EP #9 The Future is Bitcoin w/ Michael Saylor

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Earn skills in weeks, not years. Visit phoenix.edu Some people think nature is.

Like this, but actually it's like this. That's why Columbia engineers everything we make for anything nature can throw at you.

Columbia engineered for whatever. Before we move to outer space, we will move to cyberspace.

Yes, I agree with you.

So the next big move is how about if we give property rights and we make rich 8 billion people in the real world by moving their wealth into cyberspace where it will be protected from debasement and destruction and a massive.

Transformative purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like this is who I am, this is what I'm going to do do. This is the dent I'm going to make in the universe. Welcome to Mindsets and Moonshots. It's my pleasure to welcome a longtime friend, one of the smartest people I know, Michael Saylor. Michael is an entrepreneur, executive, inventor, author, philanthropist. He is also perhaps the most prominent and brilliant bitcoin proponent on the planet. He's the executive chairman of MicroStrategies, a company founded in 1989 just out of MIT where he served as CEO for 33 years straight. MicroStrategies is the largest independent publicly traded business intelligence company and the largest holder of Bitcoin on its balance sheet. He is a first principles thinker extraordinaire and provides the most clear and cogent arguments for Bitcoin I've ever heard. Beyond bitcoin as a compelling he has a compelling mastery of financial markets, history, technology, inner workings of blockchain, and makes a compelling conversation to have and listen to. He is the creator of The Sailor Academy, sailor.org providing free educational services to over 1 million students to date. Full disclosure, Michael and I were both fraternity brothers at Theta Delta Chi. At mit he was, I think three or four years behind me. We both earned degrees in aeronautical and astronautical engineering and Michael also got a degree in science, technology and society. Michael, a pleasure to have you here, pal.

Nice to see you again, Peter.

Yeah, I think last time I saw you was in your digs in Miami just towards the beginning, middle of the pandemic. One of the things I remember we did that I'd love if you would do again here was you walked through the potential of bitcoin as a store of value, what it could potentially be worth in the future. That was beautifully done. I had a similar conversation with Cathie Wood on my stage. So I guess the question is, under certain circumstances, in terms of sovereign wealth, funds or store of value replacing gold, what could Bitcoin get to? What's the math behind that?

Yeah, well, the way I think about that is I consider the value of all of the property in the world that's used to store wealth. So right now, if you're a wealthy individual and you wanted to give money to your grandchildren, you have a number of choices. You can either buy bars of gold, or you can buy ranches. You could buy blocks of Manhattan or buildings. You can buy shares of companies, corporate stocks, and you could put money in a savings account and maybe buy sovereign debt or bonds, corporate bonds or other bonds. And when you add up all this stuff, it's like $500 trillion worth of stuff that people use. And the challenge with all these things is, how do I know if I had a million dollars today that it would still be worth a million dollars 100 years from now?

A million dollars in buying power? If you would, yes.

Yeah. Money is economic energy. And so I want to have a certain share of economic energy in the civilization, and I want to maintain it for a long time, for generations. So if I buy a city block in Manhattan, it's kind of intuitive that over 200 years, the value of that city block will go up, and if more people move into Manhattan, it'll go up. And so the positives are people move in the city and I got a share of the economic activity of the city. The negatives are it's going to get taxed by the mayor of Manhattan. There's going to be zoning regulation by the Neighborhood Zoning Board. It's going to get potentially taxed by the State of New York. Some it might be the politician decides they really want to build Central park on my block of land, and they just take it from me and they pay me, you know, sub market. Or maybe they want to turn my land into an airport or into a port. So you own property. It sounds really good. But you have to fight to maintain that property over 100 years. And your children's children will have to fight to maintain it. So if I took a million dollars of economic value 100 years ago and I held it in dollars, the US dollar is expanding about 7% a year for the past 100 years. So if you do the math, you find that you lose 99% of the economic value in cash. And that's why nobody in their Right mind would put a million dollars of cash in a box and put a time lock on it. And in the year 2120, expect their great grandchildren to open the box and for it to be worth anything. If I put a million dollars of gold in a box 100 years from now, the challenge is will the bank or the government seize the gold? Pretty much every country on earth stole everybody's gold over the last hundred years. If you had it in Germany, it got stolen multiple times. The British, the French, the Japanese, the Russians, even the Americans stole everybody's gold. And if it didn't get stolen, that's what we call counterparty risk seizure confiscation. If it didn't get stolen, if you increase the gold supply by 2% a year, then you realize the half life of money in gold, that seems a half life of energy in a battery. The half life of money and gold is 35 years, which by the way.

We increase it by 2% because we are mining new gold every year. Right. It isn't a limited fixed amount.

You can't stop the gold miners from mining gold. So ultimately the economic energy stored in the container of gold is dissipating at 2 to 3% a year, which means you're going to cut it in half once, twice, three times. Right. So you're going to be down to 12 and a half percent of what you had, even if it doesn't get seized. So when you think about these things, you realize that gold doesn't really hold economic energy. Great. It just happens to be the best portable, non sovereign way to move energy around.

And portable is a, you know, I'm not going to pick up a ton of gold and move it someplace.

Yeah, it's semi portable. You couldn't move a million dollars of gold through an airport, but it's more portable than a building. Right. You're not moving your building out of LA ever. Right. So you've got this conundrum which is things that hold their value for a long time, like soccer teams or football teams maybe. Well, they have cultural risk while people still want to watch football and soccer in 100 years. And they're not so portable and they're very political. Then you have things that look straightforward, like owning 1,000 acres of land. But if your enemy takes over as governor of the state, they just pass a property tax and they tax your land away from you. And then the oldest cliche is lost the family farm because we couldn't pay the property taxes.

Sure. And by the way, that's an important Point. Right. Because the value of your land that you own dissipates over time because it's taxed constantly. And it's like if you had a deed to a piece of land for 100 years, at the end you don't own the land anymore if you didn't pay your taxes.

Yeah. So you're a rich family in New York City and you have real estate. The reason that you still own it is because you rented it out. And you were very competent in the way you manage the politics, the tax and the rent. And you managed to get more rent than the tax. And then if you do that well, and if you get lucky, then you'll still have the land. But you know the families that keep their land for hundreds of years and use it to store wealth, and they never have. And they never have it taxed away or taken away. You know who they are?

The dictators, the rulers, the kings, the sovereigns. Yes.

Okay. If you own the country, let's say the Windsors. The Windsors, you know, still own the middle of central London, but that's because they kind of own the government, or at least they're politically favored. Or if you go to the Middle east, you go to Dubai, you're a wealthy foreigner, you're like, I think I'll just buy a bunch of beach front here. No, they don't sell the good property to foreigners. You have to be a royal in order to own the beach. So many countries, what you find is the sovereigns, they own the land forever in perpetuity and give it to their children's children's children. And the reason they can afford to do it is because there's no tax, because they make the tax laws.

Hey, thanks for listening to Moonshots and Mindsets. I want to take a second to tell you about a company that I love. It's called Levels. And it helps me be responsible for the food that I eat, what I bring into my body. See, we were never designed as humans to eat as much sugar as we do. And sugar is not good for your brain or your heart or your body in general. Levels helps me monitor the impact of the foods that I eat by monitoring my blood sugar. For example, I learned that if I dip my bread in olive oil, it blunts my glycemic response, which is good for my health. If you're interested, learn more by going to Levels Link. Peter Levels will give you an extra two months of membership. It's something that is critical for the future of your longevity. Alright, let's get Back to the conversation in the episode. So let's assume, as you've said, and I completely agree, gold is getting diluted, we said threefold, over a course of 100 years. Land and buildings are being taxed and evaporated, if you would, by taxation. So if people start realizing bitcoin as a strong store of value that isn't dissipating, isn't being taxed, what is your. You walk through some of the numbers. If it takes a percentage of the store of value of land or gold and so forth, what could be the price of bitcoin in the future? Not making any guarantees, but when you.

