Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Michael Saylor – The Physics of Bitcoin (#110)

Episode Date: January 13, 2021

Michael J. Saylor is an American entrepreneur and business executive, who co-founded & leads MicroStrategy, a company that provides business intelligence, mobile software, and cloud-based services. Saylor, an MIT trained engineer, authored the 2012 book The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything. He is also the sole trustee of Saylor Academy ( www.saylor.org ), a provider of free online education. As of 2016, Saylor has been granted 31 patents and has 9 additional applications under review. We covered a ton of content in this interview including ‘the physics of money’, the purpose of wealth, and Michael’s philosophy of life. You won’t want to miss his philosophy of life. To get them, please join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php On MicroStrategy’s quarterly earnings conference call in July 2020, Saylor announced his intention for MicroStrategy to explore purchasing Bitcoin, gold, or other alternative assets instead of holding cash. The following month, MicroStrategy used $250 million from its cash stockpile to purchase 21,454 Bitcoin. MicroStrategy added $175 million of Bitcoin to its holdings in September 2020 and another $50 million in early December 2020. On December 11, 2020, MicroStrategy announced that it had sold $650 million in convertible senior notes, taking on debt to increase its Bitcoin holdings to over $1 billion worth. On December 21, 2020 MicroStrategy announced their total holdings include 70,470 bitcoins purchased for $1.125 billion at an average price of $15,964 per bitcoin. Saylor, who controls 70% of MicroStrategy’s shares, dismissed concerns by observers that the move is turning MicroStrategy into a Bitcoin investment firm or exchange-traded fund (ETF). In 1999, Saylor established The Saylor Foundation (later named Saylor Academy), of which he is the sole trustee. To support his goal of making free education available to all students, Saylor.org was launched in 2008 as the free education initiative of The Saylor Foundation. The site now offers roughly 100 college courses that are supported by free content from universities including MIT and Carnegie Mellon University, that students can access without having to pass through an admissions process 00:00:00 Introduction 00:04:00 The story of the book cover 00:07:35 What’s the next (6th?) technology wave? 00:10:55 The next megatrend: Virtualization 00:18:17 Why are there ridges on coins? 00:19:36 Where gold comes from, and can virtual currencies replace real ones? 00:22:22 Why gold as a currency standar? And what sets the price of oil? 00:36:20 Why is blockchain is so great now? 00:40:27 The Pandemic as a catalyst. 00:40:57 Risk management in science and all things.   Join My Mailing List (briankeating.com) to hear his answers to the Thrilling Three Questions What is in his ethical will? What would he put on your billion-year monument? What advice would he give to himself as a 20-year-old to have the courage to go ‘Into the Impossible’?   Watch my most popular videos: Jim Simons, the World’s Smartest Billionaire  Bill Perkins: DIE WITH ZERO:  Patr Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everybody. I just finished a really long and wide-ranging conversation with Michael Saylor, who's been in the news a lot because of his really prescient forays into the world of blockchain. And Bitcoin specifically, he's the chairman, founder, president of micro strategy, which is a technology company in its own right, but has been very, very deep as an exponent, proponent of blockchain, not only for personal gains, but really to improve the world, as you'll hear about. He really wants to use his wealth that he's gaining to educate everybody on Earth for free. That's really his mission. Sounds crazy, but I think he could do it.

And I like that he has an engineering approach to things. He thinks about things. He constantly references the second law of thermodynamics, so he's got to be good in this physicist's book. But we talked about a lot of things, including science fiction, Arthur C. Clark, what he'd put in his ethical will. I think you're going to love it. Please leave a comment in the section below. We're going to make our, you know, kind of investment pioneers playlist with Jim Simons, Bill Perkins, Patrick Bette d'evide. And now with Michael Saylor, he agreed to come back on a part two someday. So look forward to that. Put comments for him in the future. Please sit back. Enjoy this next episode.

of Into the Impossible with Michael Saylor. And it made me think that maybe they should be giving out Nobel prizes instead of in gold like this one here, but in Bitcoin, blockchain. Now, who knows? It could go down. Who knows what's going to happen? This is not investment advice.

I wish I could buy a Bitcoin. But for now, I'm taking his advice to at least investigate it and not view it with as much derision as I confess I did before. So enjoy this episode of the Into the Impossible podcast. like, comment, subscribe, do all those cool things that you're supposed to do, and it keeps the podcast going and add free. Otherwise, I'm going to be doing stuff for like Bitcoin and Ethereum and LightBird, no, light coin. Anyway, don't make me resort to that. Please help me out and leave your tiny contribution in the form of a review or a or a thumbs up. Thank you very much.

Enjoy. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So it is a pleasure to welcome to the Into the Impossible podcast, none other than Michael Saylor, who is joining us today to talk about a whole host of things, not only Bitcoin and the splash that he's made lately, but also his wonderful book that we will get into as well, which is really prescient for predicting many things, not the least of which is how mobile technology would impact the plan. And my question for him is how can we use new technologies like blockchain, like mobile connectivity, 5G, et cetera, to improve the world and improve perhaps the prosperity of the world. I think that is a major theme of Michael's work. So, Michael, how are you today? Awesome.

Thanks for having me, Brian. Yeah, it's a great pleasure to have you on The Into the Impossible podcast. Yeah, so I was really intrigued by, you know, many of the conversations I've seen you have, and oftentimes they relate to interests of mine, aviation. I'm a private pilot. I am interested in the, you know, Act being an astronaut, and I know you are MIT trained in engineering. We've had on a lot of professors and alum fellow beavers from MIT lately.

Max Tagmark, who's a current professor there. Noam Chomsky has been on the show. We've had on Peter Diamandes, who is a graduate of MIT, and David Kaiser, who's a professor there, we're a very close connection despite the distance. But the first thing I want to talk to you about today is your book, which is called the Mobile Wave. And I always say I disregard the advice to not judge books by their covers. I always judge books by their covers. How did you come up with the cover design and the name and the title of the book and the

subtitle? What was the impetus behind those choices that you made? The idea behind the book was there's a new wave of software engineering. We're moving from the mainframe era to the mini-computer error. That was the second wave. The third wave was the PC era. The fourth wave was the internet wave. The fifth wave was the mobile wave.

When software dematerializes, it jumps off of laptops, it jumps off. of desktops. It jumps onto mobile devices and it becomes like vapor and it envelops the entire world. And so, I mean, the cover of the book was based upon the idea that software was going to spread everywhere in the world and transform the civilization. I was kind of excited about it because I lived through the phase of software being trapped. on a desktop PC, and the Internet Wave was still delivered largely through PCs. But when we got to the iPhone 3, and it was clear that the iPhone was not a toy anymore, and that the iOS and Android were going to be new operating systems that were going to rise to parity with the web and maybe superiority to the web,

I think it changed the nature of software. Software changed from being something, something we went to do. We went to use the software tool on a desk, and then software became clothing. It became fashion accessory. It became in the air. It became stuff we smell. It became stuff we wear. It became things we sleep with. You sleep with your software. And at the point that we were wearing it and sleeping with it and living with it and crying and laughing with it, the nature changed and the type of software you would want to build change and what you could do with it changed. And that was just transformational to the companies that were doing it, to the computer industry, to the civilization. And I thought it merited a book.

And so I got kind of excited about writing that book. With the alums that I mentioned, I'll also mention Andy Viterbi, who is a graduate of MIT, his book over here in my office, which has a slightly more stark cover than your book does, zero colors whatsoever besides this orange type of color. And in it, he's recounting sort of his journey as an entrepreneur, as a refugee coming to America, and then founding, you know, discovering the Viterbi algorithm and really converting, you know, intellectual property into technology.

And of course, we use that today in CDMA. We use it in 5G. And my question is, you know, first of all, you know, in retrospect, is this mobile way, what would be the, I don't know, I lost track of how many waves we're at under your taxonomy system, but sixth wave, seventh wave. Five. It was the fifth starting from the mainframe, mini computer, PC, internet, and then mobile. So Peter Diamandez has said, he uses these famous five Ds, presumably because his name has so many D's in it. you know, but democratization, the materialism, then there's, but exponential, which is an E, but anyway, what do you see as the sixth wave? Is it, is it something completely different than these

other waves? Is it a, is it a rogue wave that we really can't anticipate right now? Well, first of all, as a disclaimer, Peter is a fraternity brother of mine. We were the same fraternity. He was four years ahead of me at MIT, and quite my role model. And we both had a love of of aerospace engineering and rocket science and astronautics and the like. Yes. And so I've gleefully followed Steve's Peter's career for the entire time period. The sixth wave is the virtual wave. I mean, the mobile wave was software, you know,

look, software on the desktop was bottled up to the white collar labor force an hour or two hours a day. And if you could sit down at a desk, you could work with your spreadsheet or your word processor or your accounting system on a computer. But it was a white collar constrained functionality.

When software leaped to a mobile device, it went from 500 million people using it two hours a day to five billion people, soon to be everybody. Five billion people that could be, could use it 16 hours a day and maybe 24 hours a day, arguably, right?

Because the software could wake you up in the middle of the night. And so you went to 724-365 software coverage for everybody on the planet, which meant that three-year-olds were using software and 75-year-olds were using software. Whereas the software of the Internet and the PC error was primarily well-to-do white-collar laborers and the affluent companies at their desks. And so the potential to have software that interrupted and impacted your recreation and your social life, you know, software to drive a car, software to book a restaurant or a hotel reservation, software to pay bills, software to take photos, right?

