If you're watching this video, you're going to learn three big things.
Number one, why so many people start out in crypto, but end up going all in on Bitcoin only.
Yeah.
Number two, mushrooms are insane and Bitcoin is just like mushrooms.
Huh?
And number three, how Bitcoin could push the future
toward smaller, stronger communities and more individual freedom.
All freedom.
Welcome! Today's guest is Brandon from Swan Bitcoin.
This guy has the wildest take on how Bitcoin is like the mycelium network, the mushrooms.
You're going to know more about mushrooms by the end of this episode than you've ever known in your life.
I know I did. So if you're brand new to Bitcoin, come on inside the world's biggest Bitcoin welcome center for today's show.
Welcome to Sat Chats, the Bitcoin podcast, where we chat about sats. Sats are the smallest part
of a Bitcoin, the same way pennies are the smallest part of a dollar. With Sat Chats,
we are building the world's biggest Bitcoin welcome center to serve as your gateway to
generational wealth. So if you are brand new to Bitcoin, we want to chat about sats with you.
Head to satchats.com to grab your slot in the studio today.
I'm your host, Stuart.
And I'm your co-host, Anna Bevan.
And with us today in the virtual studio is 182 Brandon.
From Swan Bitcoin, no less.
Shout out.
Now, Brandon, take us back to the time when you were a brand new Bitcoiner.
Can you even remember that?
When was it?
What did it feel like?
Why did you get interested in the first?
But just give us all of it.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
I can remember this quite vividly.
I have a tendency to get very obsessed with things.
And when I do, it's all I can think about sometimes for months on end.
And you can call me a perpetual rabbit hole dweller before Bitcoin.
2017 came around, friends trading magic internet money online.
They're telling me how much money they're making, how I'm missing out.
And so like most people, FOMO brought me in originally. I was seduced by the idea that Ethereum was general purpose technology. We just solve trust on the Internet. We're going to decentralize all the things. And so I was brought in to make money in 2017, made a lot of money in 2017. Then in early 2018, didn't take any profits. All that money I made essentially went away. And after paying taxes, I was left with very little.
and then I had a decision point to make either I doubled down on this new thing that I essentially
built my new identity around I was planning on shifting careers here or I tuck out tail between
my legs and quit and uh you know I'm not a quitter and maybe I'm a little prideful maybe I had to
reinforce my previous actions either way I went all in and kind of retaught myself economics from
the ground up. And this is now 2018. I'm living in Asia with my girlfriend at the time, now wife.
And we're in Chiang Mai, Thailand, going to Bitcoin meetups like five days a week. And I'm
just barreling down the rabbit hole. And a couple of the guys there, which we would now call Bitcoin
maximalists, I have to give a shout out to, they were very patient in helping deconstruct my
blockchain, all the things thinking. And I'll never forget a conversation where I'm pitching
like supply chain use cases or something. And the guy I'm talking to is like, hey, do you know what
a UTXO is? And I was like, no, I have no idea what that is. He's like, okay, sit down, young man,
you have a lot to learn. And out of that next phase of exploration, I realized that Bitcoin was
the actual thing here. And so now call it like March 2018, focus shifted to Bitcoin. And I realized
at that point, it was time for a career change. And if we back up a little bit, I started my
career at Oracle, I was selling ERP software to large companies, I thought my whole life was
leading to that moment, this is who I am, this is like the thing. And although it was going well,
you know, top of my team, winning awards, breaking records, youngest guy in the role
at Oracle ever at the time. It didn't fulfill me in a way that I expected. And so I kind of had a
quarter life crisis in my mid twenties, where I quit Oracle, sold everything I owned and bought
a one-way ticket to India. And then from 2014 through 2018, my wife and I traveled all around
the world, working remotely, building online businesses. Looking back, it was kind of a
stereotypical find yourself move combined with my wife and I are like business people first,
but we got into psychedelics, more Eastern spirituality type stuff. And so we just kind
of crawled the earth, exploring that side of ourselves personally. While we read the four-hour
work week, how to build stuff online. And so we were just building small bootstrapped cashflow
businesses. And after that first year, we were making enough money to travel forever. We thought
we discovered a secret to the universe and we just lived that lifestyle for a while. But like all good
things. If you have too much of them, you start to get jaded. You start to desire the stability
of home life. I wanted to go get a beer at a sports bar with college buddies. I wanted to have
a garden. I wanted to go camping, just some foundational life stuff that you get living
stationary. And so as I was sort of being disenchanted with that digital nomad lifestyle,
lifestyle, which we went all into. So sort of ready for a change. Bitcoin came in at that same
time, which probably put a little fuel to the fire on this new obsession. And by mid 2018,
I took myself entirely out of our businesses, just replaced myself through hiring. Businesses
kicked off cash and they just gave me like free time to study. And so we're talking 15 hours a
day for six months straight, like a psychopath. And learned a lot in that period, forged a lot of
my early thinking. And out of that exploration phase, I started to explore Bitcoin through the
lens of biology. I have no formal training, whatever, a few classes in college and always
was interested. But I started seeing Bitcoin through that lens and more specifically through
the lens of mycology, which is the study of fungi. And we can get into that if you want. But
I published a series of essays on the topic starting in 2018. To my surprise, the Bitcoin
community was very open to these ideas. And all my essays started going viral and built a little
brand as a content creator explaining Bitcoin through an orthogonal lens. And so that led to
meeting Corey, meeting everyone in the Bitcoin industry, led to my job at Swan in 2019, so the
next year and sort of opened a lot of doors. And since then we sold off those businesses.
