Has Bitcoin Lost Its Narrative? | Fernando Nikolic

0:03Maybe it's time to kill your heroes again and Saylor is now the hero to slay in this cycle. Why did the market react in terms of just emotions but also price action for 32 Bitcoin sold? And why didn't anything happen when he sold 700? It was because, in my opinion, because of the narrative engineering that Saylor was doing. Somebody like Sailor or anybody who chooses to engineer their narrative in a way can actually control markets. Bitcoin is so many different things that you can literally have a great argument for Bitcoin to somebody who is on the extreme far right and also the extreme far left.

0:44So the customization of Bitcoin is actually pretty cool. And that will lead to a lot of people from different walks of life to understand Bitcoin in a very deep way and be completely convinced about it. So that's great. that's that's like bullish good to see you man um we're going to talk all about bitcoin narratives across the board breaking down no one knowing which way is up with it anymore like it's funny just before we started recording i was scrolling through twitter and like i've seen three posts like is bitcoin dead is bitcoin over like i feel like we've lost the narrative but i think there's nothing more apparent as of right now as to where a narrative has either been broken or lost in everything that's happened with Michael Saylor.

1:28And yesterday, you just dropped a big piece on this. And it has been really interesting to see his messaging change over time. So do you want to start? I'll just leave it open for you. You pick where you want to jump in. What you notice when you kind of dug through all of the data around the things that Michael Saylor has been saying? well you know first of all i think you know when um when strategy sold 32 bitcoin and uh you know the reaction that everybody had not only in like the market and the price action but just like on twitter and on socials and everybody has kind of like come to this realization that okay maybe it's time to kill your heroes again and sailor is now the hero to to slay in this uh in this cycle and And I was like, it's interesting that people react like that after the fact.

2:17Obviously, there are people who have been critical of Sailor and strategy. There's this section or this cohort of Bitcoiners who are anti-Suite Coiner. That has always been part of this. But then there's a lot of other people as well that really had a problem with what was happening. And they were kind of freaking out. And I was like, what's up with that? Why do people always react after something has happened? And are there any indicators, some signals before anything happened that might have given us a clue in terms of whether Saylor has changed his mind or if he had started saying something that was an indicator of something else?

3:00I was like, okay, I just let my agents run through the Perception MCP. For people who don't know, Perception is my company. So essentially what we do is we track thousands of sources when it comes to discourse in the entire digital asset industry. So tweets, LinkedIn posts, filings, white papers, transcripts from conferences, podcasts, everything, you name it. And I was like, okay, let me just run my agents through the MCP and just track all of Saylor's tweets, interviews, conference panels, whatever he was talking about and say, hey, were there any clues before the 32 Bitcoin sell or anything else might have been some kind of a leading indicator of where things were going to go instead of reacting on something that's already happened.

3:50So I essentially told my agents to just go back to 2020 up until today and just give me a whole analysis on everything that Saylor has said And whether there's a word or two words or three words that keeps repeating or like, has he actually had a narrative that was planned and structured and kind of like on purpose throughout these years? And, you know, it was kind of clear when the analysis came back that, okay, there's like three faces from 2020 till today. That was like, okay, the first four years after strategy first announced that they were buying Bitcoin in 2020 up until 2024. There was just like this, I don't know, there's like Bitcoin maxi, anti-fiat maxi type of narrative and kind of like propaganda.

4:42And I say propaganda because the way that Saylor was saying things was in a very kind of like, I don't want to say calculated mode, but it was like very, it seems very on purpose. He kept repeating the same talking points and also used the same type of words over and over again. So I was like, that is pretty interesting. And then after 2024, entering 2025, things started to change with the kind of like the introduction of the term credit. And credit in the first cycle of 2020 to 2024 was mentioned, but it was mentioned in a very negative way. It was mentioned as like, okay, this is fiat shit. This is like not good.