All of that was mobile wave software. You wouldn't have done anything with your friends while you're at your desk at three in the afternoon. So the mobile wave was software leaping off of the desktop and out of the office and into the world of the teenager on a Saturday afternoon. And that's what made for a Facebook or an Amazon mobile or Google or YouTube and laid the framework for entertainment and communications. But now we're moving on in the virtual wave. And the virtual wave probably has two primary, primary significant dynamics. One, you're seeing the virtualization of a whole class of products and services that previously were delivered by human beings. So like that you can zoom anywhere at the speed of light and bend time and space.

If I'm a salesperson, I can take 40 sales calls a week if I want in 40 different cities. And so the complete dematerialization and virtualization of sales and marketing and services and all of the cycles and energy expended to do that, that's one element. And by the way, that phrase, you can zoom anywhere at the speed of light and bend time and space. Put a period on it. it's a very important, powerful phrase because the second part of the phrase and bend time and space, well, it refers to the fact that I can zoom to 40 places and 40 different cities and have 40 meetings and be one person and I can be not in the office. So that's pretty

profound. But the other profound part of it is what you just did when we started our call, which is you punched the record button. And you and I, are having a meeting cross-country and that's about to be shared with thousands or hundreds of thousands of people anywhere anytime three years from now someone will be able to go back in time in time three years and be in the room with us now for the cost of electricity and so if you think about it that way and turn it on his head i'm a salesperson and uh i think well i'm going to convince you you should buy my product, Brian, and you ask me 100 questions. Well, how does it work with Google? And I give you the answer. And I think after the fact, man, I was pretty articulate

when I sold a Brian. I think I'll take that video meeting and I'll upload it to my website. And I'll let the next 9700 customers with the same requirement watch the video. And you can do transcripts. You can do highlighting. You can do conversion and languages in real time with AI. I do that. And I'm multi-purpose all the, I mean, not this particular conversation. I certainly will have an AI generated transcript from it. You're absolutely right. So it scales in a way that ordinary telecons never could.

You ever see The Watchman, the movie The Watchman with Dr. Manhattan? Okay. So Dr. Manhattan is like this guy who can make 100 versions of himself. Now, what if you could, you know, what if I could speak with you? And then I could deliver it in 100,000 places at the same time. And now you just blew my mind in 27 languages. Yeah. So it sounds Godlike, right?

It's Godlike power. You can bend time and space, but you're kind of like a hundred years ago, if you'd said, Mike, I'm going to take every sales meeting in every language in real time, but I'm going to do it 100,000 times faster than the ordinary mortal. or a million times faster, you would say, no, that's impossible. But the virtual wave means that, yeah, you can basically have godlike power, bedtime and space, and you can do things inconceivable in ways inconceivable. So that's the first part of it.

By the way, that's the virtualization of the P&L of every company. Like the way you sell your product, market your product, deliver your service, has been virtualized, and you can, when you virtualize it, you make it possible to be a million times more efficient. And there are profound implications. We could talk about those. I won't now, but there are profound implications to how you compete and create value in society. But there's another part to the virtual wave, which is we're watching the virtualization

of money and the virtualization of gold and store of value. $300 trillion worth of money in the world is stored in cash. gold, bonds, real estate, stocks. They're all 20th century instruments. Most of them are fiat instruments. They're tied to underlying cash flows. And this new thing we call Bitcoin has evolved. And Bitcoin is digital scarcity.

It's 21 million gold coins sitting in cyberspace. you can't make any more running on a decentralized set of nodes. No human being, no CEO, no company, no government can stop it from running. No one can screw with it. It's going to be 21 million for the next thousand years, quite likely. And that 21 million cyber coins, Bitcoin, can now capture the monetary energy off of gold, silver, bonds, stocks, real estate, indexes. And as we speak, you're seeing that monetary energy dematerialize and morph into what is in essence virtual gold. And that virtual monetary network is growing. This year, 300%. Every year for the last decade, 200%. It's building. It's building. It's building.

And it's virtualizing entire balance sheets of companies. And it's virtualizing. And it's virtualizing, treasuries of individuals. And there's no reason to think it'll stop for a decade because because a virtual gold coin or virtual gold bar on the Bitcoin network has no mass. It can move at the speed of light. It's a million times better than an actual gold bar. A million times smarter, a million times faster, a million times stronger, a million times harder than an actual goal bar, just like you can speak to a million people in a dozen languages, you're a million times more persuasive as the virtual teacher. And so what we've got is a next generation money and a next generation set of actors in the virtual wave that are virtualizing everything.

And that's going to dominate our society for the next. decade, that transformation. Now, I want to push back with respect and say that, do you know, so I'm holding up a golden medallion. This is a replica of the Nobel Prize that one of my Nobel Prize winning guests left on my couch over here. No, it's actually just a fake piece of chocolate that I have left over from Hanukkah, but I'll believe whatever you tell me. On the side of- I'm an agreeable guest. I know, I know. That's your reputation, extremely agreeable. On the side of these coins, and you'll find this on quarters and dimes, but you won't find it on nickels or pennies, there are these ridges. Do you know what the purpose of those ridges are? Do you know what those are called? I've always been curious if you're...

I thought there to keep people from like shaving the coins or something. That's right. That's exactly right. That was create, exactly. So it's a way that since Roman times, people were doing what's called coin clipping and they would shave down just a little bit of the coin. And that was a way that they could. accumulate over enough of these coins, they could accumulate a full coin. So they were actually devaluing their money. And the Romans knew about this. No one solved it until a man by the name of Isaac Newton came about. And actually led to a great deal of a catastrophe, especially in the Jewish community of England in the 1200s that were basically expelled from England for vehement suspicion of committing this type of monetary fraud and so forth. Of course, it wasn't true. and then later when Isaac Newton became master of the mint, he said, well, you put these ridges on it.

Now, the reason that we have it on quarters is because, as you know, a quarter used to be a quarter ounce of silver. But a penny was always, you know, it doesn't have the ridges because it's made of a base metal, more base metal. There's no profit in shaving down a penny versus a silver coin. Of course, now there's no silver in our currency in America. But the notion that this had to occur was because of the scarcity of gold. can tell you that gold that I have, and if this were a real Nobel Prize, it would be worth about $24,000. And that gold came from the collision of two enormous neutron stars. And that happened perhaps five billion years ago in our region of the galaxy. And the neutron enrichment,

basically a giant atom, not a 56 neutron, but 10 to the 56 neutrons or something like that coming together, the shrapnel of which produced the gold that we find. Now, you're saying, we're only going to have, you know, 21 million coins that are subdivided into so many Satoshi's or what Bitcoin. But I don't think there's going to be another neutron star that put it this way. If another neutron star collides near the earth, we've got much bigger problems in our monetary situation. But, you know, the fact is that's much more scarce than my friend down the street, mine's Bitcoin. In other words, how can we be so certain that it is, it has this permanence and it has this durability and resilience that it may. makes it a true store of money the way that these neutron stars did for us many billions of years ago?

The history of money is human beings looking for some system that they can use to store and trade value both with each other and with themselves over time. And we've used seashells and we've used glass beads and we've used gold and silver and copper and we've used paper that represents gold and we've used fiat and we're moving toward using Bitcoin. In terms of scarcity, commodity money is when I use cattle. I mean, I trade you cattle or I trade you wheat. By the early Americans, they use tobacco, right?

That was, you know, I still do in many. Yeah, they too still do in present. They couldn't get money from the Brits, and so they actually traded bales of tobacco. The problem with commodities is that as the price goes up, human ingenuity and technology is incentivized to produce more of it. If I can do a thing, if I double the price of tobacco, right, then I'm going to go, someone's going to farm more tobacco, right? if I use wood, I'll create more wood. With some commodities, they're really easy to produce. The hardest commodity to produce that also had the characteristics that we wanted for money

was gold. I mean, because we needed it to be durable and stable. Like it needs to last a thousand years, right? Some tobacco doesn't last a thousand years, right? So some things are hard to produce, but they're not stable at room temperature and not malleable. Other things are very stable, but they're not hard enough to produce. You know, some things aren't subdividable. Something, you know, I have to be able to, you know, I can tell that's gold maybe easier

than I can distinguish certain other metals. So mankind decided upon gold. But at the end of the day, anything that is manmade, we can produce more of it. So we mine gold. Gold miners produce about 2% more gold every year. and on average that's been going on for as long as anybody can remember, that means that if I took all of all of the money in the world and I bought gold with it and I had 100% of the gold in the world, 100 years from now,

I would have 12.5% of the gold in the world. So if I'm using gold as a store of value, then I'm going to have a 2% inflation rate due to gold mining. If I use, by me, with oil as a store of value, when oil prices were $30, $40 a barrel, you know, we ended up fighting Gulf wars and we went off to the Gulf to fight a war because we were afraid that the price of oil would go too high. There'd be an oil shortage. Eventually the price of oil went to $100 a barrel. Yeah. And there were billions of dollars of capital flow from the big banks into the frackers. and then oil entrepreneurs like Chesapeake Enemy started fracking oil, and the oil production

in the U.S. went from 5 million barrels a day to 10 million barrels a day in five years. And it had not changed in 50 years. And so conventional wisdom was we had an oil shortage. Enough conventional wisdom we would fight a war over it. I mean, that's pretty strong conviction. But in fact, we didn't have an oil shortage. What we had was a price that was too low to justify human ingenuity and capital solving the problem. And we have the same challenge with commodity money like gold. If the price of gold

stays about the constant level, $2,000 an ounce, you can expect that the amount of gold that gets mine will be 2% more a year, and it's fairly predictable. But if the price of gold were to go to $20,000 an ounce, then you have three perverse incentives that make gold a risky bet. One is 10 times as much incentive for gold miners to produce goals. So there'll be more capital equipment. They'll go faster. They're going to prove out the reserves faster. They're going to work at a higher rate.