Think of it as digital gold, then it should replace gold. Gold's worth $10 trillion and that takes Bitcoin to 500,000. But when you think of it as digital property, like replacing buildings and land and other long storeholes of wealth, then you're up by a factor of 20 or 30 from there. I mean, it should not be. It's much better than digital gold because I can move bitcoin at the speed of light and I can program it to a million transactions an hour on an iPhone or a website. You can't do that with gold. So it's got more utility than gold, which means it's probably worth 20 or 30 trillion if it just replaces the gold. But instead of buying the Fontainebleau Hotel, which is a nice hotel worth whatever billions in Miami beach, instead of buying that, instead of buying the equivalent amount of bitcoin, if you bought the bitcoin, you can move that to any city in the world every hour of the day, compose it, decompose it, recompose it, dematerialize it. And when there's a nasty tax on it, you can just move yourself to a different jurisdiction where there's a better tax treatment. And if you think of it like that, then it's a multi hundred trillion dollar asset class. So at 10 trillion, it's 500,000. At 100 trillion is 5 million. So I think, you know, we're marching toward $10 trillion, which is. Sorry, sorry, $10 million a coin. Which is why bitcoin enthusiasts see its. It's just a very great long term store of value and it's a great investment idea because it meets the needs of 8 billion people. The average person, the middle class person that drives an Uber or works as a dentist, they can't buy $387 worth of a building in New York City. Every month is their savings plan. Right. And a person in Africa can't Buy a small share of a nice piece of property. They can't buy $127 worth of Picasso painting. So bitcoin offers property rights at any scale, any amount of money, anybody in the world. And you can. You don't have to worry about will people like Picasso's. Will they still want buildings in Vegas or New York? Will some politician tax it away from me? Well, you know, can I take it through an airport? So if you're looking for an egalitarian, utilitarian way for people to save money and protect their life force or protect their economic wealth for the next hundred years, and you are looking for something that's kind of consistent with the mobile wave, Android phones, iPhones, websites, that's truly global. It's more appealing to people in Nigeria and Argentina than it is appealing to people in Manhattan.

I'm going to get there. Right. Because it really is part of creating a world of abundance. It is critically important as a means for that. You know, Michael, I wake up every morning with you and your tweets. I enjoy your tweets. It's definitely good. I love this one from a little bit ago. And it was important and prophetic. You said, I thought it was late. You said, I thought I was late to bitcoin, but apparently not. And that's one of the important things that I think people need to get. It's not too late to bitcoin, especially if we had the potential to hit 500,000, 5 million, $10 million of Bitcoin. It's still early in the deceptive phase of its growth.

I thought when Google came public, I was too late. But if you look at the really great successes of our lifetime, Peter, the digital monopolies, the Apple, the Google, you know, the YouTube, the Facebook, you know, these things, the microstrategy, we thought that we were late to them. But the truth is Google would have been a good idea to invest in, you know, all the way up to like a few months ago.

Yeah, no, I was.

It's still getting more powerful. And you think you've fully embraced Google in the year 2018. But Google was going to get more powerful and surgeon. And if you thought you understood it in 2020, by 2021, it was more powerful. And the same is true with Apple and these Apple and Google probably more powerful than most nation states. Same with Microsoft. We thought Microsoft, we understood that one. And Microsoft got more powerful in the past 24 months.

I agree. Who would you rather go to war with as your ally? You know, Google or Greece? Or Ghana or, you know, it's like you would rather have one of these companies. You know, people think you've been involved in Bitcoin for, like, for a decade, since the beginning, because you've become such a strong, both knowledgeable and protagonist on you. But it wasn't. It was just a few years ago. Can you tell the story of what happened that got you excited and gave you, for lack of a better term, religion on this?

Bitcoin represents a paradigm shift. It's the digital transformation of money, property, and energy. And paradigm shifts are so profound that you're staring at them and you don't realize they took place because your worldview is constructed based upon a bunch of assumptions that you've always taken for granted. And so what Thomas Kuhn says in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions and what we study at MIT is there's only two circumstances under which people willingly undergo a paradigm shift. And one way is you wait for the old guard to die. And the millennials, kind of, they get it because they're different. And Einstein, you know, said, God does not play dice with the universe. Einstein never liked quantum theory. You know, you could be a brilliant person, but you won't embrace the paradigm shift while you're alive. In the absence of a crisis, the second way you get paradigm shift is a war. When there's a war and there are bombs dropping from above, you don't believe in atomic power, but then someone drops a nuclear weapon and the city evaporates, and all of a sudden you become a believer and you reassess your priorities.

I would posit there's another way, which is when something is 10 times better than anything else. 10 times cheaper, 10 times faster, 10 times better. It's like how I got my mom and dad to go to a digital camera or to use Google or the web, right? It's like, when it's that much better.

Yeah, I will say, though, like, even. Even when it's 10 times better, what you have is a commercially successful venture. But, for example, Warren Buffett never invested in Microsoft, and Warren Buffett never invested in Amazon, right? Even though it's ten times better, right? If you have enough money and enough power, you can ignore stuff. You know, my dad didn't use any of the new technology until at some point, we gave him. We gave him a television and YouTube. And YouTube did it. Like he didn't care about all the other things. But if you can sit and you can talk to the remote and you can stream on YouTube to anything, all of a sudden, 80 year old man decides he loves this now and so it has to just click. Yeah, right.

And what clicked, what clicked for you with bitcoin? Was it, when was it? Was it March of, was it, you.

Know, it's the second quarter of 2020, the second quarter of 2020. And what clicked was, was a couple of things. We had a K shaped recovery. Main street was shut down. It's pretty, you know, millions of people have lost their jobs, the economy's contracting, and then Wall street exploded and recovered and hit all time highs. And we.

And what I saw was six weeks later, right?