I thought it was entirely unhirable after working solo for so long. I'm very independent. I don't
like arbitrary rules, arbitrary authority. So I was like, there's no way I can be hired again
after getting a taste of the freedom. However, meeting Corey and the early team, Jan, Brady,
and a few others, combined with this larger mission, much larger than myself, which is freeing
money from the shackles of central banking and giving it back to the people, you might say in a
Promethean sense, stealing fire from the gods, I realized that it's more important that I work in a
larger team because I can enact more change in the world through this Bitcoin mission. And so all
those things together, life converged on a moment, getting good feedback from the market, feeling good
about myself, feeling confident about what I'm building, and just feeling generally fired up and
energized by this new mission. And then I blink and it's six and a half years later since I joined
Swan, a little bit longer since I got into Bitcoin. And here we are. That's wild. That's insane.
Anna Bevin is the most recent Bitcoiner on this show, right? Yeah. So I'm going to ask you,
because I wrote down a couple of things.
Number one, he talked about being in lots of different rabbit holes.
Yeah.
Okay.
Number two, there was kind of an interesting moment
where he started off interested in all of crypto
slash like Ethereum being this universal piece of technology,
more than one use case for the blockchain,
apart from being connected in as, you know,
a component of what makes Bitcoin money.
And then he just dropped the whole,
like Bitcoin is a giant mushroom on us.
So which of those three,
or did you have something else that you wanted to ask him?
Yeah, I actually really wanted to go down
the Bitcoin and biology and mycology.
Is that what you said?
That's right.
Yeah, very curious about that.
Okay, let's hear that one.
Yeah, hit me with that one.
Okay. So this is, I've spilled like 20, 30,000 words on this one. So there's many a topic. I'll
try and give you like a super high level starting point. We can see if we want to double click on
anything. So at first glance, Bitcoin and biology should have nothing in common. One is software,
one is money, the other is some weird biology thing, right? However, there are a lot of parallels
us here that I think we should think about. The first one is that Bitcoin is kind of like an
autonomous system. The rules are released. The code is out there. We voluntarily participate
in this thing by mining it, by running a node, by building software, by spending it, acquiring it,
whatever. The system pays the miners to do the work in the form of new issuance. We have a
self-interested motivation to acquire more wealth. So we go participate and breathe life
into this thing. And how is it possible that some code in a white paper bootstrapped itself
into the most powerful computing network on our planet, slurped up $2 trillion worth of value,
and no one's in charge. There's no marketing department. There's no quarterly business review,
nothing. And so I think it feels like some sort of a new decentralized meta-organism that lives
on the internet. That's point one. Point two, if you look at the architecture of mycelium,
okay, quick biology primary here, fungi is its own kingdom. There's animals, plants, fungi,
et cetera. There's more fungi than plants and animals combined. Okay. So it's a very diverse
kingdom. Most people think about the mushrooms that they buy at the grocery store, the emoji
mushroom or psilocybin mushrooms, right? But there's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of
these things. Some are macroscopic mushrooms, meaning you go in the woods and you just see a
bodacious mushroom growing out of a log or out of the ground. But other types of fungi would be like
a yeast, okay? Little microscopic organisms that kind of just float in a little soup.
And point being, there's a big diversity.
If you like chocolate, if you like tea, if you like coffee, if you like bread, if you
like beer, all these things are only possible because of our fungal allies.
OK, they produce all these things for us.
And we essentially deploy them as technology to get them to do what we want.
And so that's the food side.
We also have medicine.
Most of our medicine comes from fungi.
Why is that?
because fungi and animals are more similar than plants and animals are.
And so essentially fungi are very old.
They had to learn how to defend themselves in their own ecosystem.
They're fighting against other fungi, other bacteria, etc.
And so fungi over time have built a chemical library of different enzymes
that they selfishly use to protect themselves.
And it just so happens that our biology is close enough to fungi
that we can just steal these compounds from fungi
who are the masters of chemistry and use them for ourself. So like the famous penicillin example,
why is something growing on bread? In World War I, we were taking moldy bread and putting it on
soldier wounds. And we didn't know why. All we knew was that it helped stop infection. And then
later they figured out what exactly was going on. So point being, fungi are very old organisms
and they work very well with humans. We're symbiotic in many different ways.
At the same time, these fungi are the most resilient archetype on our planet.
Okay, let's go back to mycelium. Mycelium is the primary structure that a fungi takes.
And you can think of it like one cell walled little tubes creating a network.