And they will invent new chemistries and new technologies to mine gold if they have 10x, the incentive to do it. Pretty much all those smart MIT grads, they come out of school and they take the job that pays them the most. So if you want to double the salary of mining engineers, you'll get all the smartest people in the world and they'll be trying to do it. That's the first challenge. The second challenge is there are a lot of gold is centralized, which means you can hypothesate it and you can sell it short. There's no way for you to be sure that the bank that holds all your gold didn't actually sell

the gold twice without telling you because you can't reasonably withdraw a hundred million dollars of gold and stored underneath your mattress. And so that means that gold has always been plagued by people issuing notes against the gold without enough gold to cover it. The most famous example being Nixon going off the gold standard in 1971 when the United States printed more dollars than they had gold to back it and they had to actually default on that promise. But it's not the only example. I mean, the last 2,000 years is the history of all sorts of regimes. The Romans debased their currency and they cut back the number of grams. and gold coins and just denurturing the denarius is part of the reason for the fall of the Roman Empire.

All sorts of monarchs and medieval Europe used to issue credit notes and the like back by gold, and when they overissued them, they couldn't make good on it, and they also were ruined. Most countries have this issue over time. The U.S. had it, And you have it today. You have lots of examples of banks selling gold short, a naked short, without the, without the gold to back it. And even nation states do it and can do it to manipulate the price however they want. So it's a corruptible thing.

And finally, it can be seized because if you buy enough gold, it has to be centralized in a certain few volts, and it's very expensive to move. it's not practical for 100 million people to take personal custody of their gold. Whereas if you look at something like Bitcoin, Bitcoin is audited every 10 minutes by 10,000 nodes. So it's very challenging and not impossible to lie about it. Those 100 million people can take personal custody if they want because it has no mass. And if the price goes to a billion, you can't make any more of it. The reason it's scarce is because the protocol, you know, by the way, we have other scarce things

in the world. For example, conservation of energy is, you know, the first law of thermodynamics and the second and third enclosed thermonamic systems. They all operate based on scarcity or conservation of energy. And mathematics is based upon the idea that two plus two equals four, not five and not three. I mean, mathematics is conservative in that regard. you take away conservative engineering. Your boats don't float.

Your airplanes won't fly. Numatic and hydraulic systems don't work. Electroengineering systems fail if you don't have a closed system. The leak destroys them all. So Bitcoin is engineered. It's an engineered monetary network. It is a closed system. The reason it's closed is because the protocol closed it.

There's no law that says you had to write code to make a crypto network conservative. There are crypto networks where they actually inflate the money supply or inflate the token supply every year. There are some that don't have a limit on it, right? Bitcoin happens to be a conservative crypto network because it was designed to be that deflationary currency. They could have built a 2% inflation rate into it. It would have been perfectly light gold, right? But they put a 0% inflation rate over the long period of time. I mean, once you accept the fact there's a 21 million coin cap.

And then the thing that actually makes it truly scarce is two dynamics. The first order or second order dynamic. The first order dynamic is it's a decentralized network running on thousands of nodes and no one node can change the consensus. And so it's impossible to change the way the network works without taking over the entire network, which is decentralized with massive inertia. So if you held a gun to my head, I couldn't do it if I wanted to. No country could.

No company can. No engineer can. And so that's why, I mean, that is really the essence of crypto, this idea of a truly decentralized ethos. And Bitcoin is the greatest example of a truly successful. decentralized crypto network. But the second order thing that keeps from being scarce is you could copy it, you could clone it. The argument is what if I just clone it and create Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin

Satoshi Vision, Bitcoin version 42, Marvel Cinematic Universe, 2007. It's like they keep creating more universes, right? Parallel universes, you know, if you're a comic book fan, and finally like, in what universe does like the Wolverine die or not, I forget, you know, you get lost. That's the problem with cloning. The reason it doesn't work with money, but it got tried, it's failed 7,000, 8,000 times. It's because once there's a massive network effect, and it's not just Metcalf's law. Metcalf's law is an imperfect model.

It's more like Metcalf's law with a bunch of Newtonian astrophysics thrown in there. It's gravitational energy on a network because when 100 million people join the network, of course, they're going to resist any other network. But when 20 of those 100 million people have a billion each and they join the network, they resist with a billion times the force. And so as people with billions and billions of dollars, and as companies join the network, like Square, like PayPal,

like 25 billionaires that have done it this year, when they join the network, they join it with a billion times as much gravitational pull. Like I used to joke, you know, Rupert Murdoch never brought a billion friends to Facebook. Right. But Rupert Murdoch would bring a billion dollars to Bitcoin. And so this network has a gravitational effect. And it's like, it's like, why is it that

you don't fly off of the Earth onto the asteroid across the Earth? And the answer is because gravity, because there's more mass beneath you, you know, than then the gravitational pull of the asteroid flying out there. You're not going to fly off of the Earth. What you're going to have is all of the asteroids to get near the Earth, they get sucked into our gravity well. And what's happening now is that monetary energy is being sucked into the monetary energy well of Bitcoin. And you could clone it a million times. They're all, you know, take a rock and throw it up in the air and see whether it keeps going that direction or it comes back down to Earth. You know, you could toss it a million times. It's not escaping, you know, the gravity well because you've got a million times more

gravitational pull down than you have up. And that's what's going on with Bitcoin. It's past the event horizon and it's getting more and more powerful because of this energy dynamic. As Brian Keating back with you, just taking a pause to refresh in this episode of the Into the Impossible podcast with today's phenomenal guest, Michael Saylor, asking you to subscribe to the channel on YouTube, leave a like, thumbs up, a comment, a question for Michael. For next time he's agreed to come back on. If you're on iTunes listening to this, please leave me a small asterism,

a constellation of stars from one to five. Those are the options. I read every review. I take them all to heart, discuss them with my therapist, and it really is the only thing I ask of you. I'm not taking advertisements, as you know. And so the only remuneration

I expect is one Bitcoin per... Now, I only expect, or hope, wish, that you would leave me a review on iTunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast, like, subscribe, please share it. And please go to my website, Brian Keating.com. You're going to get the 10 life lessons I learned from Jim Simons if you sign up for my mailing list.

So please do that as well. And that will really benefit me. And who knows, we could do a part two in the 10 life lessons I learned from Michael Saylor. But you only get that if you subscribe to my newsletter, Brian Keating.com. I hope you enjoy this episode of the Into the Impossible podcast. If all other money were sound, if gold was not inflating, you know, 2% doubling every 36 years of supply, if, if U.S. dollar wasn't inflating, if we were all on some kind of hard current, would Bitcoin still be rising? Yeah, but it would be growing because it's superior technology.

There are three dynamics here, right? There's adoption, the rate of adoption, which is a marketing evangelical thing. Then there's the improvement in technical utility. What can I do with the money? And then the third thing is the inflation. Right. So let's take gold. If I couldn't make any more gold, if I agreed that there are 21 million gold bars and there are 21 million gold Bitcoin, Bitcoin would still be better because it has no mass and it moves at the speed of light. So I can move 100 million of Bitcoin for a nickel to Tokyo, but it would cost me $250,000 in a month to move $100 million in gold to Tokyo. So I can build Bitcoin into square cash, and I can buy it in one click in one second,

but I can't buy $10,000 of gold in one click in one second. So the technical utility would still be superior even if there was no inflation of gold. Yeah, I would say the efficiency. I mean, gold is used in the technology that you're using to transport the, electrons across at the speed near near the speed of light. So I mean, intrinsic value, I think I would agree that gold is more, is less efficient. And therefore, the velocity in which it can be transported, obviously as much lower as you're right. You can't take delivery. I talk to Jim Simons. We're going to get to Jim Simons, who is another MIT grad. And he said, you know, one of the things he used to worry

about is one of his future contracts, if he went the wrong way, he'd have 800's head of steer in the parking lot at Renaissance technology. And he, they're not. a cattle farm. So, you know, there are benefits of it. There are disadvantages of it. But when you talk about the technology, you know, I haven't delved into it probably as much as I should. But it seems to me that technology was in place decades ago. In other words, you could have a blockchain type. You could, I mean, it wouldn't operate with the efficiency. It wouldn't maybe have, you know, as many nodes. And network law, the law of network effects, you know, Stephen Struggatt, a friend of mine who wrote the definitive paper about network theory with 32,000 citations in nature.

And this is about the exponential geometric growth of networks growing as the number of squares of nodes. So yes, it would have fewer nodes, maybe. But is there any physical law that would have precluded Bitcoin's adoption in 1987 or, you know, earlier than this rise in the last decade or something? I have a phrase. My phrase is, technology fails until it succeeds. And that generally describes all paradigm shifts. It describes the airplane for a thousand years.