5:27Credit is bad. You should just hold Bitcoin. So obviously he was trying to appeal or maybe pander to like the Bitcoin, you know, mentality, trying to get them on board during these whole four years. And then started to like slowly switch over a little bit, like not as hardcore as the first four years. But in 2025, there was like this little like transitional period where he started like switching things a little bit, like subtly, but it started. And then obviously you take a look at like what happened in terms of like product development or just like the offerings that strategy started to offer to the market around that time in 2024, 2025.

6:09And that's obviously, you know, when Stretch, when STRC got introduced and all of a sudden the credit language or the credit discourse started to switch into something more positive. and then 2026 came and he started talking about derivatives and just like completely went to the other side right and i know that at this at this time there was some people that started to question this uh but it wasn't really it wasn't really noticeable there was some people that was like against this like what is this whole credit you know paper bitcoin anti-suit coiners they were speaking up, but the overall market wasn't really paying attention until Saylor or Strategy sold the 32 Bitcoin.

6:54And I was like, this whole upheaval happened, which also had this market correction, this market reaction as well. And I'm saying this because in this whole 2020 to 2026 cycle, where these three phases happen, there was a time in 2022 where Strategy sold 700 plus Bitcoin and the market didn't react. Nobody said anything and the price didn't do anything. It's 700 plus Bitcoin. I forget exactly how much Bitcoin exactly, but it was definitely way more than 32. Now, why did the market react in terms of just emotions, but also price action for 32 Bitcoin sold? And why didn't anything happen when he sold 700?

7:39It was because, in my opinion, because of the narrative engineering that Saylor was doing. So 2022, the 700 Bitcoin was just like, okay, he's like tax harvesting. There's just some other, people had like other, not excuses, but like they were rationalizing it. Whereas when he, when Saylor or Strategy sold 32, it was already a problem with the narrative that Saylor had done when he started to change a year before. And that to me is extremely interesting. To me, that's like proof that narratives is one factor that drives markets. It all has to do with the emotion of people, how they react to certain actions unfolding.

8:22and somebody like Saylor or anybody who chooses to engineer their narrative in a way can actually control markets, subconsciously or not. But narratives has a very important part when it comes to how people react and how people feel about something. So I thought that was pretty interesting. And I think that's kind of the biggest takeaway from the report. If you own a Bitcoin ETF, especially if it's GBTC, you need to listen up. Spot Bitcoin ETFs provide price exposure to Bitcoin, not direct ownership. You can't withdraw it, you can't self-custody it, and they charge you a management fee every year to hold it.

8:59Well, Swan recently announced Swan Real Bitcoin Exchange, and it's ready to use right now. RBX is a structured in-kind exchange that converts your Spot Bitcoin ETF shares into real on-chain Bitcoin. It does that without selling on the open market, and it's designed to support a tax-efficient outcome. So, for example, if you hold GBTC, you're paying 1.5 % a year in management fees for Bitcoin price exposure. But by swapping GBTC for real Bitcoin with RBX, you can drop that figure as low as 0 % by just holding it in self-custody. This is designed in a way that maintains your cost basis and in a manner that supports the deferral of capital gains tax.

9:35So if you own a Bitcoin ETF, especially if it's GBTC, you need to talk to Swan Private about RBX today. Head over to swan.com forward slash WBD and book in a call with one of their team. That's swan.com forward slash wbd. If you're already self-custody Bitcoin, you know the deal with hardware wallets, complex setups, clumsy interfaces, and a seed phrase that can be lost, stolen, or forgotten. BitKey fixes that. BitKey is self-custody built for real life. It gives you an intuitive, easy-to-use wallet with no seed phrase to sweat over. And it has a strong recovery system and built-in inheritance for long-term peace of mind.

10:10And BitKey's just had a massive upgrade. The new device now has a screen. So before you approve something, you can check it on the BitKey itself. The transaction, the address, or any account changes. It's a big difference. You're not just trusting what's on your phone, you're seeing it for yourself on the device. It's simple, secure self-custody without the stress. Go to bitkey.world today and use the code WBD to get 10 % off the new BitKey. That's bitkey.world and use the code WBD. Do you want to pay less in taxes and stack more Bitcoin? Of course you do. Well, by mining Bitcoin with Blockware, you can.

