or resources that you want to highlight to the audience beyond those?

[01:03:39] Brandon Quittem: Yeah, if, if you’re super new and you just want a quick hit, you don’t have that much time. You want to take like a baby step, just Google Paul Stamets Ted Talk. It’s like six ways mushrooms can save the world or something like that. It’s super dense, super fun. I would say if you like the weirder, more esoteric, push the boundaries of what we know about biology and ecology.

[01:04:00] Brandon Quittem: Look up Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. He’s also a fantastic speaker. I admire his ability to command English language. So just look up Merlin Sheldrake on any podcast. You’ll get a good dose. And I do encourage you to read my essays. I know I’m self-promoting here, but they do a really good job of weaving these things together.

[01:04:19] Brandon Quittem: And if you’re a coiner who’s curious about fungi, this is, this is a great way to learn about that whole kingdom. And it’s honestly, yeah, I’m trying to mushroom kill all the bitcoiners cause it’s an equally fun rabbit hole and I want more people to talk about it with.

[01:04:33] Preston Pysh: That’s awesome. And obviously your Twitter feed is phenomenal, so we’ll have links to that in the show notes.

[01:04:39] Preston Pysh: Brandon, I can’t thank you enough. This was really, really fun and just, I thoroughly learned a ton and enjoyed the chat.

[01:04:46] Brandon Quittem: Likewise, Preston, that was awesome. Appreciate it.

[01:04:50] Preston Pysh: If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for, We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I’d love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it’s something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm.

[01:05:15] Preston Pysh: So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening and I’ll catch you again next week.

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