Yeah, financial assets were having the best year ever. People had great years. I mean a lot of these hedge fund managers, they had the best year of their life in 2020 or 2021. And Main street assets were having the worst year in 30 years. And I had a company with $500 million in cash that was dead money. It was idle, it was generating zero percent interest. The Federal Reserve said, we're not going to raise interest rates for four years. The company's stock was in the tank. At one point, in essence, when we were going through this, our company was valued at $60 a share in cash and $60 a share in the software business. And that was like one times revenue. And so I looked at the world and I said, you know, if the cash is dead money and if our stock is viewed as dead money, we've got a choice between a fast death, a slow death, or we ride out of the cast and we take a risk. Okay, the fast death is I just give the $500 million back to the shareholders in a dividend or a buyback. Now I knew that wasn't going to save the company because I'd been buying back the stock for the last five years. I bought $300 million worth of stock back or something. And the only thing that would happen would be the stock would go from $120 a share to $60 a share. And then all the stock options, the employees would be underwater. Then all the employees would get headhunted away by Amazon and Google and Facebook. And then we wouldn't be able to compete with Microsoft. And we compete against a company which has more power than God. Microsoft. Every company on earth is their customer. They're more powerful than all but about a handful of countries on this earth and they can do whatever they want, wrap it into their product, give it away for free if they want. So the challenge of giving up the capital was first we'd lose our financial capital and then we'd lose our human capital and then we'd have no reason to exist and the company was going to zero. So notwithstanding, whether you care whether a company lives or not, I didn't see it in the interest of my shareholders to watch the stock go to $60 a share and then watch us slide, we'd have to sell the company. So the second strategy is hold the cash. But the cash is cash trash. Ray Dalio says that is generating 0% interest and the money supply expanded by 20% a year for the past two years. You can see it in US single family homes, which shot up 40% in price. And so if the money's being devalued 20% a year and you're generating 0% interest, you get a negative real yield of minus 20%. And I did the math in my head and I concluded that pretty much the $500 million in purchasing power would be cut into $250 million of purchasing power in 36 to 48 months. So that's a slow death. I could use cash to pay my employees, but ultimately we were sitting and mired. And so that doesn't work. And so in that situation, we decided we should do something transformational. And if you went into a Harvard B school class and corporate strategy said, what are you going to do? The investors want the cash back. You can't generate a yield on the cash the company needs to grow. Well, the answer is you do a transformational acquisition. So if I could have bought VMware, or if I could have bought WhatsApp, or if I could have bought Snapchat, or if I could buy like a super high growth digital monopoly or some, some moonshot thing that would go to the sky, then, yeah, maybe that saves the company. But those are few and far between. Most of the time, these acquisitions that you do are dilutive. And I knew they're dilutive because, like, Pete, it's not my first rodeo. I lived through this. I invented, you know, I launched 12 different product lines to grow the business, and there were singles and doubles or whiffs, and I know that just innovating won't always help you. And then I bought the stock back and I, you know, and I knew that didn't work. And then I spent hundreds of millions of dollars on sales and marketing to expand the business, and that didn't work. And so I. And then I watch all my competitors, businessobjects, cognos, every company, I watched them do acquisitions to try to grow, and every one of them failed. In that strategy, there was a 99% mortality rate.

Wow.

Every. The reason we're the biggest independent business intelligence company left is because the other hundred all went private, got bought up, got amalgamated and sucked into the bowels of IBM and Oracle and then dismantled over the course of 20 years. So I kind of knew, I tried everything for a decade. I knew it wasn't going to work from first, you know, from first observations. So I thought, well, what if I could find a digital gold, which was better gold than gold, something that is better than gold, but also a big tech monopoly. And here are my three criteria. I want it to be a better gold than gold, I want it to be a big tech monopoly and I want no one else to appreciate it. I want it to be underappreciated. And that's what bitcoin was in the second quarter of 2020, the insta. No one thought it was an institutional asset. Even though Amazon stock had doubled in the second quarter, Bitcoin was trading about the same as it had been trading in 2018 or 2019. You know, it had been, it got up to 10,000, it had smashed down to 4,000, it was back at 10,000. So I looked at it and I said, well, you know, based on all the information, you would think that a digital property network or a global digital money network is more valuable, knowing that people are losing confidence in currencies, losing confidence in central banks, losing confidence in governments. And this is a non sovereign, open, decentralized system. So it struck me with the fundamentals were good. Yeah, you would think that, but it wasn't appreciated.

Yeah.

So we're there and we have to take a risk. We literally have to. Or we got to sell the company. Right. We're done one way or the other. And I said, well, this is a reasonable risk because it looks like the Facebook of money or the Google of money in the year 2010 or 2011. While 98% of the world doesn't understand it, it's a bit too complicated. They're afraid of it. But just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't true. It just means. And I had the experience of riding the mobile wave.

Yep.

And I'm the guy in 2011 that bought Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google stock. You know, and they all worked out well. And I thought, the year's 2020. We're at the end of the mobile wave. You know, I tell a story of, you know, I tell a funny story in the mobile wave about my niece on a beach and she's like, I don't know, eight years old and she wants the Big Apple. And I said, oh, you want to go to New York City? She give me the Big Apple for my birthday. And I said, you want to go to New York City? She goes, no, I want the iPad. And I thought, okay, little girl wants an iPad. That means that the entire world wants this and this is going to be a big deal. So buy Apple stock. Well, in 2020, I'm talking to the same niece and I said, what do you think? And she goes, yeah, well, I just bought some Amazon stock and like Amazon is trading at like $3,300 a share, you know, and, and it just doubled. I'm like, okay, well if 20 somethings now know they should buy Amazon and Apple and Google. This is not an, this is not a misunderstood technology trend anymore. Every Uber driver understands that.

This is like the 2001.com bus where every, every taxi driver back then was telling you what.com stocks they were buying.

So get off the mobile wave, get on the crypto wave and think that through. So that kind of made the decision straightforward. It wasn't without risk, but the alternative was pretty much throw in the towel and just either get beat to death fast or beat to death slowly. And so we got into this business at that time and of course the last two years have been, I think, fairly good ones in terms of commercialization, institutionalization of digital assets.

Yeah, this was the number, right? Since August 10th of 2020 when you adopted Bitcoin, MicroStrategies has outperformed 97% of all S&P 500 stocks. Congratulations. That's amazing. Do you have a self described purpose? One of the things that I'm super, that I'm focused on in the show is helping people sort of get compelled to a purpose. I think an individual, an entrepreneur with a purpose is the way we make the world a better place, the right mindsets, and a driven purpose. What's your purpose right now, Michael?

Engineer a better world. It's mit, man.

I hear you, buddy.

Engineer a better world. I think that engineering is divine. I mean, you gotta respect engineers. If you look at what it takes to build a bridge, what it takes to build an aircraft, a spaceship, a nuclear reactor, a ship, a building a skyscraper, what it takes to cold roll steel, you know, or crate steel, or to extract petroleum out of the ground, or navigate celestially, or build a, you know, build a mobile phone or a radio or a television, it's pretty clear as if you look at the history of humanity and look at the history of science, that great improvements in the civilization and the human condition, they're all tied to technology 100%. If you master fire, electricity, oil, nuclear power, fill in the blank. Higher level mathematics, these things make a difference. Antibiotics, it's unquestionable if you study it. And on the other hand, there's a lot of other things people engage in and, you know, some pursuits. You know, I like art, music, they're good. Politics is like half and half right. Half the time it helps and half the time it hurts. And it's unclear whether it's hurting when they think they're helping or whether they're helping when they think they're hurting. But I think clearly engineering is a better moral high ground to stand on.

And yes, and the engineering you're doing right now is engineering the global financial system with Bitcoin. Is that your focus? I mean, we're not building rockets anymore, or at least you and I aren't.

I've had a passion for a lot of things in life, but if we just focus upon bitcoin right now, I think the fundamental issue is the energy balance in the civilization is broken. I think if you look at the civilization, you could say half of it. We provide goods and services and we trade with each other in order to upgrade the human condition and build things of value. We build bridges and buildings, we provide goods and services. But the other half is the money, the financial assets and the economy that create the financing, the liquidity that allow the trading and money. The way I see money is in the ideal world, there'd be a certain ledger, a certain amount of money, 100 million units or 100 billion units, and no one would make any more. And God would keep track of the ledger. And if I owed you, it's in the celestial ledger. And then when you owe me, it's the same. Nobody can cheat anybody. Everybody can trade with everybody.

And the more value I create for society, the more of it I get.