People tried to fly and then they've, you know, the Wright brothers figured it out. But if they didn't have an internal combustion engine, they wouldn't have flown, right? It describes mobile phones. People tried and they, and the breakthrough was like sufficiently powerful lithium ion batteries, you know,

and certain chips and some of these, you know, codex, right? Compression algorithms. So there are a few things we needed. In every single industry, there's always something that you need in order to break through to the next level. With the launch of Bitcoin, we've been working on the technologies for about 40 years previous. I mean, and it's well documented, you know, proof of work. You needed pretty good privacy, I mean, public, private key encryption and proof of work algorithms,

you know, and you needed sufficiently powerful CPU chips, and there was some math involved. And people tried it. They launched a number of them, hash cash and e-gold in the decade previous. This wasn't the first attempt. Bitcoin was the first attempt that was successful. Okay? So they probably attempted it, I don't know, a dozen, two dozen times before, and they worked on different elements of it for 10 to 20, even 30 years before. It was bound to happen at some point when you had a critical mass of network computers, computational power, encryption algorithms, and they just put all the pieces together.

And that's what Bitcoin was. And then it took, you know, it took 10 years of, they started a fire in cyberspace. It took 10 years of the fire burning for it to get big enough that it would work through all of its risk factors and it would mature enough that an institution would be willing to actually put hundreds of millions of dollars of capital on it. Right? Like the early exchanges got hacked like Mount Cox. The IRS could have destroyed it with the wrong tax treatment if they didn't give it the right tax treatment. It did get cloned. People weren't sure how the forks were.

would work out. It needed to be attacked in every which way for it to mature and season. And as it got more mature, then more energy got put into it. And then it got tempered. Then it got stronger. And as it got stronger, it went from a bunch of visionary retailers and, you know, a motley crew of traders and hackers and retailers and true believers and technologists. and speculators. And then it eventually rotated into institutions looking for an investment-grade safe haven asset. But it took a while to get there.

And it took not just 10 years of it living and competing for space and getting hardened. But it also took the COVID crisis and the pandemic of 2020 because that was a catalyst, right? March of 2020 was a catalyst for the explosion of Zoom and virtual work. And it was a catalyst for the explosion of Bitcoin because you simultaneously had a billion people that needed a solution to a problem. And that was the platform that would solve the problem at the point that they needed it and they couldn't delay any longer. I want to get back to COVID in the context of risk management. So I run with my colleagues of a very large telescope array complex that we are building in the high out-of-coma desert of Chile. And we're responsible for almost everything called the Simon's Observatory.

And we're responsible for bringing concrete and diesel fuel and generators, but also the very delicate superconducting sensors that detect this wispy glow of photons that we call the cosmic microwave background radiation. And so we've got, you know, very fine skills. It's kind of liken to like the biathlon. Like sometimes you have to be very, very, you know, control your breath and focus on these ultra-precise things. And sometimes you just got a haul butt and get, you know, just get concrete up the mountain. So we have these things called risk registers and we go over them and what kind of things could compromise the project.

Let's brainstorm. Where are the flaws in our logic that could come up with it? Now, you know, these are the most brilliant people in the world. These are members of the National Academy of Sciences, people that are shortlisted for the Nobel Prize, so to speak. Not a one of us had global pandemic to shut down all supply chains in Chile where the telescope is located in every state in America where all our collaborators work, every country around the world that we have colleagues on, every one of the seven continents, shut down and manufacturing of the telescope, large equipment. No one had COVID. What is, you know,

when I think about it, you know, I once, you know, try to send a message to your good friend Peter Schiff on Twitter. I said, you know, one of the problems with gold, and he's the most notorious gold bug, I think, in the world. He didn't ever answer me, by the way. But, but, you know, it's like, eventually you have to convert it to dollars. In order to do anything with it, you have to convert it to one of these inferior, according to you and many, and to him, certainly, inferior media of exchange or stores of value. So the fact, that to me represents a possible existential risk, because right now, yeah, the IRS is maybe not treating it. We saw something with Ripple last couple weeks as far as I don't follow it very closely.

But what's to prevent, you know, a really black swan event, as Taleb would say, from, you know, government just saying this is now illegal and any proceeds we want to know the history of every single coin. And unless you prove, have proof of that work, a proof of where the coin came from and it never touched a black market dealership, whatever. What's to stop that from happening, you know, and or, and or. Or do you see other potential COVID-esque risks that could compromise the rosy story of it growing 200% per year? I just think that's fairly de minimis. Like it's been growing 200% a year every year for the past 11 years. And you're only going to have 30 years of your life and business.

So how long are you going to stare at something, which is a screaming successful thing in denial? Peter Schiff has been against Bitcoin for 10 years. years, he'd be a billionaire right now. He'd be a 10 billionaire right now if he'd actually not been against it. You would lose, by way, resisting it, you would lose 98 to 99% of your wealth over five years if you're in denial of this thing. So there's a cost to being a denial of stuff. Let me just, again, offer an example. You know, like, if you're, if you're on an airplane and somebody puts their elbow through a window and it starts depressurizing and the auction gets sucked out of the airplane and then the oxygen mask drops down from the

compartment above, are you going to stare at it and debate with me for like two hours about all the black swans and whether or not the oxygen is safe and whether or not you should breathe the oxygen or whether or not you should not breathe the oxygen? Are you going to put the mask on? Because it's new. You've never used an oxygen mask in an airplane before. If I take you and I drop you in the middle of the, you know, the ocean and you're 50 feet down with the weight around your neck and I hand you a scuba equipment and a regular, are you going to put it in your mouth? Are you going to debate with me? And you're going to ask me to twist and try to, what if it's possible that some politician in

some country passes some law, making it illegal for me to put this regulator in my mouth? It's like, we're really reaching hard here to find a reason to not do the obvious. I want to give you another metaphor. You're at the top of the North Pole at 70 degrees. We're all playing Frisbee. There's one heated igloo on the North Pole. There's a guy at the front door. He charges tick admission.

And you can buy a ticket for a dollar. You don't need the ticket. You like it outside. And then some politician turns down the temperature 10 degrees. and the ticket price goes to $10. You still keep playing, no big deal. And then some politician turns on the temperature, another 10 degrees, and the ticket price goes to $100.

And you're like, oh, I don't know, I'm not sure. I mean, what's in that igloo? I might be kind of dangerous in that igloo. I think I'll just start it. So another politician turns out of the temperature, another 10 degrees, and you're afraid of the igloo. It's dark in there, and maybe it isn't dark, and maybe the food's not so good.

And I turn it down another 10 degrees. when it gets to zero degrees and you're in T-shirt and you start getting bone chilled, the temperature, the price is going to go to $100,000 to get in, and you still don't know whether or not you can get in. But every intelligent person you know walk through the door before you, and they're fine waving at you saying it's warm in here. You're going to freeze the death, Brian. And you're still standing there and the guy cranks the temperature down.

And there's a Peter Schiff standing next to you going, I don't think you should go into that heated igloo. because it's possible the politicians will pass a law, making it illegal or taxing you on that heated igloo. And then the politician cranks it down to minus 40 below. And Peter Schiff is still telling you, man, I don't know if it's safe in that igloo. And all your friends are saying,

Brian, you idiot, why don't you come in here and stop freezing to death? It's fine here. You're going to die. And some dude is still going to, yeah, I know, but they haven't done anything for 14 years. But I don't think, I've never been in an igloo before. I'm afraid. And the point is, every time the Fed or a banker prints 10 or 15% more currency,

they are sucking 15% of the energy out of the financial system. That's the same as sucking 15% of the oxygen out of your room. That's the same as lowering the temperature 10 degrees. When I suck the energy out of an adiabiotic system, you have heat lapse, you will freeze to death if you don't suffocate. We have a currency collapse going on right now. The only difference is it was going on at 5% a year in the U.S. Now it's going on at 25% this year. It's going to go on 15% for the next five years. Same in Europe. It's collapsing at a faster rate in Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, Nigeria,

of South Africa, Turkey, Lebanon, fill in the blank, you can stand there living in fear that someone might hypothetically ask you to stop freezing to, you know, get out of the igloo. But on the other hand, there's a hundred percent likelihood you're going to freeze to death if you stand where you are and do nothing. 100%. There's a 1% likelihood that when you are. actually move into the heated igloo, something unexpected is going to happen that you did not anticipate, or perhaps someone will object, but you'll be warm. And that is the situation with

Bitcoin right now, which is a lot of people are working very hard to come up with some reason why they shouldn't trust a new thing. Meanwhile, it's quite clear that 7.8 billion people on the planet have a problem. Everybody with money on Earth is going to lose half their wealth in the next 48 months if they do nothing. If you live, if one of the billion people in a collapsing developed economy, you're going to lose everything if you do nothing. The solution is a digital monetary network that doesn't dissipate energy that you can access where no one can corrupt it and you can take personal custody of your money, of your monetary energy. Yes. Yes. There's uncertainty.

For the first time in human history, we invented the thing. It's new. But it's not one year new. It's 11 years, 12 years old. And you don't have to put 100 per, by the way, when the oxygen mask drops out of the plane and you're traveling with your 10 kids, are you going to put the mask on one kid to see if they live and let the other nine kids suffocate? Or are you going to put the mask on everybody?