And it's an industrial network. It has pumps, it has tubes, it has turbines, it has all these
machinery underground. And this one cell wall system of tubes we call mycelium, it essentially
burrows into its environment. So every tree root has, it essentially allows mycelium through
chemistry to sneak into those tree roots and build little industrial tubes. And those trees
and that mycelial fungi, they essentially trade resources. The fungi use chemistry to dissolve
their environment and liberate minerals and then trades those minerals with the tree in exchange
for fats and sugars, which the tree makes through photosynthesis. And so that symbiotic relationship
is the only reason why trees can be larger than a meter tall, because they need minerals in their
structure in order to grow tall Otherwise everything small And this symbiotic relationship happens everywhere all the time And properly understood I think a forest is more it more alive more avatar which we were talking about in the early phase pre
And through science now, we can essentially biotag this mycelium with radioactive molecules
in the same way you do before a surgery or something.
And we can watch this underground fungal economy happen in real time.
And what's interesting is the fungi actually perform economic calculations.
And this is ancient, like way before animals.
And so they buy high, they sell low, they broker deals between species and species.
For example, this giant oak tree is starting to die out.
If you tag that mycelium underground, what you see is that that oak tree actually gives
resources to the pine tree next door.
right if you think about darwinian evolution you should never give resources to another genetic
line you should preserve it for yourself but instead the fungi essentially collaborate with
the entire forest and the fungi actually feels like the brain of the forest and the immune system
trading all these resources and you could look at a forest as a bunch of trees uh you know more of
like a plant-centric view phytocentric view or you can look at it as a microcentric view the fungi
are actually farming trees. So a forest is actually a tree farm satisfying the fungi's needs,
right? They require the trees for their food so then they can grow. And the oldest and largest
organisms on our planet are fungi. Okay. If you go to Eastern Washington, Eastern Oregon,
there's like a, I can't remember how big it is, but it's thousands of miles square and thousands
of years old. It's a honey mushroom and it's essentially consuming an entire forest in the
mountains. And they did some genetic studies and they realized it's the exact same genetics across
this whole thing. And how is it possible? Well, because if we go back, fungi actually learn and
they adapt from their environment. So a new predator comes, they send out little mushroom
scientists, create a new enzyme, that new enzyme deals with the predator. Over time, they build a
chemical library of these enzymes. And that's how they're able to survive so long. If we use a quick
parallel here to Bitcoin, Bitcoin is also this decentralized mycelial network. And in mycelium
and with Bitcoin, there's no leader, there's no central processing unit, there's no brain.
You could cut Bitcoin in half, it routes around. You could cut a mycelial network in half. Now you
have two and it adapts. So the parallels are crazy. And on the custom enzyme, the part where
the fungi learns, Bitcoin's the same. If you have a situation where we identify a bug in the software
or in the social layer, there's some issue. Information travels through the Bitcoin network,
just like the Mycelium network. It finds its way to developers or little mushroom scientists.
The software developers create a new software patch or custom enzyme, and it updates the system,
the system learns. So over time, every time you attack Mycelium, every time you attack Bitcoin,
as long as the network is set up properly and there's people vigilant to protect it,
It learns, it upgrades, and that vulnerability is no longer as scary.
That's a mouthful I could go on for two hours straight.
I'll pass it to you guys.
Goodness.
That is wild.
One, that is the most science.
Biology I've heard since like the 10th grade.
Like since the 10th grade.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, my God.
That is wild.
Oh, my God.
What about the trees can't grow above a meter or three meters?
The trees can't get to be more than three to nine feet tall
without mushrooms underneath trading off with them?
Like, hook us up with some of your photosynthesis.
We'll hook you up with some of this chemistry.
Oh, my goodness.
That was crazy.
I, like, I've never thought about it like that.
That is crazy.
Well, I've never thought about biology since I left the 10th grade.
Yeah.
I don't think so either.
But what I'm trying to figure out, Brandon, is if I can summarize what I've heard,
these mushrooms are basically more abundant than we think,
and they power more than we think,
and they operate intelligently with the trading,
the buying high of this, I was like, dude,
or the buying low and the selling high was insane.
So there's a decentralized brainless operating system
called these mushrooms.
And Bitcoin is also spread out.
It also has no central ruler or brain.
So there's parallels there.
what I'm trying to understand is what are the trees that Bitcoin is up underneath, right? Like,
are they now kind of growing into the main financial system in order to exchange resources
with it and grow silently underneath? Are individual Bitcoiners like the trees? Like,
in it you know you're describing a situation where the mushrooms are
absorbing unto themselves the resources required to grow how is bitcoin doing that same thing
good question yeah i think there's a lot of ways to slice it and we got to be careful with
analogies right um this is an analogy it breaks down it's not a perfect one-to-one map here
And so just caveat aside, we can play with these ideas.
We can use these ideas to understand Bitcoin in new ways.
And we can use these ideas to help non-technical, non-finance people understand Bitcoin.
I think that's the thing I'm most proud about with this exploration is I get all these messages saying, hey, my wife, my friend, my brother, my whatever.
They couldn't grasp Bitcoin in the existing content sphere.