10:42Under section 168K of the US tax code, Bitcoin mining servers qualify for 100 % bonus depreciation. This means every dollar you spend on miners can directly offset your income in a single year. And it's true for both business owners and W2 earners. So if you have$100 ,000 in ordinary income, you can purchase$100 ,000 in miners and potentially offset your tax liability entirely. Blockware's mining as a service does all the heavy lifting. They secure the rigs, they source the low-cost power, and they handle all the day-to-day maintenance. So you get to stack Bitcoin every single day while drastically shrinking your tax bill.

11:14Get started today at blockwaresolutions.com forward slash WBD and use code WBD for$100 off your first miner. That's blockwaresolutions.com forward slash WBD. One of the most interesting things about the narratives that Saylor drives, because they've been incredibly powerful, is it started like the first one I remember is the sort of melting ice cube. The melting ice cube of fiat money he was sat on, so he turned his treasure into Bitcoin. and then there was the sort of manhattan real estate there was digital energy and it felt like all of the initial narratives were kind of very positive for bitcoin and then the reason i've never liked the digital credit one is it's always been like bitcoin's not enough on its own without me giving this other product and so i feel like there's a bit of a disconnect on the narrative there and then the other interesting thing about this is i remember i had fong lee on the podcast I think it was about October-ish time last year.

12:11And he said on the show, I asked him if they would sell Bitcoin. And he said, yes, they would. And when he said that, I thought that was just like a fiduciary duty thing that he had to say he would. Because at some point, like he may have to and he has to say that that is an option. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it was just like it was sowing the seeds of this new narrative. I don't know. Like, and it's just been interesting to see it go from being, in my opinion, very, very pro Bitcoin to being like pro strategy and sometimes like saying Bitcoin is not enough. Like we need to add these new layers on top of it for it to become money like.

12:46And that's kind of, I think, where I've fallen out with this whole thing. And I think there's a lot of Bitcoiners in the same boat. Yeah, and I think, you know, I mentioned Feng Li as well in the report, because, you know, when the 32 Bitcoin got sold, you know, he bought back a lot of shares as well. And these things are filed publicly as well. And that is, even though it's not necessarily a verbal message, it is still a message that is publicly filed that should be kind of like a thing that people pick up on. That kind of went unnoticed. It didn't help at all. Like MSTR still crashed. And it was like nobody cared that this actual CEO bought back a significant amount of shares while the price was crashing.

13:34So that means that, you know, when a certain narrative has been solid and has, you know, over time, in this case, you know, from 2020 to 2024, four year cycle of like having a very hard narrative, kind of like rooting, when that gets uprooted, like nothing helps. nothing you say afterwards will help and that's like how how big narratives actually is and you know you can speculate i mean obviously there's there's a lot of like you can reason your way out of this and say hey you know business is business things change uh times change and you want to adapt you want to you know try out new things and also for sailor it's kind of like a learning curve as well right like even before 2020 he had tweets where he said okay bitcoin is is dead or has no future.

14:21And obviously he changed his mind on that as well. So, I mean, all of those things are allowed, obviously, but it's just interesting to have data on that right now that is quantitative. And you can actually, you can pinpoint to a place where like, okay, he's changing his narrative right now. And you can speculate on like, okay, why is this happening right now? What has happened before he spoke up about it that is changing his mind or is changing his mind in real time. And obviously we don't know, but I think it's extremely interesting to just have data on it. Like that's why I created perception in the first place, because I don't feel that we don't, we don't have this service where we can actually catch a narrative changing in real time.