Yeah, yeah. And it's all. It's just fair. Fair and a fair and equitable medium or system for trading. But the real world is we use currencies and we use properties instead of having true money. So if you use the dollar and we trade it, it loses 7% of its value a year, except for the last two years when it loses 20% of its value a year. But that's the best anybody's going to get. Because if you're trading in pesos or you're trading in Nigerian currency right now, these currencies are losing 50% of their value a year. And so this is the same as. You're an athlete, Peter, and I bleed you a pint of blood every year and it takes you about four weeks to recover. And so you don't run the marathon in the four weeks after I bleed you. That's like 5% inflation. But what happens when I bleed you a pint of blood every month? Right now you're just getting blood running marathons.

Yeah.

I'm reminded that George Washington died because his well meaning physicians bled him to death. And they thought they were helping. I mean, the medical establishment literally thought that they were going to help bleed off the ill humors, but they bled him to death. And this is not complicated. If you look at a hyperinflating economy, be it Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe or look at what's going on right now in Lebanon or Turkey or Argentina, when the currency collapses, the businesses collapse. This is the same thing as when you're in a car accident and you open an artery and you're literally bleeding out on the pavement. Well, eventually when you bleed out, your brain stops, your heart, you get a heart attack, your lungs don't work, system collapses. System collapse. So what's the fundamentals of triage? Which is first, stop the bleeding. I see you there. It doesn't matter. Your arm is broken. Right. What matters is first are you breathing and make sure there's oxygen. And then second, stop the bleeding and then we can work on the rest of you. So I think that inflation, monetary expansion is bleeding to death. We just saw a country collapse. Sri Lanka just collapsed about a month ago, literally. And the currency stops. And when the currency stops, you can't buy energy. And they have an edict where they say private citizens can't buy gasoline anymore. Okay, so what happens when your currency loses value? You don't have liquid energy, you can't buy food. Right. You're gonna starve to death, freeze to death if you don't get beat to death by your neighbor. Okay, so if you ask me, what is my mission? My mission is fix the money. But what does that mean? It means fix the energy balance in the civilization. There's a bunch of inefficiencies. One inefficiency is 8 billion people can't trade with each other. They can't. If you wanted to trade between a company in South America and a company in Africa, you would have to get access to your local currency. Then the dollar then go through the Federal Reserve or a central bank in New York City, then go through the central bank in Africa, then another local bank, and there's seven people that can steal the money along the way. And there's 3 billion people, can't even get a bank account, and you can't write a computer program. Right, I get it.

And the only thing that's changed this over, you know, and it's extraordinary, the life that we're living today, even in the developing world, compared to 100 years ago or 500 years ago. Definitely 1000 years ago. You know, it used to be just the king and the queen on the hilltop and everybody else in abject squalor. And even the king and the queen had a life far less than people living on the street in Venice here have. But it's always been technology that's changing the game. And so when I talk about this, and I want to break it down a little bit, I talk about what I call the six Ds of exponentials, that when you digitize something in the beginning, it begins a process of very deceptive growth. It's very slow, until 30 doublings later, you're a billion times better. And it's disrupting an entire ecosystem. And along the way, it's dematerializing, demonetizing, and democratizing. And so Bitcoin is very much all of those things in the deceptive period of time. Bitcoin isn't the first cryptocurrency to be proposed as a digital store of cash. Right. But it is the one that survived.

Yeah, they tried it with e gold digicash. They tried it for 20 years before, and all of those failed for one reason or the other. Bitcoin is the first spark that catch hold and became a fire in cyberspace. And it's because it drew liberally from all the previous experiments and it combined the cryptography and the general tech ideas with proof of work, which meant that you had an open, permissionless system that could work everywhere in the world without a counterparty or a trusted intermediary, and no one could game the system. And so it is the first digital commodity that kind of caught fire that.

Sparked, I remember hearing about it actually, at Singularity University back in 2010, 1112, from some of the fringe. It was just in the earliest days, I think there were life ending situations that it did avoid along the way. Right. I mean, is it stable now? Fully stable. Is the risk gone?

I think that it's pretty stable at this point. I think that the great risk came in the first few years. It's just like again, coming back to the metaphor of A fire. If you start a fire, you can put the fire out in the first few minutes, but at some point when the fire is taken over the entire warehouse or it's broken out into the entire forest, you can't put the fire out. So I think at this point it's beyond that event horizon. But Certainly back in 2012, 2011, 2013, there are a lot of questions like would it be deemed property by the irs? You know, would it be banned or outlawed? You know, online gambling got banned and they just shut it down dead on arrival. So there are a lot of things that do get squelched. This had to get to a sufficiently decentralized, diffuse point where no one regulator, no one nation state would think they could stop it. And I think we're clearly there now, you can see that now with the utterances coming out of the White House, the Secretary of the treasury and the head of the SEC and the head of the CFTC, but you couldn't have been sure about that in 2012.

And so the institutions, companies like yourself at microstrategies, Elon started putting on the balance sheet. I think you reached out to Elon, had that conversation originally, didn't you?

Yeah, I did.

And how hard was it to convince him to put it on the balance sheet?

For Tesla, it didn't take that long. It wasn't terribly difficult.

He's a smart engineer. Most people don't realize the engineering systems around SpaceX are. He's the CEO, he's also the chief engineer there, which is always nice to see. It's a process of, of dematerialization and disruption that's coming. What is it dematerializing and what is it disrupting?

Einstein tells us matter is energy and energy is matter. And if you look at the advances of the human civilization, many people don't think in terms of energy. But if you thought about it, you'd realize that steel is highly concentrated metallic energy. And the reason you can build a hundred story skyscraper is because you put so much energy into a material that it could withstand the force of gravity up to 100 stories. And so because you have steel, you can build a bridge, you can build a skyscraper, it'll last a hundred years. So that concentrated energy allowed your aspirations to become expansive in time and space. That's why we have the Bronze Age giving way to the Steel Age. Right. Oil is concentrated liquid energy. Right. And John D. Rockefeller kind of gave us standardized liquid energy. Standard Oil was a pretty big deal. And if you consider trying to cross the Atlantic with wind Energy instead of with oil, you could see that it really did catapult the civilization forward. Bitcoin represents digital energy. And in that way, if you think hard about it, you realize it represents digital matter too. It's the first time. It's the singularity whereby we open this portal and energy can flow into the digital realm. When Satoshi invented a way to transfer value from me to you without a trusted intermediary, I can send you a million dollars, no bank involved. Okay. The critical thing was solving what they call the double spend problem. But the double spend problem means I send you the million. I don't have it. You have it. Okay. That's a very low brow colloquialism. Right. In engineering at mit, we would refer to that as respecting the laws of conservation of energy.

Sure.