But the biology way was sort of a backdoor to understanding technology.
and just a side note there i think technology is actually um acting on the same evolutionary
drivers as biological evolution i think technology is just humans performing that same mode however
evolution works we're doing the same thing with technology and the difference is biology is slow
it takes a very long time to change but culture and our minds and abstraction that layer can grow
very, very quickly, which is why society feels like it's going off the rails. We're evolving our
culture beyond our biological capacity, and we have no respect for our biology. So we have all
these poor outcomes in human health, in mental health, in physical health, etc. We're sort of
operating from a hunter-gatherer hardware system, but we're dropped into a new software system way
beyond our means. And so just some slight asides there. Regarding the trees, what are the trees?
I think you can look at it a lot of ways. But first, we have to understand what are fungi doing?
They appear to be collaborators. They appear to be working within their ecosystem. Okay. Does it
mean that they're this happy-go-lucky symbiotic organism that's selfless? No. Fungi are operating
in their own best interests like all organisms are. But in order to be successful as a kingdom,
they do want to collaborate. And so through incentives, it leads them to help out their
environment. One plus one equals three. In the same way that markets create wealth, division of labor
creates wealth. We all specialize. We apply specific knowledge. We create value. That value
is then shared by society. So there's a similar thing there where collaboration is just the best
strategy most of the time. And I think Fungi show that. And I think where Bitcoin comes in,
I think it's scale agnostic. Maybe that's the easy way to describe it. Me personally,
the closer I become to Bitcoin, the more I adopt those principles, the things that Bitcoin can
teach me, the better my personal life becomes. That's true at the individual, that's true at the
company level, that's true at the state level, that's true at the species level. I think humanity
is better off with a monetary tool that is superior than what we have today. Money is a
foundational core technology for humans. And if we upgrade the money, we will upgrade society
because of that. And so you could insert any scale you want into the trees in this analogy.
I just think Bitcoin is a tool that improves humanity the more symbiotic we are with it.
So did writing these essays strengthen your conviction in Bitcoin?
Or just find another way to explain what you already believed in?
Yeah, great question.
Um, humans will come up with any justification to reinforce their beliefs.
We don't like changing our minds.
We don't like being wrong.
So we got to be careful of that trap.
If we go back to 2018, I was sold on the economic argument.
Okay.
I understand Austrian economic principles.
Bitcoin is the best money.
We took what we learned.
We engineered a better money.
It fits with the digital age.
It overcomes gold's weaknesses.
It's defensible against fiat.
Okay, great.
But if Bitcoin is what we think it is, won't the government just shut it down?
2018, that was a very real risk.
And obviously before that as well, less so now, right?
That headwind became a tailwind with new administration, the banks getting on board, right?
I think we kind of crossed that risk.
However, at the time, not the case.
My biggest block was, well, how can this thing survive a state level attack?
And that's where the biology stuff came in.
And so fungi have been around for a long time.
We described that.
We have over a billion year old fossilized records of early mycology, those tubes, the
mycelial network fossilized.
And so these things have been around for a while.
If we go back a billion years, a lot has changed on our planet through that period.
And so now we know that fungi have survived all six great mass extinction events that
we track, right?
The famous one, 65 million years ago, asteroid hits the planet, killed the dinosaurs, right?
When that asteroid hit, huge plume of debris blocks out the sun for years, okay?
Reptiles are cold-blooded.
Dinosaurs are reptiles.
So if there's no sun, all these giant dinosaurs have no, their body, the body temperature
goes down so low that they can't find food.
And during that period, essentially all the reptiles die, not all, but most.
and it gave rise to the age of mammals, which we are in now.
And so our human mammal ancestry comes from a single organism we call the tenric.
It's a little mouse, little shrew type thing that could uniquely go underground
and go into stasis mode, kind of like a bear hibernates.
The tenric could go into stasis mode for long periods of time
and wake up periodically and reproduce and do all the things.
So essentially, we're only here because a tiny mouse lived underground during this massive cataclysmic event.
So that's the human side.
What happened to the fungi?
Fungi find their own food.
Plants make food.
Fungi and animals find their own food.
So while the sun's gone, this does not affect fungi at all, and they essentially inherit the earth.
Their competition's gone.
They have unlimited resources.
Fungi take over the earth.
and then eventually mammals rise and now all of a sudden we're here. So that's just one extinction
event. There's been many, but every time there's an extinction event, the macro organisms,
they get wiped out like 90% bottleneck type stuff, but fungi persist. Why is that? Well,
they have a very, very strong archetype, that decentralized network archetype. And that's just
a very robust, very anti-fragile type system. And so, okay, fungi can survive any condition.
They find their own food, they make their own food, they teach themselves new chemistry,
they go into new niches, et cetera. If Bitcoin has a similar decentralized network archetype,
then maybe Bitcoin can actually survive the coming attacks from the state or from banks or from
inside corruption or whatever. And that was actually the final piece to lead me to believe
that Bitcoin can survive the coming wave of state level attacks,
which maybe they never materialized
or maybe they tried attacking it the whole time
and couldn't get it done.
Maybe we'll never know.
Yeah, that was the tie in there.
Okay.
Yes, right?
I feel like you've thought more about Bitcoin
than I have in the whole year.
Like, it's like-
Very impressive.
