The Future is Bitcoin with Michael Saylor | EP #9 Moonshots & Mindsets

Before we move to outer space, we will move to cyberspace. Yes, I agree. So the next big move is: how about if we give property rights and we make rich 8 billion people in the real world by moving their wealth into cyberspace, where we’ll be protected from debasement and destruction? A massive transformative purpose is what you’re telling the world. It’s like, this is who I am; this is what I’m going to do; this is the dent I’m going to make in the universe.

Welcome to Mindsets and Moonshots. It’s my pleasure to welcome a longtime friend, one of the smartest people I know, Michael Saylor. Michael is an entrepreneur, executive, inventor, author, philanthropist. He is also perhaps the most prominent and brilliant Bitcoin proponent on the planet. He’s the executive chairman of MicroStrategy, a company founded in 1989, just out of MIT, where he served as CEO for 33 years straight. MicroStrategy is the largest independent publicly traded business intelligence company and the largest holder of Bitcoin on its balance sheet. He is a first-principles thinker extraordinaire and provides the most clear and cogent arguments for Bitcoin I’ve ever heard. Beyond Bitcoin, he has a compelling mastery of financial markets, history, technology, inner workings of blockchain, and makes a compelling conversation to have and listen to. He is the creator of the Sailor Academy, sail.org, providing free educational services to over 1 million students to date.

Full disclosure: Michael and I were both fraternity brothers at Theta Delta Kai at MIT. He was, uh, I think three or four years behind me. We both earned degrees in aeronautical and astronautical engineering, and Michael also got a degree in science, technology, and society.

Michael, a pleasure to have you here, pal.

Nice to see you again, Peter.

Yeah, no, it’s uh, I think last time I saw you was in your digs in Miami, just towards the beginning, middle of the pandemic. You know, one of the things I remember we did that I’d love if you would do again here was you walked through the potential of Bitcoin as a store of value, you know what it could potentially be worth in the future. That was beautifully done. I had a similar conversation with Cathy Wood on my stage, so I guess the question is: under certain circumstances, in terms of sovereign wealth funds or store of value replacing gold, what could Bitcoin get to? What’s the math behind that?

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

Yes.

Yeah, if you know money is economic energy, and so I want to have a certain share of economic energy and the civilization, and I want to maintain it for a long time, for generations. So if I buy a city block in Manhattan, it’s kind of intuitive that over 200 years the value of that city block will go up as and if more people move in in Manhattan; it will go up. And so the positives are: people move in the city, and I got a share of the economic activity of the city. The negatives are: it’s going to get taxed by the mayor of Manhattan; there’s going to be zoning regulation by the neighborhood zoning board; it’s going to get potentially taxed by the state of New York; some, it might be the politician decides they really want to build Central Park on my block of land, and they just take it from me, and they pay me, you know, submarket; or maybe they want to turn my land into an airport or into a port. So you own property; it sounds really good, but you have to fight to maintain that property over a hundred years, and your children’s children will have to fight to maintain it.

So um, if I took a million dollars of economic value in, you know, a hundred years ago and I held it in dollars, the US dollar is expanding about 7% a year for the past 100 years. So if you do the math, you find that you lose 99% of the economic value in cash. And that’s why nobody in their right mind would put a million dollars of cash in a box and put a Timex lock on it and in the year 2120 expect their great grandchildren to open the box and for it to be worth anything. It’d be worth nothing.

Sure. If I put a million dollars of gold in a box a hundred years from now, the challenge is: will the bank or the government seize the gold? Pretty much every country on Earth stole everybody’s gold over the last hundred years. If you had it in Germany, it got stolen multiple times: you know, the British, the French, the Japanese, the Russians, even the Americans stole everybody’s gold. So, and if it didn’t get stolen, that’s what that’s what we call counterparty risk, seizure, confiscation. If it didn’t get stolen, if you increase the gold supply by 2% a year, then you realize the half-life of money in gold, that that same a half-life of of energy in a battery, the half-life of money in gold is 35 years, which by the way, we we increase it by 2% because we’re mining new gold every year, right? It isn’t a limited, fixed amount; you can’t stop the gold miners from mining gold. So ultimately, the economic energy stored in the container of gold is dissipating at 2 to 3% a year, which means you’re going to cut it in half once, twice, three times, right? So you’re going to be down to 12 and a half percent of what you had even if it doesn’t get seized.