It's like I move 100 kg from me to you. Right. It can't be in both places at the same time. I converted matter into energy, energy into matter, Right. I can have one or the other. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms. It can vibrate. Right. Nikola Tesla said, you understand the universe think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration. So this is a big eye opener, because what you see is that everything in the digital realm, before bitcoin was non conservative, it was digital information. I send you Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as an MP3 file. You've got it, I've still got it. And it can be redistributed 18 billion times. So you don't own it, you just have a copy. So all of those businesses, Facebook, Google, Apple, they're all based upon digital information revolution, first on the web and then on a mobile phone. And Bitcoin's big innovation was we don't just move digital information anymore, we move digital energy. It's a conservative property. And if I can move a million dollars of energy from me to you, I can move a billion dollars of energy from me to you. But if I can move it from me to you, if I can move it over 10,000 miles, I can move it over 10,000 days. I can move a billion dollars from here into the future, 30 years. And so that's a second breakthrough. And then the third breakthrough is if I can move energy through time and space, I can materialize manifest energy in cyberspace. Right. The big breakthrough is the creation of a billion dollars of something in cyberspace. JP Morgan had a phrase, he said, gold is money. Everything else is credit. And what that means is you have a bar of gold that is money, that is Valuable. Everything else, a piece of paper which just is a derivative of or is a security that represents someone else's gold. So you want the money, you don't want the credit. Now, in the world we live in right now, before Bitcoin, you can have a million dollars in your bank account, but it's credit. The bank says you have it, and the bank can take it away from you. And you can only move it pursuant to their permission to move it. And right now, the bank doesn't give you an API to move money. There is no. You could have a billion dollars and ten thousand programmers. You can't create a program that'll pay nineteen twenty two dollar transactions between here and Africa on a Saturday afternoon. You just can't do it. And guess what? For 30 years, you can't do it. And so all progress has come to a grinding halt in the financial world in the absence of money in cyberspace. Because credit in cyberspace is a, is a monopoly which is caught up in a bureaucracy. So if we come back to Bitcoin, what is it really? It represents the true digital transformation of money, of property, of energy, of matter, right? This is four fundamental things the civilization is made of. For example, can you figure out how to create a wall in the real world? Right. I use steel, I use bricks. I have a brick wall. Peter, run as hard as you can into my brick wall. Okay, well, so you run as hard as you can and you smash your face and you end up in the hospital. You ran into a brick wall. You can do that as an engineer in the real world because you have matter. And if you have energy, you can convert to matter, convert into a brick wall. You can do the opposite, right? I, I can aim a gun at the brick wall, blow it up, or I can burn it and vaporize it, right? So we have that in the real world, and that's the basis of the civilization. Now, how do I create a wall in cyberspace? See, here's the idea. If I have money, if I have Bitcoin in cyberspace, I can actually create a program where you want to come to my website, you have to post a million satoshis, and then if you, I don't know, start swearing at me. I debit you a thousand satoshis for every swear word, okay? Or if you start trying to fish me or steal from me, right? Or if you just hang out on my website, I start charging you microtransactions like I charge you a thousand satoshis a second, okay? I can't do that. With a credit card. Because a credit card is credit. I can do it. Can you think of any way to lose a billion dollars in 30 seconds in cyberspace?

Besides losing my keys?

That's one way. If you've got bitcoin, you could do it that way. There's a famous example of the chairman of, I think the HCA corporation, the wealthiest man in China. He's on vacation in the Mediterranean a couple of years ago. He's worth like $30 billion. Richest guy, maybe 40 billion. He's walking around some 2,000 year old Roman ruin. He stands up for a selfie on the wall. He takes a step backwards, he plunges to his death.

By the way, the number of people who die from selfies is a ridiculous number. It's Darwinism.

Yeah, it's sad. It's the tragedy of our time. But I tell this story because in a world of credit, this is a guy that you couldn't have undone. He could have hired an army of lawyers to bend reality to every which way with 16 different appeals. But when you're subject to the laws of nature and conservation of energy, there is no appeal for a mistake. And his life was snatched away from him in a couple of seconds or, or less because he made a mistake. Because those are the consequences of that. There are no consequences in cyberspace without digital energy. The reason that Facebook is broken and Google is broken and Twitter is broken and we have armies of bots, right? You know, Twitter has 500,000 to a million fake accounts created a day. Wow. 300 million a year. Okay. There are no consequences because it's free and so there's no truth. So if what I want to do is I want to create matter and energy in cyberspace, I need a system which respects conservation of energy. And that means I need you to post a million dollars and you need to actually lose it in a split second if you make a mistake. That guy lost $40 billion in one second. That's how fast it went. One second, $40 billion because he was living in the real world. And if you smash up your airplane, same thing. In the real world, there are consequences. In cyberspace, in a world of credit, there are no consequences. And if you consider. Let's take Visa. When I send you money via Visa, you want a $20 deposit, I send it to you, there's a two and a half percent fee and it takes 60 days to settle. Which means that the velocity of the money, you know, the frequency with which I can oscillate the money is six times a Year. And. And the cost, the friction on the motion of the money is such that after it moves 30 times, it's gone.

Yeah.

Okay, so what if I told you I wanted to oscillate the money at 10 kilohertz and I wanted it to be without friction? Right? And that's what music is. So what bitcoin represents, it represents the ability to move energy at high frequency. Like, how about a thousand times a second? How about move a billion dollars in a second? How about, you know, you're saying to me, why would I ever want to charge somebody a billion dollars a second? What? The answer is, if someone attacks me 30 million times in one second and I charge them $30 an attack, it's going to cost them a billion dollars to do that. Today. A denial of service attack is effectively for the price of the electricity, and there are no consequences. And that's why we have cyber insecurity and we have so much toxicity. And you can't even trust what people post online because they're probably a bot and they're not even a real person. And, you know, Peter, like, every 15 minutes, there's a Michael Saylor scam account spun up on YouTube with 20,000 fake listeners. And I spend a million dollars a year taking them down, and they just put them up faster than I take them down. And there's just no way to stop it, because there are no consequences in that cyber arena because there is no digital energy to create consequences.

Mike, let's turn back to engineering the world, your purpose and your passion. One of the things that is definitively different since you and I were in college together is the speed at which we're dematerializing and demonetizing products and services. Right? And one of the questions is the cost of living is dropping in so many different ways an extraordinary rate. Right? We're seeing energy, you know, effectively 8,000 times more energy from the sun hitting the surface. We're heading towards solar at a quick rate. Fusion is going to probably come online this decade. Fingers crossed, right? We're going to reinvent how we produce food. Information is effectively free. Comms and compute is demonetizing at a rapid rate. Have you ever read a book called Zero Marginal Society by Jeremy Rifkin?

I haven't read it, but I can imagine what it's referring to. Yeah.

The basis is, listen, we have AI and nanotech coming, and it's going to transform the cost of living to demonetize everything. I'm curious what your thoughts are about that project for me, if you would 20, 30 years in the future. What do you see coming down the pike?

I think the most promising things to your point clearly are utilitarian entitlements that you can create with zero marginal cost or zero variable cost. So, you know, if we think about things like education, like@my saylor.org site, I think we sign up 80 or 90,000 new students a quarter. And so now we're teaching a lot more than MIT did. And we do it for 1/1 of the price that it would cost them. But Instead of teaching one and a half million students, it could be 15 million students or 150 million students or 1.5 billion students. It scales at literally the marginal cost of some electron. You could create a PhD for $1,000 or $2,000, all in for the price of an iPad. And some going to be similar for.

Health with AI diagnosticians and robotic surgeons. And the stuff that we spend a lot of money on is demonetizing. And when it demonetizes, it does democratize. I think the change in the fiscal economic system that enables people.

This is.

For me the underpinning of creating a world of abundance where we meet the needs of every man, woman and child on the planet. If they've got access to the tech and they have access to the financial energy to utilize the tech, what could stop this?