What I like too is like the way that I,
the way that I operate, Brandon, is like in a multi-thousand year way. I really like thinking
about what it's going to be like in the year 7026 with Bitcoin. If I can track out into the future
and see that Bitcoin is in fact the intergalactic credit, then I can draw it all the way back to
the present day and say, okay, so since this is correct 5,000 years from now, I need to stack
Satoshi's today. Like that's the way that I get motivated to take action in my present day
is to take it out 5,000 plus years and say, does this still hold up? And if not, it's like, okay,
well you make these tiny adjustments today and you get a completely different result in the future you almost going the other way And saying if we look at a similar structure over the grand arc of biological history we got a winner here folks
And if Bitcoin shares any similarities with fungi, right, and mycelial networks and mushrooms,
et cetera, then some of the same things must be true.
It's absolutely wild.
My question is, if we're now learning on this show, Anna Bevan and I, in real time, that mushrooms are lit up and absolutely bonkers, and we as humans are capable of knowing that through study over time,
then in what way over the next several hundred years can we as humans leverage bitcoin to operate
more like a mushroom network and have that be a good thing for the future
yeah that's an interesting question how can we be more like fungi i mean i i think where we are now
We're in a very unique point in human history with AI coming.
We're at the tail end of a long-term debt cycle.
We're going through a fourth turning, which is a generational theory on social changes
that happen in sort of like a recurring pattern.
And so you add all this stuff together, things are changing very rapidly.
And the future is uncertain in a way that we've never experienced in our lifetime.
Going back to World War II era, I think is fair to say.
And so with coming changes, what we should learn from the mushroom is to make ourselves as anti-fragile as possible. So if your job is uncertain, you should have a higher savings rate. If the future geopolitical climate is uncertain, you should be prepared for a worst case scenario for your family.
You should come up with the ability to change career quickly.
You should be able to learn new skills.
You should opt out of the political, the politics du jour.
These things don't serve you, right?
So sort of planning for a worst case scenario and minimize the risk of ruin so that you
can make it through this period successfully.
Obviously, anytime there's change, there's opportunity.
And so I don't mean to make this like a doomer thing.
This should be an optimistic thing. Anyone with high agency who can temporarily opt out of the matrix has a massive advantage right now.
Tools are leveraged. Those who adopt new tools have longer leverage. Meanwhile, your peers are doom scrolling TikTok.
Right. So just like COVID was an opportunity to get ahead, people are freaking out and stuck inside and sort of just dwelling on it.
the people who saw that opportunity to, wait, I have more free time, social calendar freed up,
go all in on new skills. Those are the people who came ahead out of COVID. I think the same
is true now. And so my advice would be become anti-fragile. And what that means in the new
era of technology is also meaning learning new skills so that you can adapt to the changes.
would you reorganize the nation state however like if we i mean eat you know that's good advice
for the individual human right but what you've taught us is that you can have 1000 plus square
mile honey mushrooms that are consuming a forest out on the west coast which is amazing and now i
want to know which mushrooms are powering my beloved black forest in germany questions that
need answers right like because now i'm realizing when my bitcoin stack goes to the moon brandon
because i'm just going to get back into degenerate mode here for a second i got to protect the 500
year old trees of the black forest and the mushroom network underneath i gotta go i gotta go deeper
now um how does the group element of humanity like if you could just if you like let's just
say you could just magic wand um take the uh the current setup of how things are okay and say you
know what now we're going to organize like this would you move toward a single world government
like it's star trek the next enterprise the vulcans have come and hooked us up or would you
modify the current 200 plus some odd nation states who are all kind of doing their thing
quasi individually quasi not or even go into like what they might describe in um the sovereign
individual where you get into like a a cyber middle ages and now the city of raleigh develops
some walls around the 540 belt line you know we got some we got some cool knights that hang out now
in Raleigh we got some Dukes we got some Squires you know there's a Cyber Knights Templar that is
now you know international or there's a fourth option of being truly mushroom-like in our
organization like how does the greater group adapt with this knowledge that you have here
yeah good question um we can go sci-fi mode I'll share my vision of what I think the future
needs and will probably happen. Let's go sci-fi mode. Yes, let's do it. Yes. I do think the
sovereign individual is a very good thesis here in that one of the main arguments is that the
logic of violence is sort of upstream of how we organize culture. So let's take the industrial age,
for example, the MO was magnitude of power. Who has the big ships? Who has the most guns,
the most ammo, the most soldiers. If you have that, you can control the world.
So that's the industrial revolution game. Might is right, more is better. And that was true up
until the microprocessor was created. And then we've entered something more like the information
age instead of the industrial age. And in that world, the logic of violence shifts.
It shifts from magnitude to something more like a defensive technology, like defensive technology, meaning cryptography for our money, cryptography for information.
So it allows more power to the individual rather to the larger group.
And in fact, larger groups in an information age also have a huge cost because labor will be devalued massively in this world.
And so more people doesn't mean you have a better government or a better claim to the world. Instead, you want high technology, more intelligence, and essentially the little guy has an advantage. You can protect your money, you can protect your comms.
And so if that's true, then the larger mega empires start to break down. And what we should see is smaller nation states popping up with narrow specific goals. You can create a new country with new ideas, new values, and then you can defend yourself with autonomous drone swarms. You can defend your money with cryptography, etc.
So even if soldiers come to try and take your money, they don't get your money. It's no longer
gold in a vault, which would be the first thing armies would seize when they conquer a new area.
Instead, there's no money to gain. And so essentially, it's too expensive to attack
this small city state, so you just don't. And so combine that with the fact that you can bootstrap
net new energy assets through Bitcoin mining, because Bitcoin mining reduces the economic
requirements in order to generate net new energy assets, because Bitcoin miners are customer number
one. So that shifts the economic calculus on bootstrapping, nuclear, remote, hydro, whatever.
And so combined decentralized energy, decentralized money, decentralized comms,
you can kind of squint and you can kind of see a future where larger states are less competitive,
and there'll be an impulse to fracture into smaller units. I think this is good for humanity
as well. I think the best part of the American system is the federalism system, meaning 50 states
who have their own rules. We see what makes sense in a limited federal government to
essentially maintain the border. Obviously, we've evolved into a giant federal government,
which is a problem. Point being, I expect 3,000 nations instead of 300. I think that the
incentives are there to achieve that, but I'm under no illusion this is next week type of thing.
This could take generations before that's true.
But I think the trend is going in that direction.
Wow.
Did you get all that?
I think I'm still, I mean, that was a lot for starters.
But so many nation states, like I hear those words.
I'm not sure how that plays out practically.
well it's kind of like in classical greece you know you've got the city-state of athens right
that interoperates with the the city-state of sparta i mean i studied the roman times y'all i
didn't do much of that greek action but the idea is you know you might have these more powerful
centers, but their reach is only so large. And kind of what Brandon is describing there is
we reached a point in time, you know, we kind of, we were kind of in smaller pockets until we reached
a machine age. And we had machines that would work for us. We had machines that would kill
other human beings. And you just wanted to have the biggest versions of those machines possible.
right but now we have tiny machines that do ridiculous amounts of work for us
and can protect us online through mathematics and if if you if you can't break into my bitcoin wallet
in a squillion years because you would need more guesses than there are atoms in the universe
then if you come into my little pocket and mess me up all you've done is spent your own resources
to blow me out of the water and you don't have the treasure you know yeah you don't have the
booty right so then it's like okay well it's not worth my time you know what i mean so in a world
where the machines are now tiny each individual person or small group of people can protect
themselves much more effectively from aggressors so long as they don't drop a nuclear bomb on you
i guess is one piece because pretty much we do that you're you're toast but that leads to a
whole another series of problems but anyways i mean i i mean i would guess that would lead to more
um more diplomacy like if you have conflicts you'd want to try to find a solution to them instead of
going in and threatening to get stuff because you can't really get it.
I think, too, you would have like the triangle.
Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill would be a city-state.
Yeah.
You know, the triad that has Greensboro and Winston-Salem would be a city-state, but not as big.
Charlotte would be a pretty big old city-state.
Lots of financial elements there.
They think of themselves that way anyway.
Wilmington-Rightsville Beach would have a little bit of a city-state vibe, right?
Yeah.
So kind of wild.
And then like, you know, the kind of outlying lands would be up on, they would roll up underneath
these.
Dude, I started the Middle Ages, Brandon.
So I'm 100% ready to go.
I know how to win in that environment.
I'm here.
It's like, let's break up into smaller pieces and achieve like a greater balance as a result.
So Brandon.
Can I add on to that really quick?
A key point here, though, you asked for the practical.
And the U.S. isn't going to voluntarily give up those city-states you mentioned.
And so I foresee this more like being a desperation move out of bankrupt nations.
All the land is claimed, essentially.
No one wants to give up territory.
Every time there's a local uprising, like in northern Spain, the Catalonians wanted to secede.
You've got some central Canada.
They want to secede, create their own state.
the Northwest U.S. Washingtonian or whatever they call their wannabe break off.
No one's going to let that happen easily.
And so how could this practically occur?
Are you guys familiar with Balaji and his theory on the network state?
Well, we know Balaji Srinivasan.
He wrote that one essay or that one book,
but we haven't heard this part that you're talking about.
Yeah.
Okay.
So he's kind of extrapolating on the same theme to sovereign individual.
His theory is that we will organize first as digital communities, let's say Bitcoiners.
And Bitcoiners have a value set that we can generally agree on.
It's a Bitcoin standard, blah, blah, blah.
But we want some land.
So we start calling around.
Nobody wants to give up land.
And then you realize that all the nations are up to their debt and eyeballs.
And we're going to see a lot of sovereign defaults this century.
And so if country X is bankrupt, then Bitcoiners online can crowdfund some amount of Bitcoin
and acquire a territory from an existing sovereign and say, hey, we get our own rules here.
This is a special economic zone maybe at first and then later you get sort of full sovereignty recognized by the rest of the world And so that one way it could look And then in that community the value set is already well
defined online. And so it's not that hard to translate values into some form of governance.
I think we're going to see that's like the idealized internet native tech guy version.
The other angle is technology requires, how can I describe this?
Certain technologies are strangled by regulation.
Let's say rockets.
Let's say nuclear technology.
Let's say bioengineering, right?
Things that have a high risk of going wrong, the government wants to protect us from that failure mode.