So when you think about these things, uh, you realize that gold doesn’t really hold economic energy great; it just happens to be the best portable nonsovereign way to move energy around, and portable is a, you know, I’m not going to pick up a ton of gold and move it someplace. Yeah, it’s semi-portable; you couldn’t move a million dollars of gold through an airport, but it’s more portable than a building, right? You’re not moving your building out of LA ever, right? So you you’ve got this conundrum, which is: things that hold their value for a long time, like soccer teams or football teams, maybe, well, they have cultural risk; will people still want to watch football and soccer in 100 years? And they’re not so portable, and they’re very political. Then you have things that look straightforward, like owning a thousand acres of land, but if the if your enemy takes over as governor of the state, they just pass a property tax, so they tax your land away from you, and then you, you know, the oldest oldest cliché is: lost the family farm because we couldn’t pay the property taxes.

Sure. And by the way, that’s an important point, right? Because um, it the value of your land that you own dissipates over time because it’s taxed constantly, and it’s like, you know, you could if you had a deed to a piece of land for 100 years, at the end you don’t own the land anymore if you didn’t pay your taxes.

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

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

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So let’s assume, uh, as you’ve said and I completely agree, gold is getting diluted; you said we said three-fold over the course of 100 years; land and buildings are being taxed and evaporated, if you would, by taxation. So if people start realizing Bitcoin as a strong store of value that isn’t dissipating, isn’t being taxed, um, what is your, you you walk through some of the numbers. If it if it takes a percentage of the store of value of land or gold and so forth, what could be the the price of Bitcoin in the future? Not making any guarantees, but when you think of it as digital gold, then it should replace gold. Gold’s worth 1 trillion dollars, and that takes Bitcoin to 500,000. But when you think of it as digital property, like replacing buildings and and land and and other long-term holds of wealth, then you know you’re up by a factor of 20 or 30 from there. I mean, it shouldn’t be that it’s much better than digital gold because I can move Bitcoin at the speed of light, and I can program it to a million transactions an hour on an iPhone or a website; you can’t do that with gold. So it’s got more utility than gold, which means it’s probably worth 20 or or 30 trillion if it just replaces the gold. But instead of buying the Fontainebleau Hotel, which is a nice hotel, you know, worth whatever billions in Miami Beach, instead of buying that, instead of buying the equivalent amount of Bitcoin, if you bought the Bitcoin, you can move that to any city in the world every hour of the day, compose it, decompose it, recompose it, dematerialize it, and you know, when there’s a nasty tax on it, you can just move yourself to a different jurisdiction where there’s a better tax treatment. And if you think of it like that, then it’s a it’s a multi-hundred-trillion-dollar asset class. So at 10 trillion, it’s 500,000; at 100 trillion, it’s 5 million. So I think, you know, we’re marching toward 10 trillion, which is sorry, sorry, $10 million a coin, which is is why Bitcoin enthusiasts see it’s it’s just a very great long-term store of value, and it’s a great investment idea because it meets the needs of eight billion people. The the average person, the middle-class person that drives an Uber or works as a dentist, they can’t buy $387 worth of a building in New York City every month as their savings plan, right? But and a guy, a person in Africa can’t buy a small share of a nice piece of property; they can’t buy $127 worth of a Picasso painting. So Bitcoin offers property rights, uh, at any scale, any amount of money, anybody in the world, and you can you don’t have to worry about: will people like Picassos? Will they still want buildings in Vegas or New York? Will some politician tax it away from me? Well, you know, ex can I take it through an airport? So uh, if you’re looking for an egalitarian, utilitarian way for people to save money and protect their life force or protect their economic wealth for the next hundred years, and you are looking for something that’s kind of consistent with the mobile wave, Android phones, iPhones, websites, that’s truly global, that that is, it’s more appealing to people in Nigeria and Argentina than it is appealing to people in—I’m going I’m going to get there, right? Because it really is part of creating a world of abundance; it is critically important as a means for that.

You know, Michael, I wake up every morning with you in your tweets. I enjoy I enjoy your tweets; it’s definitely good. I love this one from a little bit ago, and it was it was important and prophetic. You said, uh, I thought it was late, you you said, “I thought I was late to Bitcoin, but apparently not.”