What could slow down the driver is technology and engineering. Those are the good guys. And the danger, the nemesis is politics. So ultimately you paint a picture of, yeah, this is great, energy is getting cheaper, but it isn't getting cheaper in Europe right now. In Germany, politics shut down the nuclear industry and the price of energy shot up by a factor of 20. Yeah, right. And so politics shuts down the use of fertilizers. Politics shuts down the use of nuclear. Politics is, you know, shutting down, you know, I've got a natural gas well, but nobody wants to actually create a pipeline. Politics shuts down free trade, right? Prices were all plunging and then we reversed it by putting tariffs on free trade and stopping the shipping. So I think ultimately the long term ARC is a good one. And let me take, I'll give you an example of politics and education. We could give a free college education, a free college degree to everybody on earth. The great majority of the people in the education establishment don't want to do that. They actually see that as anathema because their view of education is the goal of education is to get the budget for education as high as possible and create the most number of jobs for educators. So If I could actually have one, you know, one teacher of algebra that taught a billion people, that would be viewed as anathema to politicians. They don't want one algebra teacher teaching a billion people. They want a million algebra teachers teaching fewer people. So ultimately, I think you can't, you can't pursue entrepreneurial aims without considering the politics. Politics have impacted Uber, they impact fintech, they impact crypto.

The question is, do you have a disruptive enough? So like, when Google came around, they dematerialized, demonetized and destroyed libraries, right? I mean, it's like, when's the last time you went to a library? But they didn't ask. And in fact, the web sort of has transformed the entire Hollywood media system. And I think if Hollywood media had understood what was going to be happening, they would have tried to stop it, but they didn't.

Okay, well, I agree in general, I'm the optimist, but let me give you a pessimistic example of failures. There is no online poker right now, even though there could be. There used to be a site called Tradesports where you could go and you could bet on the statistical outcomes of all manner of things like elections and who was going to win the super bowl and, and weather and that got shut down in the same sweep that shut down online gambling. They just defunded that. If you look at Zillow, Zillow is like a great application in the US Try surfing Zillow in the Caribbean or in Europe and what you'll find is 20 years afterwards, it still doesn't have any data and it doesn't work anywhere in the world outside the US and that's, that's because of the market structure supported by the political system. So you would think that after 20 years or 10 years of inventing something, it would get embraced by the world, but it hasn't and it won't. And so there are plenty of examples of breakthrough technology that would make the world a better. Let's take nuclear. In the US they've never built a nuclear power plant since the formation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And so in 50 years, we shut down the nuclear power industry, even though.

It'S one of the safest forms of.

Power, even though it's the cleanest, safest form of energy. And you know what I think? I think, you know, I didn't understand it when I was younger, but now I see how politics works. I think it was the oil and gas industry that paid the environmentalist to protest against the nuclear industry, to spoke to stoke Fear in the hearts of people so that they could protect oil and gas and coal. And now the irony is you've got the solar and the wind industry stoking fear of oil and gas industry and they're still shutting down the nuclear industry. So I think that there's a lot of politics and it's jockeying of competitors and one competitor wants to weaponize the political system to shut down another competitor. And how is it possible? In France they embrace nuclear and in Germany they reject nuclear. And the human race is supposed to be full of intellectuals and objective engineers engineering a better world.

So let's talk about can we engineer a greenfield better world in cyberspace or on Mars or in o' Neill colonies? I mean if we're going to be going someplace new, the worst thing I want to imagine is that we bring old style politics and divisions with us into new arenas. Have you thought about what you would do for an economic system if we were a new nation state? If you would were being created off world or I think about the future of Web3 being I'm going to have a citizenship and operate in a virtual world.

I think when you're engineering these things, you have to consider first the engineering envelope. Are you on the S curve or are you after the S curve or are you before the S curve? And if you're too early, you might be a decade early, but you might be 100 years early like Google Glass 10 years ago. It's nowhere closer to reality today than it was 10 years ago.

Sure.

So firstly you figure out are you in the zone where some amount of engineering can make a difference? We weren't in that zone for aerospace engineering from the mid-80s all the way till 2010 or 2015. And then at some point we moved into a zone where you can start to engineer new and interesting space and air vehicles. And we're kind of moving back in the zone.

You and I, when we were in aerospace and you know, I was a few years ahead, I was just taking a break from medical school. I came back to do an aerospace engineering undergraduate degree and I needed to take unified engineering and multivariable calculus. And then I just, I hung out with you and the fellow core 16ers to try and do our problem sets together because doing them by yourself was definite suicide. But this was like 17 years post Apollo 17, which had landed in 1972 and the shuttle Challenger exploded just happened. And it was like, you know, it was like anybody who was passionate about space, it was like it was dead in the water and it had been for, you know, after that for another 20 years. It's just now, you know, Elon is revitalizing it with Starship and Falcon.

That's like we can get to the moon 50 years ago, but we didn't go back because it wasn't commercially viable. When you're thinking about these things, the question is, is your intent to inspire or to commercialize? And if your intent is to inspire, you go to Everest, you go to the South Pole. Shackleton was inspirational, you know, Apollo was inspirational, but not commercial. People aren't living on the South Pole, they're not living on the moon. We're not making money there. So I think you got to consider, are you trying to commercialize something? And that's a different state space of things you can do. And I think the second question is you got to consider the politics and the cultural drivers and we're not really on the Earth today. We're not going to create a new nation anytime soon. And as long as nation states persist, you'll have strong, say, fiat currencies. And you have to adjust your commercial activity to sit within that envelope in Zillow. They're not going to succeed in Europe if they can't get access to the listings. No matter how good their tech is, no matter how they could spend billions and billions and billions of dollars, it's not going to make a difference. And in the US they could do certain things, but they can't do other things.

Is there any part of you that's excited about space still about where it's going? Has anything recatalyzed?

My issue with that, Peter, is fundamentally it's a propulsion and materials issue, right? They're just fundamental issues there. And if you look at propulsion technology and specific energy of fuels and efficiency of them, there isn't an order of magnitude improvement in jet engines in the last 40 years. The Gulfstream 6 or the Global Express is 20% more efficient than 30 years ago. So we're not getting order of magnitude increases. So if you really want to change the world, you have to get 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 orders of magnitude increase. So I'll be. I think fundamentally it comes down to energy, right? When you can actually put a sugar cube in a coffee cup and wrap a fusion reactor around it and you can generate enough energy to fly electro car for 20 years straight off of the sugar cube, then I'm enthusiastic. And if you want to go to Mars, you got to have water and then you got to have massive amount of energy to heat this stuff up. You know, just like even in Ron Moore's you know, remake, you know, for all mankind, he's like, we're going to the moon. We found water on the moon and we, you know, we can use the water to stage. Okay, well, if we had a. If, you know, in Ron Moore's making of it, they've got like pocket nuclear reactors on the moon in the 1980s combined with water.

By the way, I've been, I really have enjoyed that series. It's. They've done a beautiful job.

Yeah. So my issue is I would be enthusiastic if we commercialized fission and fusion and energy sources and if we work through some of the materials issues and then I think maybe there's something there. But right now it's pretty clear that if you gave me $10 billion or $100 billion and I had a choice between can I provide education for free to 8 billion people? Can you make 8 billion people live a happier life for five additional years? Can you fix the money in the world and make trade 100 times as efficient? Those are all potentially doable things. Can I actually put a million people on the moon or 10 million people in a self sustaining colony on Mars? I don't think you're going to do it for $100 billion. So I think that it falls into the category of inspirational and experience experimental. We're looking for something. And look, if the Germans can't figure out how to generate electricity in Germany because they reject technology, you know, like, why don't we fix our own planet? And right now on our own planet we're rejecting technology right and left and there are massive political struggles. So I guess the appeal of the off planet people, the Heinlein people, is this planet's too crowded, it's beat. We just got to get out of here and where there's more living. Benstrom Right. We need living space away from the politicians. And that was always the libertarian appeal. Like, go west, young man, go west.

I think the libertarian appeal wasn't about more. There's plenty of space on this planet. It was, I want to go someplace that doesn't have a set of laws already in place where I can create my own set.

That's what I mean. There's no, there's no space on the planet where there's not a political.

I mean, unless you have an army and you can, you can take over a country and conquer it. I mean, they're seasteading.

You still don't have political, you still don't have peace.

Yeah, I agree with that. And so part of the question is, how will humanity seed itself going forward?

Before we move to outer space, we will move to cyberspace.

Yes, I agree with you.

So the next big move is, how about if we give property rights and we make rich 8 billion people in the real world by moving their wealth into cyberspace where it will be protected from debasement and destruction.

I love that.

I love that when you put stuff in orbit, when you're putting in outer space, I put a million pounds in orbit and I can move it around, it'll go in orbit forever. That's the breakthrough. But when I put a billion dollars in cyberspace, I'm putting a billion dollars in orbit. It'll last forever. Right now, the half life of your money is seven years or something. So the next big move is fix the energy, the political, economic, energy system in our civilization. Because by my calculation, we're wasting somewhere in the order of 10, $20 trillion a year because our economics are broken. And so what could you do if I gave you 10 trillion a year in a dividend to work on science? So there's no point in losing 10 trillion a year every year for the next 30 years while we try to do something scientific because we're just bleeding out. It's back to the issue of stop the bleeding before. I'm not getting a PhD while I'm bleeding to death on the sidewalk.

Hey everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode. I'll tell you about something I've been doing for years. Every quarter or so, having a phlebotomist come to my home to draw bloods, to understand what's going on inside my body. And it was a challenge to get all the right blood draws and all the right tests done. So I ended up co founding a company that sends a phlebotomist to my home to measure 40 different biomarkers every quarter, put them up on a dashboard so I can see what's in range, what's out of range, and then get the right supplements, medicines, peptides, hormones, optimize my health. It's something that I want for all my friends and family and I'd love it for you. If you're Interested, go to mylifeforest.com Peter to learn more. Let's get back to the episode. I'm going to change the subject to one that I'm passionate about and I'm working on and is connected in a way to bitcoin, which is the area of longevity. And my question for you, Michael, is how long do you Want to live.

I want to live as long as I can be constructive and enjoy life.

Okay, so if you have the ability to have the cognition, the aesthetics, the mobility for the next 60 or 100 years, you're good with that?

I'd be okay with that.

Okay. That's important. There's a connection for me in between Bitcoin and longevity. There's a lot of work going on. Most of my company's investments right now are in this area. The idea that we can slow, stop, and even reverse aging. Working on a $100 million age reversal X prize right now to turn back your biological age 20 years. I'm just curious your thoughts about this conversation. And do you have this conversation with anybody? Is that of interest to you?

I mean, they're similar because Bitcoin's about conservation of economic energy, and you're talking about conservation of life energy, life force. They're both pursuing immortal life. One is the immortal life of your economic energy. The other is the immortal life of your. Of your consciousness. And the enemy is dissipation of energy. Right. You know, dissipation, bleeding off of energy.

And bleeding off of life's energy, which is sickness. Right. Today we live in a sick care system that basically, you know, therapeutics are about maintaining your sickness, not curing it to a large degree.

John D. Rockefeller lived to the age 99 and three quarters. 99, almost 100. And he's famously known for having set up, you know, the entire modern American medical system, maybe the medical system of the world, and endowing doctors and the like. But he famously rejected all medical care. He was homeopathic. And his view was a lot of the doctors were clacks and many of the drugs and the surgeries were iatrogenic. His thoughts are echoed by Upton Sinclair, who wrote the Fasting Cure more than 100 years ago, where he basically observed that most diagnosis, most drugs, most surgeries were counterproductive. And the best thing you could do when you're sick is just stop eating for a while, while. And he wrote an entire book about it in 1910. And when I think about health and I observe what we've learned over the past few years or however long it is, it's healthy living, right? Think about. I'm inspired by Paleolithic, the entire paleo theory. How did human beings live for 3 million years as hunter gatherers and ask the question, a hundred thousand years ago, did your great ex grandfather or grandmother do the thing you're about to do? And if the answer is like, drink large Copious amounts of alcohol, pure sugar, take lots of pharmaceutical drugs, have your stomach stapled. Right. And have other random surgeries, probably not. Or sit on a chair and watch tv. But if you say to yourself, get up, move around, get exercise, eat lean proteins, eat a mixture of organic foods, drink water, probably they did that. And so I tend to be skeptical of a lot of medical intervention. I think that the modern establishment invents a lot of. A lot of diseases so they can treat them like they want to tell you that your 6 year old kid has attention deficit disorder. So they can give them Adderall. But we didn't have Adderall growing up and we didn't take it and we got on just fine. And maybe, maybe, you know, getting bored of things that are boring is a positive trait and not a negative trait.

I think one of the other things that science tells us to do is to de stress and have fun. What are you doing for fun these days?

I try to get out a lot. I like gardening, I get out in the gardens. I do a lot of running, walking through nature. You know, I like to boat. I get out on the water, I play chess. I like that. That's a good pursuit. You're able to lose yourself in a very intricate. So calculations.

Yeah.

A lot of reading. Well, you know, there's a. There's a world of infinite learning now. You can pretty much learn anything, any amount about anything at your fingertips if you just start to surf through podcast or Google or yahoo or, or YouTube or the like. And so I have 11.

My 11 year old boys are learning everything they could possibly need to learn on YouTube these days. It's extraordinary. Chad Hurley had no idea what he was creating. Or maybe he did, but I don't think he saw the potential of what's become. If you were Emperor King and I'm not, or head of Bitcoin Inc. Or not say go back Emperor King, what changes would you make in the world right now, Mike? What would be the most important changes that you would make in re engineering our civilization? Top down? What are your top like five.

I think less government would be helpful. Okay.

Libertarian tendencies. I love that.

I won't go into detail because it's all very highly controversial. But I just think in general we have too many rules and too many well intentioned politicians that are attempting to help, but they unintentionally introduce iatrogenic intervention.

So do we go with the. In order to add a law, you have to remove a law and do we go with a direct democracy?

Just Just less, just less, less well intentioned politicians helping us how to live beyond that, I think the world would benefit if everyone had just free infinite education online. There's no reason why you can't learn most things for free. And so making education free is a good thing. I also think that there's no reason why 8 billion people shouldn't be able to get a wallet that holds any mixture of currencies and assets and properties in their wallet and trade with each other. I would say I believe in trade. I think that if you want to encourage abundance, then allow people to freely trade with each other at high velocity.

Without anybody siphoning off part of the.

Trade with the minimum of friction. There are a lot of places where they just. It's impossible to trade. If you manufacture something in a certain Central African Republic and you're dependent upon the cfa, which is the currency, the currency terminates in Europe. You can't trade it. Go to your computer terminal. There's not even a price for it. There's not even an exchange rate for it. There are people that live either unbanked or they live in a currency which is not a hard currency. If that person could be your tutor or your account, how do they get paid? How do they do business? So I think an open monetary system and open, I think the Internet has gone a long way toward giving us an open communication system. I think just spreading more openness would be a benefit. I think that having common language, common mores, common currencies, common ability to communicate, all of those things, have moved the human race forward. And the opposite of all those things, compartmentalization and the like, drags us backwards.

Do you have a mindset that you think has been like the most important mindset for you that's allowed you to succeed? What would you describe that mindset as?

