YouSaid · the spoken record

Brandon Quittem

lines on the record: 65
first: 2023-07-05
most recent: 2023-07-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Was they formed a symbiosis and they colonized dry land together. So that fungi burrows into the rock and dissolves the rock with chemistry and liberates the carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, all the things it needs, simultaneously that little allergy that the fungi trapped was converting the sunlight and oxygen into.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Launch point into symbiosis because I think it's important to have that sort of idea in the back of our head that these are cooperative and competitive ecosystems and humans play the same game. You look at our gut, it's full of a microbiome of all these tiny little creatures that are not human cells. 90% of the cells in our body are not human cells and we need these organisms to survive. And that's how we evolved as well. And one last thing on this one before I get off my diatribe is that about 500 million years ago all complex life lived in the oceans. There was no terrestrial plants. There might have been some insects on dry land, but it was pretty much all the action was underwater. Then there was some fateful occurrence where a fungi and some sort of a plant, some symbiote, maybe an allergy, something like that, they washed up on shore together. And what happened?”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Looked at a certain medicine, I don't remember which one. And they said, Oh, this medicine comes from a plant. And then they look a little bit deeper and they realize, wait a minute, that molecule is actually produced in the fungi that lives inside the plant cells. And by the way, 100% of plants have fungi embedded into their cells. That little mycelium thread-like stuff works its way in. So not a single plant have ever been found in the wild without a fungal ally. And most plants with roots also connect through the mycorrhizal network underground. And back to that story, the fungi actually created the molecule, not the plant, right? Then you go even deeper and you realize that bacteria is inside the fungi. They're even smaller. And they find out that the molecule was actually created in the bacteria. And you can go one step lower and you can say, oh, it's actually the virus in the bacteria that's in the fungi that's in the plant that creates the molecule. And so I bring that up just as a”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These ants to go find them food and bring it to the mother source so the fungi has more to eat. It's kind of an extended phenotype for the fungi, right? They deploy the ant like a beaver makes beaver dams. The fungi hires the ants to bring it more food. Yeah, and if you look at biology one step deeper, and this is getting into, I would say the tip of the spear of biology. It's a little more esoteric. It's not necessarily mainstream approved. But I think all the interesting stuff in science is on the edge. And, you know, 50 years later, we'll look back and be like, oh, that's obviously true. And the point I'm talking about here is about symbiosis. And so pretty much every scale of biology, there is some sort of symbiosis. And what that means is two separate organisms are cooperating. And in that environment, it's a little bit of cooperation, a little bit of competition. But the point is that they work together in OnePlus 1 equals three. And a fun study here was”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where the mushroom wants to broker a healthy forest, and sometimes that means taking some carbon off of this big healthy tree and giving it to a smaller tree that needs it. Yeah, let's just keep mycocentric versus phytocentric in mind there. A couple other interesting ones here are the leaf cutter ants, which Andrea Santinopoulos actually put on one of his books. So he understands this sort of network intelligence type thing, which we'll talk about. But the leaf cutter ants, they're one of the most populous organisms on the planet. And what they do is they go out and they forage leaves. They bring them back to their underground layer and they put those leaves in a pile and essentially ferment them. And so that fermentation process, of course, happens with a fungi. And that stores a food cache underground. And then they can come in and eat off of that mycelium for a long time into the future. Now, if we look at it from the fungi's perspective, what's happening? The fungi are hiring.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trees were only about a meter high and they didn't have really any root structure. And so the leading hypothesis now from the mycology side is that tree roots are actually evolved to go search underground to find these mycorrhizal fungi partners to trade. And if we look at, now that's the phytocentric theory, right? It's a forest and they borrow from the mushrooms. From the mycocentric point of view, mushrooms and especially mycorrhizophongi are the ones who trade in the roots, they are actually just tree farmers, right? So they connect with all these trees and they're growing the forest in the way that best suits them. And we're starting to uncover these trade relationships. And what we find is that it looks like a tree will give resources to another species. So an oak tree gives a birch tree, a whole bunch of carbon, right? That makes no sense from a biology standpoint. They have separate genetics until you involve that mushroom trade network.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With fungi underground, and they form a symbiotic relationship. The mushrooms burrow into the tree roots and they create trade networks. And there's trade policy. There's buy-low, there's sell high, there's hoarding resources, you reward your good trading partners and you stiff the other ones. And it very much resembles a human economic system. In that environment, most people would say a forest is just competitive trees or maybe it's a symbiotic forest working together and they just use the mushrooms for their capacity, right? And let me break that down. Fungi use chemistry to dissolve things in the soil. And what they're doing is they're liberating minerals and valuable resources, which the tree needs to grow. And what the trees do is they use photosynthesis to create sugars and fats, which are food for the mushrooms. So the trees sell the sugars and fats in exchange for these minerals. And prior to that symbiotic relationship,”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the only reason why they discovered it is because they were hiking around this mountain. They're like, why are all these pine trees dying? They got in a plane and flew over the mountain and they observed that there was this huge swath of the forest being decimated. And then they figured out that it was a single honey mushroom who was consuming entire forest. It's thousands of acres in size and still growing. And since we know so little about fungi, it's entirely possible that there's larger ones other parts of the planet. That's just the largest one we've found so far. People talk about plants, and I actually want to break down a difference between a mycocentric world and a phytocentric world, meaning plants get all depressed, plants get all the love because we see them, we know them, whereas fungi are mostly out of sight and out of mind. And so they get no love. And so if you view the world, let's look at a forest, for example. What is a forest? It's a whole bunch of trees competing, right? And those trees actually connect.