Yeah, and and that’s one of the important things that I think people need to get: it’s not too late to Bitcoin, especially if if we are had the potential to hit 500,000, 5 million, $10 million of Bitcoin. It’s still early in the deceptive phase of its growth. I thought, you know, I thought when Google came public I was too late, but you know, if you look at the really great successes of our lifetime, Peter, the the digital monopolies, the Apple, the Google, you know, the YouTube, the Facebook, you know, these things, MicroStrategy, we thought that we were late to them, but the truth is, Google would have been a good idea to invest in, you know, all the way up to like a few months ago, like yeah, no, I I was, it’s still getting more powerful. And you think you’ve fully embraced Google in the year 2018, but Google was going to get more powerful and surge, and if you thought you understood it in 2020, by 2021 it was more powerful, and the same is true with Apple, and these Apple and Google probably more powerful than most nation-states. Same with Microsoft; we thought Microsoft, we understood that one, and Microsoft got more powerful in the past 24 months.

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

You know, Bitcoin represents a paradigm shift; it’s the digital transformation of money, property, and energy. And paradigm shifts are so profound that you’re staring at them and you don’t realize they took place because your worldview is constructed based upon a bunch of assumptions that you’ve always taken for granted. And so what Thomas Kuhn says in *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, and what we studied at MIT, is there’s only two circumstances under which people willingly undergo a paradigm shift, and one way is: you wait for the Old Guard to die, and the Millennials kind of they get it because they’re different, and and uh, the uh Einstein, you know, said, “God does not play dice with the universe.” Einstein never liked quantum theory. You know, you could be a brilliant person, but you won’t embrace the paradigm shift while you’re alive in the absence of a crisis. There, the second way you get paradigm shift is a war, you right, when there’s a war and there are bombs dropping from about you, you don’t believe in atomic power, but then someone drops a nuclear weapon and the city evaporates, and all of a sudden you become a believer, and you reassess your priorities. I would posit there’s another way, which is when something is 10 times better than anything else, 10 times cheaper, 10 times faster, 10 times better; it’s like how I got my mom and dad to go to a digital camera or to use Google or the web, right? It’s like when it’s that much better—

Yeah.

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

Yeah, right. And clicked, what clicked for you with Bitcoin? Was it when was it? Was it March of, was it?

You know, it’s the second quarter of 2020, and what clicked was was uh a couple of things. Uh, we had a K-shaped recovery; Main Street was shut down; it’s pretty, you know, millions of people have lost their jobs; the economy is contracting. And then Wall Street exploded and recovered and hit all-time highs, and we and what I saw six weeks later, right? Yeah, financial assets were having the best year ever; people had great years; I mean, a lot of these hedge fund managers, they had the best year of their life in 2020 or 2021.

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

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

Yeah. You think, but it wasn’t appreciated.

Yeah. So we’re there; we have to take a risk; we literally have to, or we got to sell the company, right? We’re done one way or the other. And I said—

Well, this is a reasonable risk because it looks like it looks like the Facebook of money or the Google of money in the year 2010 or 2011. While 98% of the world doesn't understand it, it's a bit too complicated; they're afraid of it. But just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't true; it just means you don't know.

And I had the experience of writing the mobile Wave Y, and I'm the guy in 2011 that bought Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google stock. And you know, they all worked out well. And I thought the year's 2020, we're at the end of the mobile wave. You know, I I tell a story of, you know, I tell a funny story in the mobile wave about my niece on a beach, and she's like, I don't know, eight years old, and she wants the Big Apple. And I said, "Oh, you want to go to New York City?" Uh, she's like, "Give me the Big Apple for my birthday." And I said, "You want to go to New York City?" She goes, "No, I want the iPad." And I thought, okay, little girl wants an iPad, that means that the entire world wants this, and this is going to be a big deal, so buy Apple stock.

Well, in 2020, I'm talking to the same niece, and I said, "What do you thinking?" She goes, "Yeah, well, I just bought some Amazon stock, and like Amazon's trading like $3,300 a share," you know, "and and it just doubled." I'm like, "Okay, well, if 20-somethings now know they should buy Amazon and Apple and Google, this is not an this is not a misunderstood technology trend anymore. Every Uber driver understands that this is like the 2001c bus where every every uh tax driver back then was telling you what what stocks they were buying." So get off the mobile wave, get on the crypto wave, and and think that through, and and uh so that that kind of made the decision straightforward. It wasn't without risk, but the alternative was pretty much throw in the towel and just get either get beat to death fast or beat to death slowly. And so we got into this business at that time, and of course, the last two years have been uh I think fairly good ones in terms of commercialization, institutionalization of digital assets.

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

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

And yes, and the engineering you're doing right now is engineering the Global Financial system with with uh with Bitcoin. Is that your focus? I mean, we're not building rockets any uh anymore, or at least you and I aren't. I've had a passion for a lot of things in in life, but if we just focus upon Bitcoin right now, I think the fundamental issue is the energy balance in the civilization is broken. I think if you look at the civilization, you could say half of it is is um we provide goods and services, and we trade with each other in in order to uh upgrade the Human Condition and build things of value, right? We build bridges and buildings; we provide goods and services. But the other half is the money uh the financial assets in the economy that create the uh financing, the liquidity that allow the trading and uh money. The way I see money is is in the ideal world, there'd be a certain ledger, a certain amount of money, a 100 million units or 100 billion units, and no one would make any more, and God would keep track of the ledger. And if I owed you, you know, it's it's in the celestial ledger, and then when you owe me, it's the same. Nobody can cheat anybody; everybody can trade with everybody, and the more value the more value I create for society, the more of it I get.

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

Yeah, you know, I'm reminded that George Washington died because his well-meaning physicians bled him to death, and uh they thought they were helping. They I mean, the medical establishment literally thought that they were going to help bleed off the you know, the ill humors. Yes, but they bled him to death, and uh and this is not complicated. If you look at a hyper-inflating economy, be it Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe or look what's going on right now in Lebanon or Turkey or Argentina, when the currency collapses, the businesses collapse. This is the same thing as when I when you're in a car accident and you open an artery and you're literally bleeding out on the pavement. Well, eventually, when you bleed out, your brain stops, your hearts, you get a heart attack, your lungs don't work, you know, suffocate, system collapse. So what's the fundamentals of triage, which is first stop the bleeding? Did not like I see you there. It doesn't matter your arm is broken, right? It that what matters is first are you breathing and there you know, make sure there's oxygen, and then second stop the bleeding, and then we can work on the rest of you. So I think that inflation, monetary expansion, is bleeding to death. We just saw a country collapse uh Sri Lanka. Yeah, just collapsed about a month ago, literally uh and um and the currency stops, and when the currency stops, you can't buy energy, and that you know, they have an edict where they say private citizens can't buy gasoline anymore. Okay, so what happens when your currency loses value? You don't have liquid energy; you can't buy food, right? You're going to starve to death, freeze to death if you don't get beat to death by your neighbor. Okay, so so if you ask me what is my mission, my mission is fix the money, but what does that mean? It means fix the energy balance in the civilization. There's there's a bunch of inefficiencies. One inefficiency is eight billion people can't trade with each other; they can't you if you wanted to trade between a country, a company in South America and a company in Africa, you would have to get access to your local currency, then the dollar, then go through the Federal Reserve or a central bank in New York City, then go through the Central Bank in Africa, then another local bank, and there's seven people that can steal the money along the way, and there's three billion people can't even get a bank account, and you can't write a computer program, right? So I I get it, and the only thing that's changed this over you know, and it's it's extraordinary the life that we're living living today even in the developing world compared to 100 years ago or 500 years ago, definitely 1,000 years ago. You know, the it used to be just the king and the queen on the on the hilltop, and everybody else in abject squalor, and even the king and the queen had a a life far less than than you know people living in in on the street in Venice here have. But it's always it's always been technology that's changing the game. And so when I talk about this uh and I want to break it down a little, but I talk about what I call the 6Ds of exponentials, right? That when you digitize something uh in the be in the beginning, it begins a process of very deceptive growth; it's very slow until you know 30 doublings later, you're a billion times better, and it's disrupting an entire ecosystem, and along the way it's dematerializing, demonetizing, and democratizing. And so Bitcoin is very much all of those those things. The deceptive period of time uh Bitcoin isn't the first cryptocurrency uh to be proposed as a digital store of cash, right? It's it's but it is the one that survived. Yeah, they tried it; they tried it with you know, e-gold, digit cash; they tried it for 20 years uh before, and all of those failed for one reason or the other. Uh, Bitcoin is the first spark that caught hold and became a fire in cyberspace, and it's because it it it drew liberally from all the previous experiments, okay, and it and it combined you know, the cryptography and uh the the general tech ideas with proof of work, which meant that you had an open, permissionless system uh that could work everywhere in the world without a counterparty or a trusted intermediary, and no one could game the system. And uh and so it is the it is the first you know, digital commodity that kind of caught fire, that sparked.