But if you overprotect ourselves and then China just goes hog wild, then you're essentially just disadvantaging the U.S. and handing the new technology race to China.
So what we would want to do is create special economic zones in the U.S. in the same way that Elon built Starbase in Texas.
They have special rules. They don't have to go through the proper channels.
They can iterate and make mistakes. And it's kind of a known area with special rules.
And so I think there's an incentive there for competitive reasons to generate special
economic zones.
And then on the other side, like the culture side, groups will form online and then they'll
want to realize their values in real life.
And so I think kind of both happen at the same time and probably many other versions
of this that aren't obvious to me.
And you can kind of see little patchwork things popping up.
And what we'll learn from that is these are all little experiments, right?
We've essentially stopped experimenting in politics for a long time because there's no land to do so.
And so this will generate an explosion of new innovation in how we organize as people, combined with the meta trends coming out of sovereign individual.
Yeah, I think you can kind of see that trend playing out.
And I can see those two angles at least being the obvious ones for practical ways it can get done.
So how long in your version of this, like of this picture, how long before we get here?
no idea um i mean i can i can uh pontificate on things but i have no confidence in my own
timelines and i don't think anyone else should either um i think the trend is there it could
never happen but i like systems thinking in big picture and look at history look back to look
forward type stuff. And I just think that's the trend we're going down. I don't expect 3000
countries in my lifetime, but it could happen. Well, Brandon, it's clear that there is so much
to Bitcoin that we will never fit it into a single chat about sats. So we do ask each of our guests
if they'd be willing to come back on in nine months to give us an update on their Bitcoin
baby would you be willing to do that we'll see how many new nations form between now and then
oh yeah now brandon that you know before we move over to ithaca hummus
for the brand new bitcoiner who just had their eyes opened to a world of possibilities biological
sociopolitical you know futuro historic however you want to say it um what's what's your advice
to them. If they just bought $50 worth last night for the first time on Swan and they just found your
episode, what's the one thing that this brand new Bitcoiner needs to do to just be doing the right
thing no matter which way any of this stuff goes? Yeah, I think it all comes back to understanding
what Bitcoin is as best you can. The reason why you want to do that is you want to have an educated
opinion on what this thing is so you can allocate your resources appropriately. What most people do
is when they first start buying Bitcoin, they buy a little bit. And that usually makes sense. You
should buy in relation to your conviction, your understanding of the asset. And then two years
go by and you go, wow, if I would have actually studied it hard right away, I would have been
allocating more of my resources two years ago when the price was lower than it is now. And then they
scramble and try to catch up. And so I would say sprint down the understand this thing as fast as
you can arc so that you can assess your conviction level so that you can allocate resources
appropriately. Obviously embedded here is typically the more you understand about Bitcoin, the more
you allocate to it. And you just want to give yourself as much time to acquire it as you can.
And a 60, 70K Bitcoin in 2026 is an absolute dream.
So don't feel bad.
You're not late to the party.
There's massive upside ahead.
But make sure you position yourself appropriately as soon as possible.
I like that.
Assess your conviction.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kind of investing in tune with your conviction.
Yeah, that's good.
All right, let's make it happen over here, Abes.
All right.
So this brings us to our Buy the Dip moment sponsor, Ithaca Hummus, reminding us to buy the dip.
Which Brandon just told us to do as well, y'all.
So it has to be true.
That he did.
So we are tasting in the studio today the lemon dill.
It's been a minute since we've had the lemon dill.
So we're going to act as your taste buds today.
Cheers.
Mmm.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my gosh.
Mmm.
The dill.
Mmm.
The dill pickle.
Now,
Yes?
Which mushroom powered the growth of that pickle is my question to Brandon.
You know what I mean?
Like,
clearly there was a mushroom underneath wherever those cucumbers were growing.
Clearly.
You know what I mean?
What information is my body receiving from the mushrooms that helped
to grow the cucumbers wow and all that stuff about the chem being chemistry dude i'm gonna
yeah i'm gonna i'm about to go listen to all of brandon's talk about it for like days now so yeah
yeah because i actually remember listening to an episode you did i think with danny on what
bitcoin did that came out maybe around halloween or christmas because i remember i was hanging
candles from our sun porch to make it look like the harry potter great hall in there
cool and i was like this dude's going talking about some mushrooms it was insane now i'm gonna
go back and listen to all this stuff um that was delicious brandon have you ever had any ithaca
before no i have not and quick note i recommend the show with preston uh preston pish we did a
full mycology only presentation or podcast that was very good. And so that's like the densest
version of these ideas. I think that exists on the internet. Yeah, I was chatting with Preston at
Sailor's place a couple years ago, just like having lunch on a table or whatever. And we
started talking about biology and we had a similar chat. I just went on a rant and he's like, okay,
you convince me to learn more. Cool. Read this book. He reads the book a month later. He's like,
I can't stop thinking about it. Let's talk. And so that was a very fun episode recommended.
No, I have not had that brand of hummus. I enjoy. I enjoy hummus. Tell me about it.
Well, Ithaca hummus dot com is all you need to know, man. Find where it is near you.
Get some. Try any flavor. It's that's all you need to know.