Or you can put your mask on your son? first, how afraid are you of suffocating versus how afraid are you of using the oxygen? Because Bitcoin is oxygen and it's new. And there are some people, there are some people that are very comfortable in their existence and they think it's okay to ignore it because they're rich and they're comfortable and they're happy. There are some people that dabble in it. Like I think I'll buy one or two percent because I'll speculate in it. And there are some people, like, if I put you in Argentina, and by the way, do you know the exchange rate in Argentina to the dollar right now?

No. I think it's, I know it's inflating tremendously. It used to be one peso to the dollar. And then it slid to 10 pesos to the dollar. And then it slid to 20 pesos to the dollar. I know they actually write on it. They actually change, they just cross it out and add zeros in common. I had a guest on a.

slid to 40 pesos to the dollar. Then it slid to 80 pesos to the dollar. The black market rate is 140 pesos to the dollar. And the dollar has lost half of its value in the 10 years. So you've actually lost what is one divided by 280? It's like if you're living in Argentina and you have any wealth to speak of. You lost 99% of it. Now, right, are we going to sit and think about ways that we might, it's hypothetically possible that a politician in Argentina will pass a law requiring that I disclose my Bitcoin or tax it or whatever. But are you going to suffocate your entire family and destroy everything you know based on the hypothetical possibility that someone might object to you choosing to not roll over and die? Because it seems like most of the world

would like for us just all roll over and die and shut up and not make a big stink about it. It seems to me that if I come into your house and I start cranking the temperature down until I freeze your children, at some point, maybe you'll have the bravery to open the back door and walk into the backyard and maybe go find a new house. I mean, like, it's just a matter of courage and maturity at some point. And for those people that just want to spread fear and uncertainty and doubt, I mean, like, what's the future for humanity if we're going to live in fear of the solution to the problem that plagues us all?

I had on, that's a very good point, Michael. I had on Lord Martin Rees, who is the astronomer royal, which does not mean that he tells the queen her horoscope, he tells me, but he is in fact in charge of all the observatories in England, at least officially. But he has the position that Isaac Newton had back in 1700s, which was master of Trinity College. And he said to me, well, you know, the thing that disturbed, because he writes many books about the future. In fact, he has his new book, is called On the Future. And I'll put a link to that in this podcast as well. He's a brilliant guy, futurist. I don't know if you've ever heard of him.

But he says that blockchain kind of depresses him because it's a sign of distrust. It's a sign that people don't trust each other. And we're going to show how trustworthy we are by completely exposing and transparentizing every aspect of this particular type of, of commodity or of currency or of store of value, however you want to describe it. But I pointed out that that's basically, you know, what's written, as you've all known, Noah Harari points out, you know, on each dollar bill, it says, in God we trust. Like, we're not only invoking, you know, that we, I might not trust Michael, you know, because I don't know you, but I trust God, and therefore I'm going to put this on my currency because everybody agrees on that. So there's stories that go along with it. I think part of the technological superiority is not enough. you know, people need a story. And this is coming along nicely. Before, I do want to move away from blockchain to get into your concepts about higher education and some, some ideas that I find

fascinating. Look, I think we should address the issue of blockchain, which is, which is, first of all, every pay, every fiat currency and history has been debased and eventually failed. So if you're going to be academic, are you going to be historian, you can't find a single example of sound money everlasting anywhere on earth, no commodity money, no gold money, no silver, no copper, no fiat, no nothing. You cannot find a, you can't find a single regime that ever executed a strong money policy for 25 years straight in the history of man. So when we, you know, when Satoshi said, you know, the problem with fiat currency is all the trust that requires from banks and they've always betrayed trust. He was just pointing out the obvious. Every bank on earth can print more money

with impunity and every central bank can print more money. It's just an observation. And so, so the idea that you should actually create a monetary system based upon trust of a banker or a politician is about a silly a notion as the idea that you should sail a ship across the Atlantic with leaks in it without making sure there are no, do you trust the boat to not have leaks in it? Or do you like make sure it's leak proof? No. I mean, there's no. Every pilot does a free flight, right?

There's no engineering system that functions with a leak. Your swimming pool doesn't, would you jump into your swimming pool without check and see of this water in the swimming pool? would you actually jump into a swimming pool with a leak in it? Like the swimming pool won't work, the airplane won't fly, the ship won't sail, the electrical system won't work with a short circuit, the pneumatic system won't work with a leak in it. You know, nothing works in the engineering world if you don't have, you know, integrity and a closed system. And nothing works in math if you just change the number, right?

I mean, the point is math is math. So if you want to reject all of math, all of thermodynamics, all of science, the conservation of energy and the universe, then yeah, you can run your society based upon fiat currency with one individual that makes up how much money they want to make up at any given time. But it seems pretty clear that the rest of the universe doesn't work that way. And so being against the idea of a blockchain that actually enforces. integrity and enforces mathematical scarcity and conservation of energy, being against that is like being against the laws of gravity, being against the passage of time, and being against math, right?

And there are politicians that are against conservation of energy, the passage of time, and math, right? There are plenty of examples, but there are no successful engineers. And so I think that what can be said about blockchain is it's an engineered monetary network. It's the reason the asset class is outperforming every other asset over every time period since its instantiation is because it's mathematically pure and everything else is subject to debasement and dilution and inflation. and any engineer or mathematician or scientist with any degree of integrity would look at that, accept it and say, yeah, I think I'm going to design my system, you know, bowing to Newton's laws, the laws of math, the laws of thermodynamics, the laws of electrodynamics, as best as I understand them. Before, by the way, would you put your children into an airplane designed by an engineer that

that they bragged to you that he ignored the laws of thermodynamics and he broke all the rules and the airplane. Just improvised, right? Yeah, would you improvise? Would you cross a bridge designed by an engineer that bragged that he broke all the laws and he didn't respect people with math that checked his calculus and he wanted to make up two plus two equals 16? Like, the point is nobody in the civilization would trust anybody or anything.

designed by a not by a politician that simply made up the rules and reversed gravity right and yet we trust monetary systems where the rules are made up and you can reverse when you have negative interest rates that's like reversing the flow of time you're trying to make time flow backwards right good luck with that right right you're going to trust your your family your life your livelihood a system that's engineered without respect for the laws of thermodynamics. The answer is no, not a third grader. I mean, the stupidest person on the planet probably is not that stupid. I think people just, here's the paradigm shift.

They don't realize that we have engineered a monetary system for the first time in human history that actually will work. And they think that they're trapped in all of the defective paper, political and commodity monetary systems of the past. And since none of them work, they resign themselves to living in a world where nothing works and nothing is going to work. And then what happens next is a moral hazard where you have one group of people run to take control of the banks and the printing press to enrich their friends and their pet causes. And another group of people suffer and starve to death, you know, because they don't control the money. And that's the world we live in today. And that's

why this is a moral issue. I want to just make a quick analogy. And again, there's so much about your educational innovation that I want to get to. But I can't resist this. So I don't know if you've ever done this, but if you go to Wikipedia, pick any Wikipedia page, I'm going to pick the Wikipedia page of Michael J. Saylor. And it's an exercise that's fun to do. You click on the first hyperlink in each page that's unique. So the first one under Michael J. Saylor is micro strategy. Click Microstrategy. You go down, it goes to data analysis.

It goes to cleansing. I don't know why. It goes to scrubbing, database, table, records. Eventually it gets to abstract. Abstract means concept. And eventually almost every single one, if not every single Wikipedia page, is fundamentally going to refer to a single page called philosophy.

In other words, philosophy is the core element of every page on Wikipedia. at its core. So it goes to IBM, it goes to multinational corporation. I've done this before you came on the show. Eventually, it goes down to groups abstract and then, you know, it gets totally abstracted away from you and Michael's micro strategy. My thought is that, well, the reason that the dollar has power is because at its core, the United States dollar is backed by eight nuclear-powered carrier battle groups. And we have this, you know, immense military capability. And throughout history, there haven't been many empires that were the, you know, reserve currency that didn't have the

most powerful military in the world, before the U.S., it was England, you know, now China's kind of on the rise, et cetera. They all have power. It's not like you have some, you know, Switzerland is going to have the reserve currency of the world. Obviously, they have financial transactions. But what is the core of Bitcoin or blockchain? If you keep going into the Wikipedia page abstractly, you know, What is the core of it? Because it's not backed by nine nuclear powered, but, you know, aircraft carriers. So what is, you know, the fundamental reason that that gives it this protection that really the dollar has enjoyed for, you know, a long time? And I think I do want to move off of blockchain and Bitcoin to your more your personal philosophy of life. First of all, the dollar is only as old as 1971, right?

we've got a fiat currency for 50 years. Number one. Number two, it's lost 98% or 90-something percent of its purchasing power in those 50 years. So it's not, it has power. Look, the Roman Julius Caesar had power. Where is he today? I mean, the point is, Babylon had power. The British Empire had power, right?

Napoleon had power. lots of examples of empires that had, you know, Alexander the Great had power. How'd that work out? Right? The Carthaginians and the Phoenicians had power. The Venetians had power. The Roman Catholic Church had power. Henry VIII had power, right?