15:00If you bother to look to come, like the consensus here is just to check the narrative after it's already been said and done. Like, like everybody has with this, with the reaction to the 32 Bitcoin being sold. So that's, that's the cool part. It's language. It's not binary as code, so it's not black and white. You can only speculate and talk about it on the podcast um but i think uh it's just incredibly interesting narratives really move markets sometimes a hundred percent and and obviously like we've focused there on the strategy side but on the bitcoin side the narrative has changed a lot as well like when i came into bitcoin i don't get me wrong like i came for number go up but i stayed for freedom money and and bitcoin was like it was freedom money like this was a counterculture thing that was cool it was like end the fed it was punk rock like it was everything that like i wanted to find at the time that i found it and it's part of the reason i fell completely in love with it and like never focused on anything since then essentially but like now i think because bitcoin's won so hard we and we've got everything that we talked about in 2016 2017 i feel like people aren't sure what the narrative is anymore because like and and to me like a real turning point is like the etf approval it's kind of that was something that bitcoin has been fighting for since 2014 when the wink of us first applied for an etf and it was like the thing that kind of knighted them and allowed them to come on with the wall street like finance bros and be a real big boy asset like they it got everything and then it's like now what we've won what what who are we anymore and i feel like that's something bitcoin's battling with right now 100 man and if there's so much to say about this uh let me try to just synthesize it and not have too long of a rant because i i i really really geek out about these things so yes i agree like i'm class of 2017 and the things that convicted me back then was just not what's being talked about right now definitely and we definitely have a situation right now like where the punk rock band you know from you know bushwick brooklyn all of a sudden uh is now playing at stadiums in in wembley london you know like we totally went mainstream and a lot of people don't like that you know like me too you've made the really shit third album exactly like the first album is like everything your whole life experience and it's amazing and then after that then what you know so we have already gone through that like first album where everything is fucking beautiful and it's packaged right and so many more people people come along and then are we fizzling out right now?

17:37Because right now there's really no solid narratives to cling on. And bear markets are for building narratives, not only for building products. It's for us to kind of like regroup and be like, okay, what do we talk about now that can live on during the next bull? I don't see any new narratives happening right now. I don't see any memes happening right now. And like the narratives and the meme culture, I mean talk to any like real quote-unquote bitcoiner they will tell you like memes is so important for us to convince outsiders because it's a memetic culture is visual it cuts through a lot of the noise and you get it instantly you don't need to read any academic papers or white papers or any of that bullshit and if we don't have that then what are we what do we hold on to when we are ready for the next phase of adoption and more outsiders and normies are going to come into the realm.

18:32So that's a... I don't know if it's a problem, but it's definitely different this cycle than before. And I see a lot of other Bitcoiners who have been around for a while during this cycle, kind of like, first of all, killing your heroes. That's always a thing. And that is also always based on narratives because your hero became a hero because of things that he said. And then since... Where am I going with this? The cypherpunk ethos is also kind of like dwindling out as well. And we see like, we are kind of like in an environment right now where there is no Bitcoin culture or Bitcoin community neither.

19:14There's no, and I know we want to talk about monoculture, but like there used to be a monoculture within Bitcoin like a decade ago, perhaps. obviously with infighting still prevalent it has always been a thing because we are like decentralized we are kind of like chaotic in the way we organize so that's kind of part of the dna but there was like always a thing that made this a movement that a lot of people felt part of and now i think on a broader sense with just the internet being fragmented and the way we communicate with each other and taking information and educate ourselves is also fragmented because of just the internet has created thousands of voices thousands of channels and the incentives for a thought leader or an influencer or a podcaster is pretty much to just stay within one very niche subject and just double triple down on that so once you get caught in one of these niches you kind of like you get caught because you understand it like let's say there's a podcast that is only about i don't know self-sovereignty freedom and all of those things you're going to tune into that podcast if you share some of those beliefs before and then you're going to continue listening to that podcast and you know continue to go deeper into that rabbit hole and be completely convinced about the freedom aspect of bitcoin self-sovereignty self-custody all that but the same that same phenomenon is also going to happen on a separate like pocket of the internet where somebody who just wants non-number go up all of a sudden is starting to discover adam livingston's of the world, right?

20:46The True North podcast, whatever. And they're going to be convinced because they have some preconceived beliefs about financial stuff. And they're going to understand Bitcoin from that perspective. And they're going to double and triple down and kind of go down that rabbit hole. And the way the internet is right now is like these two pockets of the internet are not really talking to each other that much. And extrapolate that with like hundreds of pockets of the internet. So I think this is interesting right now because to me, this is affecting Bitcoin adoption. This is kind of like setting the stage for the next wave of adoption where there's no like one movement that's going to bring in a lot of people understanding Bitcoin in one way.