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, very, very important for this guy. And that's true all over all of history. It's the humans who partnered with fungi, they're the ones who out-competed others. For example, beer is made with yeast and yeast is a fungi. And in a time where waterborne pathogens were very, very disruptive to societies, if your society could brew beer, Very low alcohol beer, you can drink that cleanly with no problems, whereas the neighbor”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Half of his possessions were fungi. Okay. The two fungi, one is tinder polypore. This is a unique mushroom. It's found all over the world. And when you dry it out, it makes really good tinder for starting a fire. Okay, super valuable. You're crossing the Swiss Alps. Obviously, fire is important. The next was a birch polypour, which is a mushroom that when it's dried out, it actually becomes so hard you can sharpen a knife on it. And if you boil in water for a little bit, it produces some antiviral and antibacterial properties. And what we found is this otzy, the ice man, was so well preserved in the ice that we could actually check his stomach. We found pathogens in his stomach that birch polypore was active against.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And humans have been deploying fungi as a tool for as long back as we can remember in World War I, people would put moldy bread on wounds in trench warfare. And we actually didn't even know it was due to penicillin on the bread. We just knew it worked. And if we go back even further, let's say about 5,000 years ago, we found a famous ancient man in the Swiss Alps. He's called Otzi the Ice Man now. And he had a few possessions on him, a knife, a little satchel, and two mushrooms”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much more similar than we are to plants. So both animals and fungi inhale oxygen. We exhale carbon dioxide. Obviously, they are the opposite. And we both find our own food, whereas plants make their own food. The major taxonomy, the branch where we sort of forked off from fungi is because animals put food in their body. And fungi actually go into, put their bodies into the food. So that mycelial little tube structure dissolves its environment. It consumes its environment through chemistry. And it's actually a master of chemistry. A lot of our medicine comes from fungi. And because our biology is similar, fungi have evolved to learn these little defense molecules to protect themselves. And it just so happens that those same molecules work on us. Most famously was penicill”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fragment and connect trees together Recent studies are showing that they send information bidirectionally, they trade resources. And so underneath a forest is this Enormous network of multiple fungi plants working together and trading. And it actually resembles an underground economy. And we now affectionately call this the Woodwide Web This underground network there. And so that's sort of the framing of what this thing is. But let's do a little more fungi stuff just to make sure everyone's on board with how cool this stuff is because it's really a forgotten kingdom. And as late as the late 60s, it was considered a lesser plant. So, not that long ago, we didn't even know it was its own kingdom. And a lot has changed since then. More we study, the more this whole kingdom starts to unfurl Okay, so fungi and animals are actually very similar”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is a recent finding that sort of breaks our whole long view of history because we thought other things had evolved first, but it turns out that fungi might have been primary and we'll kind of figure out kind of talk through how they fit into the ecosystem later and where that would make sense. And so the mushroom itself, most people think about, that's just the sexual reproductive organ. It shows up just for a brief moment. It produces spores, which are like little mushroom seeds, and then the mushroom quickly disappears. But the majority of most fungi's life are spent underground or in a tree in a form that we'll call mycelium. And mycelium is the most interesting part of the kingdom, in my opinion, and it also, as we'll find out soon, ties directly into Bitcoin, which I know sounds totally weird, but it is true. And at Mycelium form, think about an underground network of tubes. So one cell wall, very tiny little tubes that branch.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, absolutely. And quick caveat for the actual biologists or mycologists out there. I'm just an amateur who goes hard at things that I'm interested in. Same with Bitcoin, same with mycology. So I'm going to anthropomorphize a little bit. I'm going to tell stories that an actual mycologist might slap my wrist a little bit. But that's okay. Let's start with mycelium. Let's start with fungi. Let's start at the very high level. In biology, we sort of put different organisms into categories, the taxonomy. So fungi have their own kingdom, plants, animals, fungi, et cetera. And most people think of them as plants or they think about the mushrooms at a grocery store or something they see on a log in the woods. But the reality is that it's an enormous kingdom with tremendous diversity. There's some of the oldest multicellular life on our planet. In fact, one fossil, the oldest multicellular fossil we found is 2.4 billion years old and it's some type of fungi.”
2023-07-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC137: Bitcoin Functions Like A Biological Network w/ Brandon Quittem (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT