Welcome to the first issue of the revamped newsletter, now called Probably Nothing.
Guru bias
This week I watched a great conversation between Isaac Morehouse and T.K. Coleman about some of the social mechanics at play in the Bitcoin space.
A lot of ground was covered, but one topic caught my eye in particular.
T.K. talks about how most BTC proponents will defend it based on the problems it can supposedly solve, but pay almost no thought the mechanism being used to provide the solution.
He likens this to the (fake-)Guru movement and the wave of so-called entrepreneurs selling the appeal of financial freedom to the masses.
The initial problem is real and compelling; people struggling to make ends meet and wanting to up sticks from the paycheck-dependency of classical employment.
But the solution they are selling you is usually some type of get-rich quick scheme.
These rarely work in reality, tending only to enrich the talking head who sold you their passive income guarantee.
The obvious parallels with Bitcoin are pointed out by T.K.
The crypto crowd recruit new buyers by selling the problem: inflation, money printing, centralisation, and the lack of financial sovereignty.
And then they claim that BTC is the solution, and the strategy is to HODL.
New people buy BTC, enamoured by the promise of a solution to the problem, without questioning how the solution is supposed to work, or whether it even does work.
But that’s not the key insight I got from this conversation.
It was something T.K. said, using a key plot point from Inception as an example:
“There’s something about the person that first wakes you up from your intellectual slumber that gives them a certain measure of credibility and trust in your eyes that can really make you vulnerable.”
This is such a great insight.
It distils precisely how people buy into BTC as the solution because its proponents are the same people that introduced you to the problem.
Not only that, but the warning should not be taken lightly.
Essentially, if you’ve been introduced to a great idea, or a revelatory insight from somebody in the past, you’re that much more likely to swallow their next idea without much question.
This also gave me pause for reflection on my own worldview.
I’ve been similarly ‘awoken’ from my ignorance of a few important truths about life until relatively recently.
Many of these were delivered to me by none other than Naval Ravikant.
Naval is somebody whose views I widely respect, and that’s in large part because I’ve learned a huge amount from reading and listening to him.
For a time, it felt like I couldn’t help but agree with everything he said.
But the illusion was shattered when I listened to him speaking on the Tim Ferriss show around a year ago.
I found myself utterly disagreeing with him on something a did know a little bit about; Bitcoin.
This made me wonder: am I only challenging his ideas because I already know something about this topic?
Maybe I should be challenging things he’s said about other ideas in different domains?
The full details of this rude awakening are for another day, but sufficed to say that this week T.K. reminded me the importance of always taking a critical view on new ideas, especially when they come from somebody you already respect.
Don’t let past resonance become a blind spot.
Salesman of the truth
If there’s one thing I’d implore you to watch from this week, it’d be this fantastic podcast interview.
Kurt Wuckert Jr, a Bitcoin historian and a man I admire increasingly each day, was invited to talk about the crypto space in general on the Patrick Bet-David podcast.
The hosts were great, asking a very wide range of questions covering an astonishing amount of ground in the two hour slot. They were open to new ideas, which is refereshing to see in this space.
Honest conversation about Bitcoin is heard to come by, and this is a really great example of it.
At times you would be fooled into thinking Kurt is a salesman for the the original Bitcoin as realised by BSV.
But as I tweeted out at the time, the truth about Bitcoin is so palateable that it is near-impossible for it not so sound like sales.
I guess it also helps that he’s just that convincing an orator when he’s talking about Bitcoin.
The big distinction between this kind of sales and what you’ll find in BTC, is that it’s not pitching an investment you need to ‘get-in on’.
It’s simply pitching a brilliant idea.
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