21:26There's going to be a lot of people coming in, but there's going to be fragmented groups understanding Bitcoin in very different ways. And a lot of those ways are going to be extremely contradiction and they're going to be like opposite of each other is that good is that bad i don't know it is kind of like decentralized and cool right it's kind of like the same chaoticness of bitcoin which is part of our culture but at the same time it's a little bit weird because we're continuing to kind of go away from those those things that convinced a lot of people in the very beginning so i don't know if a lot of people are gonna like rage quit before because of that or if bitcoin is going to be very different because of how many different people are going to come in and not really get the 360 degree view of all the awesome things that bitcoin represents i don't know if this is good or bad i don't know what do you think i i don't like i find this really hard because when i came into bitcoin 2016 like i was really only ever on bitcoin twitter um a little bit on sort of the reddit but i think really most of the people who were on the reddit were also on bitcoin twitter and it did feel like a monoculture in a lot of ways like it felt like this sort of inside group that knew a secret that no one else knew and everyone just wanted to meme and talk all day and bullshit and during this whole time like don't get me wrong i was really new so i i didn't understand the full complexity of like the block size walls everything that was going on but there was still infighting it's just like but it still happened in one place it felt like a sort of clubhouse that everyone went to to talk about this thing that we knew we knew existed and no one else did and then like you say that's fragmented so much i think the sort of orange tie suit coin of bitcoiners are entirely different they represent like a different subset of bitcoiners they don't really talk to the sort of the freedom maximalist bitcoiners who don't really talk to like the bit 110 people who might not talk like talk to the ordinal guys like it has been totally fragmented and i don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing but what i do worry about is like how without a sort of monoculture within bitcoin how you push bitcoin adoption as wide as we need to push it that that's my big open question yeah man and it's like it's kind of like the the way that i i i i've been kind of like saying bitcoin is not for everyone for a while uh and that's that's pretty much my reasoning behind it it's just like it's not it's not for everyone i mean it is for anyone like everyone anyone is welcome if you kind of like understand it your way um but it's just like a lot of people are not going to get it and um i think another another another reality like in in this internet age that we are living in like the last 20 years i would say not only did everything started to fragment 20 years ago and is as fragmented as ever today But that has also changed our habits a little bit in terms of personalization.

24:16So it's like you can now personalize your feed. You can now personalize. If you buy a car, you can personalize the color, the wheels. Everything is personalized. So that leads to a change in consumer behavior where everybody expects things to be customized. We're seeing this now in AI on the business side of things. We're like, hey, if you are selling a dashboard these days, you're dead. Like everybody's creating their own dashboards because everybody wants like a highly customized solution for whatever they're doing, right? And it's possible. So people are just going to expect that. Now, the cool thing about Bitcoin is that I've always said that Bitcoin is so many different things that you can literally have a great argument for Bitcoin to somebody who is on the extreme far right and also the extreme far left.

25:03There are arguments for both extremes and everything in between. so the customization of bitcoin is actually pretty cool and that will lead to a lot of people from different walks of life to understand bitcoin in a very deep way and be completely convinced about it so that's great that's that's like bullish but that's actually really interesting because like one of the things that i think i've said before on the podcast is that i think bitcoin covers such a broad array of things that it's very hard to know how to orange pill someone if you don't know them Like if you know that someone cares deeply about like human rights, you tell them the story of like Roya Mabu giving women education in Afghanistan by like using Bitcoin.

25:44Like that's going to always hit. But the same story of like fiat, like money printing and fiat inflation is not going to necessarily hit that same person who might have more those like left wing biases. But maybe that's where the complete fragmentation of culture actually works in Bitcoin's favor. Like you have people in each of these camps and everyone's pushing Bitcoin from every different angle. It's exactly right. But that's going to create a reality for a lot of people that will make them think, ah, nothing is happening in Bitcoin, man. Like there's nothing, there's no narratives, there's no movement.