I remember hearing about it actually at Singularity University back in 2010, 11, 12 from some of the the fringe. It was just in the earliest days. I think there were there were uh life-ending uh uh situations that it did avoid along the way, right? I mean, it's is it now fully stable? Is is the risk gone? I think that it's pretty stable at this point. I think that the great risk came in the first few years. Yeah, it's just it's just like again coming back to the metaphor of a fire. If you start a fire, right, and you can put the fire out in the in the first few minutes, but at some point when the fire is taken over the entire warehouse or it's broken out into the entire forest, you can't put the fire out. So I think I think at this point it's it's beyond that event horizon, but certainly back in 2012, 2011, 2013, there a lot of questions like would it be deemed property by the IRS, you know, would it be banned or outlawed? You know, online gambling got banned, and they just shut it down dead on arrival. There so there are a lot of things that that do get squelched. This this had to get to a sufficiently decentralized, diffused point where uh no one regulator, no one nation-state would think they could stop it, and I think we're currently there now. We you you can see that now with the utterances coming out of the White House, the secretary of the treasury, and the head of the SEC and the head of the CFTC. But you couldn't have been sure about that in 2012. And so inst you know, institutions, companies like yourself uh and MicroStrategy uh uh you know, Elon started putting on the balance sheet. I think I think you reached out to Elon and had that conversation originally, didn't you?

Yeah, I did. And uh how hard was it to convince him to put it on the on the balance sheet for Tesla? I I don't it wasn't it didn't take that long; it wasn't terribly difficult. He's a smart he's a smart engineer. Most people don't realize you know uh the the engineering systems around SpaceX are are he's the he's the CEO; he's also the chief engineer there, which is always always nice to see. It's a process of of of dematerialization and disruption that's coming. What is it dematerializing, and what is it disrupting? Einstein tells us matter is energy, and energy is matter. And um if you look at the advances of the human civilization, many people don't think in terms of energy, but if you thought about it, you'd realize that steel is highly concentrated metallic energy, and the reason you can build a 100-story skyscraper is because you put so much energy in into a material that it could withstand the force of gravity up to 100 stories. And so because you have steel, you can build a bridge; you can build a skyscraper; it'll last a hundred years. So that concentrated energy allowed your aspirations to become expansive in time and space, right? That's why we have the Bronze Age giving way to the steel age, right? Uh, oil is concentrated liquid energy, right? And John D. Rockefeller kind of gave us standardized liquid energy. Standard Oil was a pretty big deal. And if you you know, consider trying to cross the Atlantic with wind energy instead of with oil, you could see that it really did catapult the civilization forward. Bitcoin represents digital energy, and and in that way, if you think hard about it, you realize it represents digital matter too. It's the first time it's the singularity whereby we open this portal, and energy can flow into the digital realm. Okay, when Satoshi invented a way to transfer um value from me to you without a trusted intermediary, I can send you a million dollars, no bank involved. Okay, the the critical thing with solving what they call the double-spend problem, but the double-spend problem means I send you the million; I don't have it; you have it. Okay, that's a very low colloquialism, right? In engineering at MIT, we would refer to that as respecting the laws of conservation of energy. Sure, like I I move a 100 kilograms from me to you, right? That it can't be in both places at the same time. I converted matter into energy, energy into matter, right? I can have one or the other. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only change forms; it can vibrate, right? Nicola Tesla said, "You understand the Universe; think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration." So this is a big eye-opener because what you see is that everything in the digital realm before Bitcoin was non-conservative; it was digital information. I send you Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as an MP3 file; you've got it; I've still got it, and it can be redistributed 18 billion times. Sure, so no, you don't own it; you just have a copy. So all of those all of those businesses, Facebook, Google, Apple, they're all based upon digital information revolution first on uh the web and then on a mobile phone, and Bitcoin's big innovation was we don't just move digital information anymore; we move digital energy. It's a it's a not it's a conservative property, and if I can move a million dollars of of energy from me to you, I can move a billion dollars of energy from me to you. But if I can move it uh from me to you, if I can move it over 10,000 miles, I can move it over 10,000 days; I can move a billion dollars from here into the future 30 years. And so that that's a second breakthrough. And then the third breakthrough is if I can move energy through time and space, I can m materialize, manifest energy in cyberspace, right? The big breakthrough is the creation of a billion dollars of something in cyberspace. There's a JP Morgan had a phrase; he said, "Gold is money; everything else is credit." And uh and what that means is you have a bar of gold that is money that is valuable; everything else, a piece of paper, which just is a derivative of or is a security that represents someone else's gold. So you want the money; you don't want the credit. Now in in the world we live in right now before Bitcoin, you can have a million dollars in your bank account, but it's credit; it's the bank says you have it, and the bank can take it away from you. Yes, and you can only move it pursuant to their permission to move it. And right now, the bank doesn't give you an API to move money; there is no yeah, you could have a billion dollars and 10,000 programmers; you can't create a program that'll pay $22 transactions between here and Africa on a Saturday afternoon. You just can't do it. And guess what? For 30 years, you can't do it. And and so all progress has come to a grinding halt in the financial world in the absence of money in cyberspace because Credit in cyberspace is a is a monopoly which is caught up in a bureaucracy. So if we come back to Bitcoin, what is it really? It represents the true digital transformation of money, of property, of energy, of matter, right? This is this is uh four fundamental things the civilization is made of.