I don't dispute the fact that they all had power. Everybody has power over the course of some period of time. And, you know, the U.S. dollar is the reserve currency of the world. It's undisputable. And once I almost wrote a book all about. the supremacy of the dollar i get it that's not the point right the point is is not is it is it the reserve currency of the world and and do we need to accommodate it we do the point is what will you as an individual choose to use as your technology to avoid starving to death or freezing to death

economically that's the question right the argentine Peso had power, still has power. It doesn't change the fact that if you live in Argentina, you will starve to death and lose your family's life savings every 10 years unless you adopt a new technology, right? Doesn't change that fact. Do you worry about that? And so the significance of Bitcoin is it's a technology for you to avoid becoming impoverished, right? If I drop you in the middle of Russia, the rubble will have power, you know, and they will shoot you in the head if you don't use the rubble properly. It doesn't change the question at hand.

If you have tuberculosis, you should use penicillin to avoid dying. And if you have a bunch of money in a country where the currency is collapsing, you should use Bitcoin to avoid dying, right? And if I drop you in the middle of the ocean, you should hope you have a ship around you to avoid dying, right? It's just the technology in order to live your life in this particular case. And so what is the core essence of it? Well, the essence of it is the same thing that makes the universe work, the laws of thermodynamics

and the conservation of energy, right? What's at the core of Bitcoin is the laws of thermodynamics and the conservation of energy. If I put a million dollars of monetary energy into the network in the year 2020, I can go forward 250 years or 50 years or 10 years or whatever amount of time frame you want. And I will have the same amount of monetary energy scaled up perfectly linearly for the economic growth without any individual stealing at all. If you take the same amount of monetary energy and you put it into the dollar, you will lose 99% of that energy. It will be stolen from you by the central bank and the fractional reserve bankers over the course of 100 years, maybe over the course of 10 to 15 years, right? If you put that into a gold network, you're going to lose 90% of the energy, if not all of it.

You'll lose 90% because of mining and you're likely to lose the rest when the bank you put it in gets seized in a regime change. And if you look at the top 100 cities in the world over the last 100 years, 95 of them had a regime change that was hostile that would result in you losing all of your monetary energy. So the significance of Bitcoin is you can take a portion of monetary energy. You can store it on a network that no politician, no bank, no counterparty can seize from you against your will, and nobody can debase or inflayed away via some political edict, which is not the case with any other monetary system on Earth. Another way to say it is, as Ross Stevens says,

you have a choice. You can choose the Fiat standard, which is a standard where other people can print unlimited units of money, just not you, right? Or you can choose the Bitcoin standard where nobody can print units of money, including you. You have a choice. You can live in a world where someone you don't know can rob you of all of your economic power without your consent, without your knowledge. Or you can live in a world where nobody can.

You choose, right? That's the stark decision. By the way, that's the case. why is this why is this moral because when you live in the universe you have to subject yourself to the laws of thermodynamics you don't get to create energy or destroy energy or create mass or destroy there's a conservation of this stuff you can't leap a million gazillion miles we don't have a world where you get to leap a million miles an hour and murder everybody and the guy next to you doesn't right you're both subject to the same laws of thermodynamics in that world but in the world

of theaught there's one dude that can steal the life work of a billion people in a minute on a whim and there's another person that can't that can have all of their life's energy sucked out of their account and be and be rendered a pulper. That's the world you live in when you live in a Fiat world. And, you know, it seems quite evident which world a scientist or an engineer or a rational thinker or a person that simply wanted to live would want to live in. You'd want to live in the thermodynamically sound world of truth and integrity. And that's at the core when people question Bitcoin, it's like, why would you question

a monetary network based upon math and the laws of thermodynamics that are what God uses to move the universe. Yeah, I'm certainly a fan of the laws of thermodynamics as a physics professor. Let me ask now on the other side. So there's people selling Bitcoins, even though it's today you hit an all-time high. I found out earlier today it was at $40,000 per Bitcoin. It's up 100% in a month. And, you know, I'm not going to ask you for investment advice, but I will note, you know, as again, I've had on Bill Perkins, who you may know, I've had on Jim Simons, as I mentioned, Patrick Bette

David, you know, several billionaires and billionaire class people and now having you on. What is, in your mind, how do you think about wealth? A lot of my listeners criticize me, you know, for, you know, talking to billionaires. And obviously, I'm only talking to people that have something. valuable to say to a technologically astute audience like my audience, even if they may not be able to construct a theory of everything themselves, they're keen on these big existential issues of that give meaning to life. But how do you, Michael, how do you think about wealth? What is the purpose of wealth? You know, I mean, I've seen Jim Simons. I know he has a yacht, you know,

but as, as, you know, Gordon Gecko was told by Charlie Sheen's character in Wall Street, you know, You can only water ski behind one yacht at a time. What is the purpose of wealth to you? So money is monetary energy. Monetary energy is the apex of all energies. I can convert kinetic energy and I convert potential energy and nuclear energy and electrical energy. And even mass into energy, right? I mean, I can convert anything into energy.

Anything that I convert into energy, I can monetize. I can take $100 million of electricity and make it $100 million of money, and that becomes wealth. I am a wealthy person with $100 million of energy. I can take $100 million of money. I can convert it back into an army of whatever, 5,000 guys with machine guns and have them charge off. And I can general a kinetic energy and chemical energy and I can kill a bunch of people and chaos. Right. And so wealth is money.

Money is energy. At the end of the day, energy is conserved. It's all there. You can do what you will with it. Everybody chooses to channel their energy, however they will. You can channel your energy to create Amazon and deliver people. You can create a Netflix. You can endow apart.

For example, I happen to be pretty big into conservation, and I like green space. When I see a park, like I see a park in the middle of Naples, and it's overrun and it's not maintained. It makes me very sad. So I'm also aware it costs money. It takes wealth to actually maintain a park. It's not cheap to actually do the forestry. You have to continually work on that. You can endow a university, right?

I have a nonprofit foundation, and we operate a website, the Sailor Academy, and we give away free college education to people, I think 7,800,000 people last I checked. And our goal is to give away education for free to everybody forever. Okay, so that's an interesting thing. It takes energy, right? It takes energy. You've got to create the courses. you've got to host the courses.

You have to deal with the politics. You have to jump through the hoops to get ACE accredited. Right now we're working to get certified to grant certain types of degrees, takes more energy. You have to pay people to do things. So wealth is just energy, and you can channel it however you want, and ultimately it gets channeled based upon the values of the people with the energy, right? Some wealth is controlled by politicians, right?

So they can create a central park. right uh rockefeller had a lot of wealth and you can trace his fingerprints right the grand teeton national park the national park at st johns and the u.s virgin islands you can look at all the state parks up and down the hudson river that were contributed by wealthy individuals like rockefeller and jp morgan some people you know harvard was endowed by whatever harvard and a bunch of wealthy people they wanted at a university. So the issue is what are your values? Cathedrals were built by wealthy people to the glory of God. There's plenty of hospitals that are endowed by the wealthy. So I think that wealth is energy to be channeled how you will, whether or not you have religious values,

political values, environmental values, or family values, or whatever you want to do with it, people do with it. As you said earlier, you know, you can't jump 800 times higher than Michael Jordan just because you think you can. But as you know from your engineering background, that, you know, money, money being essentially this form of energy, the rate at which energy is consumed is power, is the actual definition of the watt power. And so there are listeners that ask me, you know, how can I talk to people that have so much power, the ability to convert energy and do work in a very brief amount of time? Obviously, you're not going to construct a mercenary army, I hope.

you know, with some of your money. But it's not on my agenda. It would be a bad investment anyway. Because you're competing against the government. There's a government army that's subsidized by the government and they give it away for free. Why would you want to try to compete with that? All right. You heard it here first.

Michael Saylor is not going to construct a private mercenary army. That would be, you know, kind of the start of many, many sci-fi dystopian futures. But the point that, you know, one of my listeners asked me is like, I interview these people, they have all this power. but never has there been such discrepancy in power. So yes, you can have more energy, you can have more money, but we're also living in the most polarized, you know, discrepancy between those that can apply energy in the shortest amount of time and those that cannot. How do you, does that affect you? Do you think about that? You know, obviously there will be discrepancies. If there were no discrepancies, the thermodynamics would not, you couldn't do extraction of zero use for. Look, I do think that I think the people with the most power are the politicians and the bankers, right?

You know, like we have people in the world that actually can spend $5 trillion a year. What private citizen do you know that can spend a trillion a year? Right? Nobody, right? The Fed buys $120 billion worth of bonds a month. Give me one private individual that can spend $120 billion a month. So the truth is we have a big power discrepancy. The politicians have the most power.

Then you have others that have power. The number one source of the power discrepancy is the Fiat standard. And that's why Bitcoin is the solution, right? The solution to actually stop in the contillion effect, right? The fact is when I print a trillion dollars and I use it to buy certain assets, I buy them from people that I wish to buy them from. And if you hold those assets, like bonds, if you own, you know, the best trade this year was owning long-term government bonds.

You got a 20% return on that. That's because you sold them to the government. No reasonable person would have bought that. So go figure how many hundreds of billions of dollars flowed because certain people traded with certain other people. So, you know, the reason that Bitcoin is the solution is if you can take the power to create. When you create, if I have $25 trillion of currency floating around and I just print another

trillion, I just seized 4% of all the power in the civilization and I just did it by fiat, right, by edict without even a law of being passed. So the biggest power discrepancy is the current power to print money currency. And that leads to all the other power discrepancies. And if you want to reverse that, then you need to educate the world so that people understand that they should switch from the Fiat standard to the Bitcoin standard, because if you're on the Bitcoin standard, nobody could print more Bitcoin and deprive you of your monetary energy. Right.

So it's really critical thing, right? I mean, everything relates to everything. And a society where, I mean, go to Zimbabwe, right? And in a society where one dictator takes over the entire country and starts printing, pretty soon there's only 22 people in the country that have enough to eat and everybody else is impoverished. I mean, you want real power discrepancy, right? It's as the government prints more and more currency, when I print twice as much currency, I've seized twice as much currency, I've seized twice of all assets. Right. That's what's happened. When I print 10 times more currency, I've seized 90% of all assets. So the biggest power shift and wealth discrepancy is coming about based because of like modern monetary theory and this thought that it's okay for the government to print infinite money. It's okay. I think it's, you know, as the cane said, you know, not one man and a million can detect the inflationary perniciousness that is unleashed. I know you don't have too much more time, Michael, but I do want to get to some, do you have a few more minutes? talk about Sailor Academy. So you're a pilot like me, private pilot. First of all, what's your dream

plane in your hangar? What's your dream hangar look like? I have a global express. I like it. I'm going to keep it. Are you typerated in it? No, I don't fly it. I used to fly. I mean, I learned to fly when I was in the Air Force and I'm yeah. And I just, you know, it takes a lot of time and energy to keep up with that and it's not safe to be a hobbyist. A lot of wealthy people died crashing their own airplane, so I don't really wish to emulate that model. I'm just perfectly fine being flown. Being a passenger.

But when you were training and you were learning how to fly, obviously there's some of that you can learn online. John and Martha King, you may remember them from your training. They're here in San Diego, friends of mine, they run King schools. But you can take their course. On that subject, I will say I think it'd be really cool if we get to the point where we have the Tesla of airplane. If we can create an electric powered hovercraft airplane, maybe a four-person airplane that's electric powered, even if it was low altitude, where you could zip around at 20, 30, 50, or 100 feet up. Yeah.

That would be really, really neat. Yeah, your fraternity brother, Peter, has talked to me about that exact point. but getting back to what it actually took to become a pilot. And so the Kings, John and Martha King, say, you know, once you become a pilot, even the day you get your first solo under your belt, your identity has changed. You are now part of any elite core of human beings who have flown an aircraft sat in a chair above the ground moving at 100 miles an hour and live to tell about it. Some of that you can learn online, but a lot of it you can't. And you need to have your flight instructor. It needs to be taught from apprentice to, you know, to protege, or from mentor to protege.

So my question to you is, you know, can you have, you know, online education? For example, your alma mater has all of its courses open. And yet they're 10 times oversubscribed. Talk about, you know, constrained supply. The president of MIT has said that he could accept 10 times many people without changing the quality one bit. And so therefore they have this open courseware, et cetera. But is it the same? You know, is it the same to take the open courseware?

Is there something that Sailor Academy can't provide, you know, online learning versus online education or credentialism? There's a difference. What do you think is the most important problem to solve and that you're directing Sailor Academy's efforts towards? I think if you look at the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, a lot of the engineering, a lot of general science, the ones that don't require extreme lab work. I mean, math is a perfect example, right? You don't need lab work for math. Computer science, you don't need lab work.

You don't have a computer. So they're obvious. But if you look at the science and technology and engineering disciplines, I think that they blend themselves well to online automated education. I don't think ballet and banjo playing is quite as good, right? I mean, and scuba diving and piloting not quite as good. But they're flight simulators, which are interesting. Yeah. But the obvious is just computer science, data science, and mathematics. And what I think there is, I think someone said, I mean, we spend billions of dollars a year

paying calculus teachers. You really need like, what, 10? superstar teachers of Calh? Maybe one, two, three, four. Some are between two and 12 good teachers and then you need to capture their courseware online.

And then I don't know why they couldn't teach the next billion people or 10 billion people. Why can't 12, you know, I mean, you talk about Isaac Newton a lot, right? Isaac Newton wrote Principia and as far as I can see, Isaac Newton must have like invented like 80% of all the math that anybody ever needs ever. And maybe, I think probably, it's probably not unreasonable to say that someone

in the order of 98 to 99% of all human beings don't know as much math as Isaac Newton laid out. Might be 99.9% of all human beings. Oh, yeah. Didn't outstrip what, I mean, if Isaac Newton was alive today, he could have taught everything that 99.9% of the people would have needed to know. And 300 years after he's gone, we still haven't outrun. calculus of variations and all these other things he did. You know what he claimed was his biggest accomplishment, Michael?

What? That he died of virgin because he was intensely religious and he wanted to emulate Christ in every way. Yeah, but that wasn't his biggest accomplishment. I know. I'm just saying that was what he was most proud of apparently. Anyway, getting back to... He was probably being politically correct in some sort.

1730s version, yes. But science and technology, clearly you can automate that. If we want to move the civilization forward, we have like 10 million PhDs. We need a billion PhDs. You're not going to come up with, you know, interstellar travel and nuclear fusion on a sugar cube and new propulsion and cures to cancer with undergraduate degrees.

Sure. I got paid to go to graduate school as a graduate as teaching assistant, a fellowship, whereas, you know, undergraduate, I had to get loans or get, get. But it doesn't change the fact, right, that we need a billion PhDs, right? Right. So how do you incentivize that? How do you...

Well, so the first point is it cost a million dollars to create a PhD if you do it, you know, the old-fashioned way. You need to do it for a nickel. You need to drive the cost of education down to a nickel. And the way to do that is to upload all the computer science and math and physics and engineering curriculum from K all the way through PhD. everything that can possibly be taught needs to be uploaded and made free. And then people need to be able to go at their own pace.

You can't really convince me that I need to have 187,000 geometry teachers in the world. Or I don't need a world of a million calculus teachers. I don't even need a calculus teacher sitting in front of me. I don't need a person to teach me math. I mean, it's just, it's a silly, two plus two equals four. You got to be here or the computer can teach me to math. So I think, I don't think, I don't see any reason why we can't take 98% of the cost of education and dematerialize it just uploaded.

If you go to, if you go to my website and you start taking the physics course, you'll actually see lectures by Walter Lewin and Walter Lewin is standing in the same lecture hall where he taught me he's the same guy that taught me the same course in the same lecture hall in the video the difference is the amount of money i paid MIT or that had to be paid to MIT for me to sit in that room with 300 other freshmen impoverished my family in eight weeks in eight weeks it was our our entire family's life savings everything we'd saved in 200 freaking years was the cost to go through half a semester at MIT. You can have the entire thing for free.

And by way, it's better. It's better. And I'm not sitting in the back of the lecture hall. You're up front. You can start it. You can stop it. You can speed it up. So the real point here is there's no reason why we can't give everybody

unlimited free education as much as they want, as fast as they can have it, and they can go as far as they want to go. and the cost of education is divided into three components, right? There's the room and board, the food cost, and that's universal basic income. So if the society wants to give people food and room and board for the rest of their life, I'm okay with it. We're kind of doing it anyway right now. The second component is the country club component.

Like we're going to let you play flag football and go spulunking and be in the glider club and maybe meet friends and have dances and, you know, and have frat parties or whatever, you know, and I'll play golf on the golf team. That's the country club element. Maybe the society wants to pay for that or not. I mean, it's another political decision. And the third element is the part where they teach you stuff. The third element we can dematerialize to literally be the cost of electricity.

I don't, I mean, I don't see any reason why if you took 0.1% of the Department of Education, annual budget, you could upload pretty much every science technology and engineering course and give it away to 8 billion people for free. And all they have to do is buy a used iPad or a used computer and pay for electricity and bandwidth. And we're going there. I mean, we're not getting that support from the government. I mean, and most of the universities, they're more, the problem is they're creating scarcity in the certificate or in the diploma because their business model is create scarcity. But I actually think that what we're going to find is that the diploma is going to become

less valuable. If I could actually give you a test and test whether or not you understood math, I wouldn't care whether you had a Ph.D. in math. I wouldn't care whether you, you know, if you told me you had a Ph.D. in math from Harvard and you had all A grades, but if you flunked my assessment, I wouldn't hire you. And if you told me you'd never gone to school, but if you were the best out of 100,000 people at the assessment, I would hire you. So I think we're going through a rotation from the appearance of skill and acumen to the actual essence of skill and acumen. The only reason that we

rely upon degrees is because it's too expensive to assess, to assay talent. But the reason it's expensive to a save talent is because we don't have an automated way to do it. But what if I told you we did? Like, what if I actually gave you, when you apply for a job with me, I give you a test in analytics, a test in English, a test in engineering, a test in whatever. And I just run that with a robot. And if you pass the test and if you're the top one out of a million people,

I don't care that you got a D from a community college or you didn't go or you did go. I don't care anything other than fact, you can do the job. And we're moving toward that world. So that world is a world where you're going to see a disruption of the traditional education establishment. You're already seeing it. You're going to see more of it. I mean, when an Ivy League school charges you $50,000 or $30,000 tuition to study online over Zoom.

Yeah. Let me give you another secret, right? You can go on YouTube and you can go to the basic, the original sources and you can bypass, you know? Why do I want to learn? But here's an interesting question. I'm the CEO of a publicly traded company. I've been doing it for 22 years.