26:17But maybe not to you in your view of the world, but like something here is happening that is really cool that you have absolutely no clue about. like so many times i i like go to lunch and i talk about something that i care about like i don't know i read a book and that book i know sold millions and then i talk to somebody like hey do you know about this book or do you know about this author and they're like nope never heard about this guy what the hell the guy has sold millions of books you have no idea who that is and this goes with like i don't know films that you see bands that you hear people are just like there's there's such a disconnect between people like you go to your neighbor and that your neighbor is just going to have wildly different tastes and things that they're interested in compared to you.

27:01There's absolutely no, it doesn't matter anymore if you live in the same street, doesn't matter if you live in the same city, like everything is fragmented and people just customize their own like worldview. So Bitcoin will win in that way because it's adaptive enough to, you know, create arguments and be convincing for a lot of different people. And the thing with the fragmented media is like, okay, you're going to create these like pockets of internet that are kind of like insulated, but it's going to be super effective because these people are going to be super niche. They're going to cut down to one very specific thing.

27:35And the way that we also like ingest information these days, we don't have the mental capacity to like register everything. So we need things like packaged in a, you know, bite-sized way. So adoption is going to be good, but it's not going to feel like, oh my god we're taking over the world because you know this one narrative is like totally dominating it's going to be like boring fragmented you're going to not know what the hell is happening but it's going to still happen but you're going to have a view of like bitcoin is boring and i think that is also what's happening right now i think a lot of people are like like like i said like literally 10 minutes ago there's no memes there's no dominating narrative i'm bored bitcoin has no future, but maybe we shouldn't think like that.

28:20Maybe this is just the way adoption is changing and mutating into something else that we're just not used to. The thing that keeps me up at night with Bitcoin cold storage isn't Bitcoin failing, it's my setup failing. And this is where AnchorWatch comes in. With AnchorWatch, your Bitcoin's insured with your own A-plus rated Lloyds of London insurance policy and all Bitcoins held in their time-locked multi-sig vaults. So you have the peace of mind knowing your Bitcoin's insured while not giving up custody. So whether you're worried about inheritance planning, wrench attacks, natural disasters, or just your own silly mistakes, you're protected by AnchorWatch.

28:52Rates for fully insured custody start as low as 0.55 % and are available for individual and commercial customers in the US. You can speak to AnchorWatch for a quote and for more details about your security options and coverage, visit anchorwatch.com today. That's anchorwatch.com. You wouldn't reuse a Bitcoin address, so why does your phone broadcast the same identifier for life? Every sim has a static ID and carriers, ad networks and bad actors all use it to track you. The big carriers have been caught selling that data over and over again. CAPE is America's privacy first mobile carrier. Their identifier rotation feature changes your ID every 24 hours so you look like a different subscriber every single day.

29:30And sim swaps are off the table. Your number can't move without a 24-word phrase that only you hold. There's also no name at sign up, no social security number, and there's no profile to build on you. If you're a Bitcoiner in America, I honestly don't know why you'd use any other network. You can head over to cape.co forward slash WBD and use the code WBD for 33 % off your first six months. That's C-A-P-E dot co forward slash WBD. If you hold Bitcoin long enough, there's going to come a time when you need some dollars. It might be a tax bill, a business expense, life getting in the way, but whatever it is, it might come at a time when you don't want to sell your Bitcoin.

30:06That's where Ledin comes in. Ledin lets you borrow against your Bitcoin instead, with tiered rates that go as low as 9.25%. So you don't have to sell your stack if you don't want to. Ledin have operated through every market cycle since 2018 and have originated over$11 billion in loans. But the important part for me is the way Ledin handles these loans. Your collateral is held in custody and never lent out to generate interest. And Ledin's more than just loans. Tether Gold is now live alongside your Bitcoin, with instant trading across 10 pairs. And later this year, you'll be able to borrow against gold in the same way that you do with Bitcoin.