Let me boil it down to 10 observations. I was asked by somebody for advice for his children entering adulthood and he said, can you just write down your advice for them?

Sure.

I thought about it and I boiled it down to 10 phrases. One, focus your energy. You have limited energy in your life. You think you can accomplish more than you can accomplish. You really can't do a hundred things you might be able to do. You can't do 10 things. You'll be lucky to do one thing but focus your energy. The second is guard your time. People are going to actually chew into it. And if you're trying to accomplish something and if you're not thoughtful about your time, it'll be dissipated.

Yes.

The third is train Your mind, you know, train your mind to do whatever it is you've decided, whether it's music or math or engineering or something. The fourth is train your body. You should stay healthy, take care of yourself. If your body breaks down, you know your mind will follow. Fifth, think for yourself. The world's full of people that are telling you what to think and they spend their entire life planting narratives and ideas in your head, most of which are dysfunctional, that are self serving. To sell. We didn't have breakfast. People invented breakfast to sell you cereal. When you or I were growing up, there was no add. They invented ADD to sell Adderall. Like stuff happens. So think for yourself and decide whether or not you believe what people are telling you. I think the 6th is curate your friends. You don't need many, you just need a few. Decide who you want to be in your social sphere. The seventh is curate your environment. Where do you want to be? Put yourself in a safe place, a calm place, a productive place. Whether it's controlling what you have in your room or what you have in your house, or physically where you live, or what country you live in, or the like. But curate it. 8. Keep your promises. If you make a promise, keep it. If you lose, if people lose faith in you, they won't help you. They won't trust you ever again. It's just bad karma. 9. Stay cheerful and constructive. There's a lot of reasons to get negative, but it won't help. And so whatever you're pursuing, no matter how many cynics and critics come at you, you have to continually, cheerfully, constructively pursue it and not focus upon the negatives because it just distracts and dissipates energy. And then 10th, upgrade the world, right? Be an engineer. Upgrade. Leave the world a better place. Whether it's your garden, your house, your product, your book, something right, and you're awake. Hopefully you upgrade the world such that someone can trace some improvement to the fact that you existed on this planet. And that's my mindset.

That's awesome. I love that. That's a whole set of beautiful. Make the world a better place. I want to close with a question, Michael, which is I phrase it as if I would be able to launch any X Prize you wanted. It was fully funded, the world is ready to go after and pursue it. What's an X Prize that you would love to see launched? Something that would solve a grand challenge, something that should be done, hasn't been done yet. Any thoughts?

I think the killer product that 8 billion people want is A simple mobile app that holds US Dollars and Bitcoin. And if you have a currency, you have a property. It's a bank in your pocket that's completely open, permissionless, and you can trade instantly in one second, either in a currency or in a property with anybody on the planet. And no one can take your money away from you. And you don't have to ask permission. It would completely dematerialize the entire financial establishment, and it would empower everybody on Earth to take possession of their life force.

Are you going to build that?

I'm trying my best to help it along. I'm working on parts of it, yeah.

Yes, you are. I love the tweet that's pinned at the top of your Twitter feed. I just read it here. It says bitcoin is a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goddess of wisdom, feeding on the fire of truth, exponentially growing ever smarter, faster and stronger behind a wall of encrypted energy.

Yeah. It's a lovely thought, isn't.

Is? A vibrant and colorful thought, for sure.

It refers to the hundreds of millions of people everywhere in the world that are doing something in the manner of a swarm in order to pursue integrity and truth and beauty in cyberspace. And you ever walk into a bitcoin mining center, you hear this whine. It sounds like a whine of hornets. But bitcoin itself ultimately is about creating a truthful ledger. And I've talked about it. It is energy in cyberspace. It's encrypted energy. What you're doing is you're taking electricity, you're running it through a SHA 256 modulation, and you're spitting out a block of bitcoin, which is encrypted. And then you're putting successive layers of encryption on the blocks over time, which represent reified energy or reified information. And so it is a. I describe it as like a fire in cyberspace. You know, you can think of it as a fire, a chain reaction in cyberspace. But you could also think of a swarm creature as very organic.

Yes.

Because it's just an organically evolving thing. And if you roll the clock back 13 years, it was just a few cypherpunks working on it, and then it picked up power and now exponential, baby. There's people in every country and every language working on something, and they're doing it because it's the right thing to do. And they feel like this is their best hope at creating something truthful that is beyond corruption. It's an incorruptible beautiful thing. And let's take Wikipedia. People are corrupting Wikipedia right now, right? They were just trying to redefine the definition of recession.

Yes, I saw that.

If you get famous enough and controversial enough, they'll go to your Wikipedia and they'll just write stuff about you, relentlessly attack you. And what we see is that history is written by the victors. And you start to wonder what really happened a thousand years ago because the Romans tell you the Carthaginians kind of worshiped idols and burned their babies or something. But maybe the Carthaginians would have said something different if they hadn't had their city raised.

Fact, you know, you know, my, my mission, my purpose is to inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling and abundant future for humanity. And I love that that one of the tweets you put out said everywhere in the world, Bitcoin represents freedom, money and hope. And I think people need hope more than anything else on the planet.

Yep, they need hope. We got to give them hope. And the way you give them hope is you either give them, you give them empowerment through education or you give them empowerment through technical utility or both, or you give them power through economic energy. But you know, it's. The most depressing thing would be, not that I don't have any money. The most depressing thing would be I give you $100,000. Peter, you live in Africa and then the money is worthless in 12 months because a politician debases it to zero.

With hyperspace inflation or even worse, not giving it. I work my butt off to earn it and I have an entire year worth of savings that is no longer able to feed my family.

You know what I talked about with the skyscraper? I said because a steel is highly concentrated metallic energy, you could build a hundred floor building or you could build a bridge that spans 1,000 meters. That's because you can walk out and trust the steel. You can hope for something expansive. And the same is true with money. If the money won't last a hundred years, you can't have a hundred year dream. If I told you everything you own will dissipate on January 1st of next year, your life is hopeless. And so therefore you just spend and squander everything in the next few months because it's going to be gone on January 1st of next year. So the time horizon that the scope of the aspirations in space and time of humanity is controlled by the technologies we have at our disposal. And money is just a technology. Like antibiotics is a technology.

Yeah, 100%. And it used to be the stability of your government was what allowed you to have multi decadal dreams. And so the question of a stability, of a financial system independent of a government, because we're living in a world in which it doesn't matter where you were born. I employ people I've never met in different parts of the planet. I love that the scope of our dreams is a function of the stability of our systems that we utilize.

Yeah. And it is beautiful in that way. If you have a world where the Internet reaches anybody on Earth and where you have a monetary network like Bitcoin that reaches enlightening, that reaches everywhere on Earth, and if you have a technology like Zoom or like that reaches everywhere on Earth, then you can trade, you can educate, you can inspire, you can trade with, you can work for, you can employ anybody on Earth. And that allows people to reach their full potential. And then after they do it, they can have hope that they'll be able to retain their life force and their life savings. And that allows them to dream for something better for their family, their friends. Right. Their children.

A hopeful, compelling and abundant future.

I guess it's a lot better than we ever had in the history of the world. So that's something positive to be said.

Michael, thank you for the mission you're on, for the work that you do. There is nobody who's got a, I think, a more clear and compelling voice in the world right now. And it's a pleasure to share with the world in my small way what you're doing.

Thanks for having me, Peter. It's always nice to talk with you.

See you, buddy.

Yeah, you too. Keep up the good work.

Thanks.