Michael Sullivan spent a little over three years writing a novel - every single day, cutting eight of his favourite chapters because they didn't serve the story - and then pointed the same obsessiveness at Bitcoin's language. He is an engineer by trade, the author of Blood of the Bourgeoisie, and the creator of Bitcoin Sentiment Weekly, where he measures the market's mood by tracking how individual people's words change over time. His view of the alternative is not gentle: fear and greed indexes, he says, are straight up garbage.

The host of this show is in his terminal installing Homebrew with no idea what he's doing, and has described himself as the monkey holding the hammer. His guest built the entire thing himself - dashboards, ingestion pipelines, the lot - and reckons it would have taken a team of ten people a year without AI.

The first person he ever ran the machine on was himself. He watched his own optimism climb in his own tweets and discovered he had top-ticked the market with it, consistently. Then he did it to Michael Saylor, then to Peter Schiff, and then to the whole BIP-110 fight - where he found the people arguing against it were growing more confident over time while its supporters quietly hedged more, and that the angriest cohort he has ever measured was the one that lost.

WHAT DOES A BOTTOM SOUND LIKE? Desire - wanting language - has been in the absolute gutter, at levels not seen in about seven years. He co-wrote "Peak apathy" with @checkonchain and their read is that almost nobody is willing to say out loud that this might already be the start of a bull market, which is exactly what a disbelief rally sounds like from the inside.

He explains:

- Why he read The Blocksize War and came away with the opposite conclusion to everyone else - your node was never the thing that decided it

- How the algorithm quietly picked a side in the BIP-110 fight, and why Lynn Alden got ratioed by accounts a fraction of her size

- Why "desire" at a seven-year low is the most bullish signal he tracks, and why narrative itself is nearly worthless

- What happened when he measured Saylor's own cohorts - which one is angry, which one is convicted, and which one stopped caring about price entirely

Views expressed by the host & guest(s) are their own and are shared for general informational purposes only. Nothing here should be treated as medical, legal, or financial advice. This is Financial Entertainment.

0:00 How the show got its name - Will Smith, and a cab driver

3:04 Meet Michael Sullivan - novelist, engineer, sentiment analyst

4:45 What he and Adrian Morris are building

13:56 Blood of the Bourgeoisie - the Bitcoin novel people finish in a day

20:36 The pivot - how a person's language shifts before they know it has

23:07 Why fear and greed indexes are "straight up garbage"

23:39 He measured himself first, and found he had top-ticked on his own optimism

25:30 The monkey with the hammer - engineers and AI

28:13 Why Bitcoin is the perfect thing to measure this on

34:03 BIP-110 - the confidence draining out of one side of the argument

35:46 The algorithm was picking sides, and Lynn Alden got ratioed

37:51 Not every node is the same - the UTXOs that actually count

39:25 The Blocksize War, and the opposite takeaway

41:41 Language plus on-chain - the Checkmate collaboration

44:38 Narrative follows price. Sentiment can lead it.

46:09 Peak apathy - desire language at a seven-year low

47:55 The disbelief rally, and why he's bullish because nobody else is

51:38 Saylor's cohorts, measured

54:37 Self-custody after the Cold Card drain

57:20 "It doesn't take much for all this machinery to come back online"

Follow Michael:

X: https://x.com/SullyMichaelvan

Bitcoin Sentiment Weekly: https://sentimentsully.substack.com/

Website: https://michaelrsullivan.com

Follow Host:

X: https://x.com/benschmidtbtc