30:39Ledin really is an awesome company. I've used them multiple times. The applications have taken me less than 15 minutes and you have the dollars in your account within hours. If you want to check out Ledin, go to ledn.io and use the code WBD for 0.25 % off your first loan. That's ledn.io and use the code WBD. So I do have my ace on my sleeve, which is when I think Bitcoin monoculture comes back. But can we talk more broadly about the the death of monoculture in society because this is a topic that i find really interesting and i don't always find people that also find it interesting and there's there's a time i brought this up on a show maybe six months ago and you reached out to me um and so i've been excited to talk to you about this because i don't know when the death of monoculture happened but i know that it has happened and and the problem with it is it to me looks like the shittification of everything like music has got worse film has got worse tv's got worse like culture is fragmented and so there's there's no real shared values amongst people that you might be in like a local geography with maybe there is in all different like different parts of the world who you have you're connected to through the internet but like i feel like it's a societal breakdown that i don't love to see and one of the cool things though about recently is the world cup has been like a shining light of what monoculture can be like i feel like it's a very small glimpse of the life in the late 90s early 2000s when i was a kid when everyone cared about the same thing at the same time and i think there's something really special about that but i want to start like just a really open question about like when do you think the death of monoculture happened oh man you're saying so many things and i'm afraid of going to like crazy around because i have so many thoughts and opinions about this but let's do it um i think uh the death of monoculture probably happened around late aughts uh early 2010s because of social media and internet and i think this is something that everybody intuitively know and but it's easy to look back and say that now but i think uh you know the world cup is a great example of uh why we why we need monocultures in different like geographical locations because it's really beautiful to see you know all the all the fans and the stands representing each country kind like dressing up and like the stereotypical garments you know like that it's totally yes totally stereotypical but it's really beautiful because you really you're shining you know your culture what you represent and and all the values and the traditions of it right like i love to see you know i grew up in norway my fellow norwegians they they they just post up with like viking helmets and then they do the the row thing and it's really it's really wonderful because you know when i travel i want to go to a place and feel like i'm in this in that in that country i don't want to see the same type of coffee shops or the same type of people like being present in every single city.

33:41And I think we see that on, you know, physically, like a lot of cities, big cities in Europe, for example, kind of like starting to look the same. They're losing their like flair and originality. And we are also seeing it now on the internet with what I like to call the homogenization of the internet, which AI is really pushing forward because we have all these tools that are trying to appease everyone because they want to grow fast. So they kind of like homogenize the entire web and giving you results or answers to questions that are like they sound confident but it gives you like 40 of the actual truth so you we kind of like get like lobotomized slowly over time thinking that we're really making decisions and we're making opinions based on facts but we're not and when the monoculture did exist there was at least a feeling even though yes it was super centralized and your only choice was like five hosts of five different shows in one channel it still was something that brought people together and there was some sense of like okay a consensus a consensus of culture that at least if you felt identified or not it was kind of like the thing like mainstream was a thing and yeah i don't know there was stuff like grunge bands like obscure music from seattle that just managed to kind of like hit the zeitgeist to the mainstream and if they did that it was literally a global thing i remember like in the 90s growing up as a kid as well like basketball was like insane they hit the zeitgeist and it became like an all like all sucking thing that everybody could relate to and and embraced and that was because of yeah there wasn't the customization again of content wasn't there we were kind of like reduced to the TV, the radio.

35:32And that was like a thing that happened from, I think, 1930s when, you know, more people at their households began getting radios and TVs and channels started to appear and content started to create. And then that kind of like from the 1930s, it became a growing business, a growing industry. We saw advertising kind of like get invented and like more money, more money were made so more channels were made and then when the internet came that kind of like metastasized into the internet and continued to fragment and spread everybody had their own channels everybody had their own opinions everybody wanted to make money so i think around that 2010 is is kind of like where things really starting to accelerate and just like we are now 15 years in and there's like very crazy period where i honestly think and sorry for the rant again we're kind of like going back to our like human biology of like dude societies for hundreds and hundreds of years millennia even were mostly reduced to like your local physical place and the the culture that grew in those places were just like local high trust same language same way of speaking everybody kind of like understood each other because they had evolved in the same place for hundreds of years.