For example, can you figure out how to create a wall in the real world, right? I I use steel; I use bricks; I have a brick wall. Peter, run as hard as you can into my brick wall. Okay, well, so you run as hard as you can, and you smash your face, and you end up in the hospital. You ran into a brick wall. You can do that as an engineer in the real world because you have matter, and if you have energy, you can convert to matter, convert into a brick wall. You can do the opposite, right? I can aim a gun at the brick wall, blow it up, or I can burn it and vaporize it, right? So so we have that in the real world, and that's the basis of the Civilization. Now, how do I create a wall in cyberspace? See, here's the idea. If I have money, if I if I have uh Bitcoin in cyberspace, I can actually create a program where um you want to come to my website; you have to post a million Satoshi, and then if you I don't know, start swearing at me, I debit you a thousand Satoshi for every swear word. Okay, or if you start trying to fish me or steal from me, right, or if you just hang out on my website, I start charging you micro-transactions like I charge you a a thousand Satoshi a second. Okay, um I can't do that uh with a credit card because a credit card is credit. I can do it like Can you think of any way to lose a billion dollars in 30 seconds in cyberspace besides losing my uh my my my uh keys? That's one way. Yeah, I once you if you if you've got uh Bitcoin, you could do it that way. There's a famous example of the chairman of I think the HCA corporation uh the the wealthiest man in China. He's on vacation in the Mediterranean a couple of years ago; he's worth like $30 billion, do richest guy, maybe 40 billion. He's walking around the uh you know, some 2,000-year-old Roman ruin; he stands up for a selfie on the wall; he takes a step backwards; he plunges to his death. By the way, the number of people who die from selfies is a ridiculous number; it's you know, it's it's Darwinism. Yeah, it's a yeah, it's sad; it's the tragedy of our time. But I tell the story because in a world of credit, this is a guy that that you know, you couldn't have undone; he could have hired an army of lawyers to bend reality every which way with 16 different appeals. But when you're subject to the laws of nature and conservation of energy, there is no appeal for a mistake, and his life was snatched away from him in a couple of seconds or less because he made a mistake because those are the consequences of that uh there are no consequences in cyberspace without digital energy. The the the reason that Facebook is broken and Google is broken and Twitter is broken and we have armies of bots, right? And there you know, Twitter has 500,000 to a million fake accounts created a day. Wow, 300 million a year. Okay, um there are no consequences because it's free and uh there's and so there's no truth. So if what I want to do is I want to create matter and energy in cyberspace, I need a system which respects conservation of energy, and that means I need you to post a million dollars, and you need to actually lose it in a split second if you make a a mistake. That guy lost $40 billion in one second; that's how fast it went, one second, $40 billion because he was living in the real world. And if you smash up your airplane, same thing in the real world; there are consequences. In cyberspace, in a world of credit, there are no consequences. And if you consider, let's take Visa. When I send you money via Visa, you want a $20 deposit; I send it to you; there's a 2 and a half percent fee, and it takes 60 days to settle, which means that the velocity of the money, you know, the frequency with which I can oscillate the money, is six times a year, and and the cost, the friction on the motion of the money, is such that after it moves 30 times, it's gone. Yeah. Okay, so what if I told you I wanted to oscillate the money at 10 kilohertz, and I wanted it to be without friction, right? And that's that's what music is. So so what Bitcoin represents, it rep it represents the ability uh to move energy at high frequency, like how about a thousand times a second? How about move a billion dollars in a second? How about you know, you're saying to me, "Why would I ever want to charge somebody a billion dollars a second?" What the answer is if someone attacks me 30 million times in one second and I charge them $30 an attack, it's going to cost them a billion dollars to do that. Today, a denial-of-service attack is you know, effectively for the price of the electricity, and there are no consequences, and that's why we have cyber insecurity and we have so much toxicity, and and you can't even trust what people post online because they're probably a bot, and they're not even a real person. And you know, Peter, like every 15 minutes there's a Michael Sailor scam account spun up on YouTube with 20,000 fake listeners, and I spend a million dollars a year taking them down, and they just put them up faster than I take them down, and there's just no way to stop it because there is no there are no consequences in that cyber arena because there is no digital energy to create consequences.

