#756: Why Anger Is A Buy Signal with Michael Sullivan

**SPEAKER_1** (0:07)
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.
When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:18)
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:29)
I mean, that's part of the bold case for Bitcoin.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:31)
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. You probably should be.

**Marty Bent** (0:36)
Michael Sullivan, welcome to the show, sir.

**Michael Sullivan** (0:38)
Thanks so much for having me, man. Really grateful to be here.

**Marty Bent** (0:41)
Pumped to talk to you. I think it's been interesting observing your coverage and your particular analytical niche, which is sentiment analysis within Bitcoin. I think a lot of what you've been putting out there has been confirming my natural pattern recognition indicators been going off in my mind, having been around Bitcoin for 13 years now.
I've been saying pretty frequently over the last few months that this market reminds me more of 2015 than any other bear market that I've experienced. For those who are unaware, 2015 was terrible sentiment wise. Bitcoin Twitter didn't even really exist yet, but the small pocket that did exist basically went away. People thought Bitcoin was legitimately going to die. For some reason or another, this time around in 2026, the sentiments are very similar. And I find it fascinating because I've never been more bullish, but people are really butthurt about where Bitcoin is right now.

**Michael Sullivan** (1:48)
It's so true. And this happened like really naturally for me. I was really into language and just kind of had been noticing relatively recently how kind of the vibes were out there changing and whatnot. And I'm so excited to talk to you about it because some of the people that have been here longer have been more in tune with this, at least from my experience. They've really been optimistic in different ways than the newer folks are. And there's a bunch of potential reasons for that. I have my own theories as to why this might be true. You do too, between gold ripping, the AI trade going crazy, and then Bitcoin treasury companies burning a ton of the newer cohort of Bitcoiners. There's a lot of different reasons out there. For whatever of them, sentiment is really bad right now, despite so many things being so optimistic broadly. And that's just a really interesting dynamic. So yeah, I've been really, really, really having a ton of fun getting into this stuff.

**Marty Bent** (2:41)
Yeah.
We can dive deep into the details with just a couple of comments based off of that is thinking back to like FTX when we went down to 15K, 155K, wherever we settled at the capitulation wick there. There wasn't like an AI trade like sucking or a gold or silver trade that people could point at in parallel and be like, oh, look how great they're doing compared to how poor we're doing. And I think this time around, the AI trade, gold and silver, even though they're off their highs, they're still relatively elevated. I think people look like, oh, god, am I holding the wrong bag? And beginning to basically do the meme of the stick figure poking Bitcoin saying, do something.

**Michael Sullivan** (3:26)
Yeah, I think part of it too is Bitcoiners in general are relatively technologically savvy and optimistic folks. And like, we've really gotten deep into AI, myself very much included in that. So to watch something that we're, it just take to watch that narrative and that technological thing get really taken over and be so enthusiastic and euphoric, I think just hits a little bit differently, since we're also generally so much aligned with the AI thing in general.

**Marty Bent** (3:53)
Yeah. I mean, we're talking about before we have record, but the AI energy is real within Bitcoin too. I mean, I've been leading into it very heavily here at TFTC and other aspects. And I think it's actually helped us to get information as it pertains to Bitcoin out there.
So it's been in that positive, but there are many people saying like, what are you doing focused on AI? You got to focus on Bitcoin. You can do both and hopefully leverage one to accelerate what you're doing with the other, which is leverage AI tools to accelerate Bitcoin education for our purposes here at TFTC. But it's, yeah, again, it's fascinating. And I think now is a good time. Just like, how did you get into, I mean, you mentioned a lot of language and all that. How did you get into sentiment analysis within Bitcoin specifically? And what set you down this particular rabbit hole?