I got 30 years experience. I will sit and tell you how to run a publicly traded company. Why would you want to go to business school, pay $50,000? and have a professor that's never run a publicly traded company that read books written by a guy that's never run a public traded company. Talk to you about how to run a publicly traded company. Like, just like, why do I want to learn math from the 800,000th best? You think the people teaching calculus, like in, you know, in the 800,000, you know, public elementary or public high school?

Do you think that person is the best calculus? No, I always say that. Like, you know, practitioner in the world? Turn down UCSD and go to Harvard. And I say, do you think that they, you know, know, know, fourth, fifth, sixth law of thermodynamics that, like, we haven't learned yet. And you see San Diego, which a public institution

and a very good one at that. I want to take it a step further, if you'll indulge me. Why not, you know, instead of learning for Michael Saylor, or let's put it this way, getting back to my friend Isaac Newton again, you know, who would you rather learn calculus from? So Isaac Newton has, you know, 800,000 words that he's written down. I'm sure you're aware of this software, GPT3 and all these artificial intelligence codes.

So it turns out that people like him, like my personal hero, Galileo, over here, I'll send you a little finger puppet sometime. Yeah. So Galileo, he wrote the best book probably written in popular science ever written called the Dialogue on Two World Systems. I'd never read it until I was an 18th year professor at UCSD. and it's all his philosophy, and he's a wonderful writer.

He talks about, like, learn directly from him. Yeah, just dump this in to GPT3, and then I don't have to like even just wait for you to put out your master class. I can, anytime I want, in my pajamas, learn from Galileo,

from Albert Einstein, from Noam Chal, you know, whoever you want to learn from, but it will be synthetic. And the question is, is it just credentialism? Like, I mean,

people are paying for this, this notion of, the superiority of the Harvard degree and having that credentialism. Do you see that collapsing as you foresaw back in 2012, the collapse and dematerialization of currency of virtualization process? Do you see that occurring thanks to artificial intelligence? I do. At what rate?

I'm clear of what rate, but absolutely collapsing. What we didn't get to when I talked about the implication of the virtual wave, the implication of the virtual wave is that you need one really great community. and the other 800,000 mediocre ones don't have a job anymore. Like during the lockdown, there's a family, the Peterson's, and they blew to prominence on YouTube. They have 800,000 views. It's the perfect family.

Like, they're all beautiful. They're all talented. They all get along with each other. The music is great. They play well. It's well produced. They give it away for free. and they've got fans everywhere in the world.

And here's what I thought. I thought, well, there could be no family that perfect. Right. Like they could, but then I realized, well, they're the one in a million families that is that perfect, right? And then I thought, you know, there used to be 27,000 local bands playing to 200 people in a pub. And they're all out of business because the pubs got shut down.

And everybody's sitting at home watching this perfect family on YouTube, playing in super high deaf. And for them to become superstars, 20,000 decent average musicians had to lose everything, had to be suppressed. And what you're describing is, you know, why don't we just go to the first, to the source? Now, by the way, maybe Galileo and Isaac Newton

are the two best people to teach. But, you know, maybe Isaac Newton was not a good teacher, but there is somewhere in the last 300 years it is. the beauty of like the YouTube algorithm is they'll figure out the best one right when you go to youtube they will find the most beautiful family they will find the best they will find they will find the most entertaining whatever so i don't match it to you right they'll match it to your click rate your yeah and and you know there's a certain degree of immortality we're going to get starting in the 21st century right Isaac Newton didn't have the ability to upload all of his

lectures. Feynman did, by the way, right? Feynman's lectures. There's a lot of stuff that was videotaped in the 60s, 70s and 80s. It's now finding its way to YouTube and is not going to die ever. And some of it's really good. Yeah. You'll find like, you know, I'll find my hero, maybe Robert Heinlein, one of my favorite authors, he gave a speech at a science fiction conference, whatever, in 1970 or whenever. And I can go back and I can be a fly on the wall and watch him speak, even though I, I, And I feel like this is great. I'm moving through time and space to go back in time to see something that happened when I was just barely born. Yeah.

And I think 500 years from now, right, maybe that will last. We have the music of Beethoven because we can perfectly reproduce it. Right. And there's nothing produced by any composer in the last 100 years that's worth listening to compare it to Beethoven. I'd just rather just go back, rewind. And I think, I think you'll see. the same? How is her copyright on Principia? Mathematica, right? It's 300 years old. There's not 99% of what you need to know probably shouldn't be copyrighted. No, it's not actually. It's funny that you

mention it for this book. So this book is translated by Stillman Drake. I don't know if you can see it. The forwards by some guy named Albert Einstein who calls it perhaps the greatest book of popular science, so to speak, that was ever written. And he was known to write some books. This book exists. It's existed for almost 400 years. I've seen an original copy. My friend Jay Passacoff, professor at Williams College in Massachusetts, owns an original copyer at Williams College does. And this book, you turn it, it's pages are history.

That book is more available in almost every other form, except no one's ever made an audiobook version of it. Can I download it to iBooks? You can't get an electronic version of it in this particular translation. You can get the 60. You have me salivating right now. I feel like I want it. But the way I want it is I just want to download it to my iPad.

You cannot do it. So what I'm doing, Michael, and I'd love to involve you. It's a good enough. You would think that Google would have done that as part of the Gutenberg. It doesn't exist. So this is the definitive translation. Stilman Drake, professor at University of California. It's dead now.

But this from 1950. I am with an Italian physicist colleague, are making not only the translation of it, but we're actually recording the audiobook. So you'll be able to get this. and I'm not doing it for profit. I don't care about the profit. You're resonating with this man's mind that's 400 years old. And I should point out that this is a case where technology is kind of,

the progression of technology actually was detrimental because this book is cheaper than Darwin's origin of species. And the reason why is because of technology, Darwin's origin of species written 200 years after, it should be cheaper, right? It's actually much more rare because it was printed on paper, not parchment, like the original version of this. Paper has acid in it. The paper was causing it to disintegrate,

but it made the characters wider, brighter, on the page, leapt off the page more. And so in that case, technology is actually bad, and it's more rare, more valuable to have a copy of origin of species than to have an original dialogue by Galileo, which is 200 years older. Anyway, I thought that was a cute tidbit. But I am taking this book, and my goal is before I... He actually has another book, which I think...

I'd love to send you a copy of Michael, if you'll give me your address. It's called the military compass. And you're like, what the hell is this? It's actually one of his first books, if not his first book, 1600, he wrote it. And in it, he talks about this compass is really a slide rule,

and they called it a compass. And as you, MIT Beavers love or fond of your slide rules. But in it, he goes through all the cool things you can do with the military compass, including currency conversions. And I want to finish up with this before I ask you these three questions, I ask all my guests.

But in the currency conversion section, he goes, you've got Venetian Scuti, and you want to convert it to Florentine Dukati, or whatever, I forget what it is. And he goes through the exercise of how you use a slide roll to, you know, this is to people in 1600 before calculus and whatever. So the slide rule that he invented, he really wrote the instruction manual for it. And he goes through it.

And I'm thinking as I'm reading this book, which is also doesn't exist in electronic form, doesn't exist in audiobook form. So that's another one. It's only 50 pages long. But anyway, when you read it, I'm thinking, I'm just like, I want to shake him. I'm like, Galileo, take this book, which there's only like 100 copies left in the whole planet of his compass book. It's even more rare than the dialogue. And I said, Galileo, in my dream, shaking him, put these books away.

Because in 400 years, no one's going to care about a scutti, a billion scutti, a trillion ducati, because you can't do anything with it. But one copy of your book, it'll be worth $18 million. And if you just put that- It is. It is a scarce asset. So Michael, I know your time. You've been so generous. I hope we can do maybe a part two.

I want to maybe pick your brain with a friend of a friend named Peter Thiel, who I've met and has similar ideas about education. And I think it'll be fun to have a conversation, be a fly on the wall, digital fly-on-the-wall, if I can set that up with you. It's refreshing to talk to you and to get a glimpse of. of the future perhaps and your thought process. And to hear your very intellectually honest perspective on life and everything, I hope we could do a part two.

Maybe that will be in the car. I'd be fine. I'd be happy to. That'd be great. Thank you, Michael, for doing it together and I'll be there. I enjoyed our discussion. Thanks for having me. Me too.

Thank you. I'm sorry to interrupt this video, but I have to say you're going to not want to miss Michael Saylor's answers to the questions of what he would put on a, monolith that would last for a billion years, what his last will and testament will be of the ethical variety. And also, you won't want to miss what he would tell a younger version of Michael Saylor to have the courage to go into the impossible. These are the thrilling three final questions I ask all my cherished guests. But to get access to Michael's answers, you're going to

have to subscribe to my newsletter at briankeating.com. It's been a blast. I've had tons of tons of new followers. And this is a great way. for me to connect with you, offer free giveaways like a signed book by Michael and by other people that we've had on the podcast. It's a way for me to connect with you. So I don't want you to miss the answers that he gives. It's most vulnerable, most incisive answers that I've ever heard him give personally, a little bit biased because I asked them, but he's an amazing intellect. You don't want to miss his answers. Please sign up. I won't spam you. You get one email a week with the tips and tricks from the brightest minds in the multiverse.

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