If you are not going to make your own hummus, which these days, not many people.
Oh, wow. OK, so you do make your. OK, well, now I got a taste test.
I should have actually guessed that he makes his own hummus.
I don't know what I was thinking.
But if you, for some reason, decide not to make your own hummus,
this is the absolute best hummus.
I mean, I would say probably period across all.
It's frigging delicious.
Oh, yeah.
Just try it out.
They don't use a lot of tahini, which is really nice.
So it doesn't fill all.
You don't get that weird like tahini aftertaste.
And it's all flavor moving forward.
I mean like this would be great on a sandwich like we're getting to like the summertime where
it's like prime sami season and I like love me some like buffalo chicken sami with Havarti cheese
and then the lemon dill yeah I mean it replaces mayonnaise in almost all cases and the founder is
a big corner now let's uh the the there is um expeller pressed sunflower oil and
you would need to get the collaboration with graza in order to have an olive oil hummus which
to my understanding is not a seed oil correct oh i have had ithika i lied i've had the ithika
graza hummus the exact one you described yeah okay that one's pretty yum that one's good that
one's pretty yummy as well and the the the the non-seed oil peeps they like that they like that
one yeah all right now we have something that also has no seed oils in it whatsoever for you
to choose from that was my segue that was a nice segue yeah that was so smooth guys it really was
i uh didn't take that like pass off nicely my bad guys um this brings us to our cash versus sats
decision powered by salt and our own one two three sean nice yeah we're getting better i like number
one twenty three you got one two three that's because you used to say one two three okay yeah
anyway uh at sat chats we believe in value for value and in exchange for your time and coming
on our show we would like to give you your choice between fifty dollars in fiat or fifty dollars
and big quorum at today's exchange rate is 72,552 satoshis.
What would you like to choose?
You already know. Send me the sats, baby.
Send him the sats, dude.
I'm going to throw the sats into the leaves of a dying oak.
The oak's going to trade it with the mushrooms for some energy near the end of its life.
The mushroom's going to shoot the satoshis over to a pine tree.
For sure.
And then the pine tree is going to trade it with a lightning bolt when it gets struck.
Okay.
It's going to go up into the sky and then yeet its way all the way into your wallet, dude.
Oh, it's going to go rain.
It's going to fall down as rain on Brandon's garden, which he has now that he's stationary.
Yes.
That's going to go into his cucumbers.
Correct.
Okay.
They'll get to you.
It's going to be amazing.
So, Brandon, where can our Satoshi...
First of all, you do bring our scoreboard to 194 that have stacked the Satoshis along with 10 that have chosen the cash.
So we were absolutely dunking on.
I love how you like dipped.
I want to make sure because I was blocking the three.
Where can our Satillionaires go to spend more time with you and with Swan Bitcoin?
Yeah, absolutely.
All my essays are at brandonquittum.com.
There's a very long one called the Mycelium of Money, which covers much more than what we covered here, but similar topics.
And then the other one to point out for biology is called the Bitcoin is a Pioneer Species, which is exploring the mining side of Bitcoin specifically through the biology lens, more of a population ecology lens, but similar stuff.
You'll like both.
The only social platform I'm active on is Twitter.
So bequittim is the handle there.
Come say hello.
DMs open.
If you want to nerd out about this stuff, let me know.
It's my not-so-secret mission to mushroom pill all the Bitcoiners.
And I think we're doing a good job today. And, you know, I feel good about that.
If you want to get if you want to get buying some Bitcoin, you live in the United States, head over to Swan dot com or download the Swan app on the app store there.
You can buy Bitcoin through a personal account. You can onboard an entity account. You can buy it in your IRA.
You can custody with Swan Vault, which is our two of three collaborative multi-sig.
If you want a one-on-one rep to talk you through the Bitcoin stuff, kind of like your Bitcoin advisor, come to Swan.
You'll get paired up one-on-one with one of our reps, help you understand the market changes, how to do your custody, any of that Bitcoin stuff.
We got a whole team of experts here to help our clients one-on-one.
And I think that's the best way to understand Swan compared to a Coinbase or Robinhood or Cash App.
Those are mass scaled platforms.
They're fine.
They're great places to start.
You can buy small amounts, no problem.
But once you want to take Bitcoin a little bit deeper, I think a platform like Swan is where you want to end up.
You get the full suite of financial services.
You get Bitcoin native experts, Bitcoin only platform, et cetera, to support your Bitcoin journey.
Let's go.
Fantastic.
All right, Abe's.
All right.
So, Tillionaires, if you have enjoyed today's show, I'm going to hand that to my very own Vanna White.
click the subscribe button at your chance to be entered in or i guess that's your you're in it
yeah yeah when you click subscribe to win this silver coin collectible with satoshi on the front
and a qr code to 50 000 sats on the other side from crypto link coins when we get to 3 000
subscribers uh and if you would like to find out more ways to support the show either grab your own
slot in the studio, whether it's in person or virtual, or if you find out ways to sponsor the
show, you can do so in our show notes below. And Sat Chats is for educational purposes only and
should not be construed as financial advice. And our guest views are there. And until next time,
Stacking Them Sat.
you