Miche, let's let's turn back to engineering the world, um your purpose and your and your passion. Um, one of the things that is definitely different since you and I were in college together is how the speed at which we're dematerializing and demonetizing products and services, right? And uh one of the questions is the cost of living is dropping in so many different ways at an extraordinary rate, right? We're seeing energy you know, effectively 8,000 times more energy from the Sun hitting the surface; we're heading towards solar at a quick rate; fusion is going to probably come online this decade, fingers crossed, right? We're going to reinvent how we produce food; information is effectively free; comms and and compute is demonetizing at a rapid rate. Um, have you ever read a book uh called *Zero Marginal Society* by Jeremy Rifkin? I haven't read it, but I can imagine what it's referring to. The the basis is listen, we have AI and nanotech coming, and it's going to uh transform uh the cost of of living to demonetize everything. Um, I'm curious what your thoughts are about about that you know, project.

For me, if you would, 2030 years in the future, what do you see coming down the pike? I think the most promising things, to your point clearly, are uh, utilitarian entitlements that you can create with zero marginal cost or zero variable cost. So you know, you know, if we think about things like education, like at my sailor uh sor.org site, I think we sign up 80 or 90,000 new students a quarter, and uh, and so now we're teaching a lot more than MIT did, and we do it for one 1,000th of the price that it would cost them. But instead of teaching uh one and a half million students, it could be 15 million students, or 150 million students, or 1.5 billion students; it scales at literally the marginal cost of some electrons. So you could, you could create a PhD for $1,000 or $22,000 all in for the, you know, price of an iPad and some electricity. It's going to be similar for health, with you know, AI diagnosticians and robotic surgeons, and you know, the stuff that we spend a lot of money on is is demonetizing, and when it demonetizes, it does democratize.

I think, I think the change in the fiscal economic system that enables people, uh, you know, this is for me the underpinning of of creating a world of abundance where we meet the needs of every man, woman, and child on the planet, right? If they've got access to the tech and they have access to the to the uh to the financial energy uh to utilize the tech, uh, what could, what could stop this? What could slow down the driver? Is Technology and Engineering; that's, that's those are the good guys. Yeah, and the danger, the Nemesis, is politics. So ultimately, you know, you know, you paint a picture of, yeah, this is great, energy is getting cheaper, but it isn't getting cheaper in Europe right now, in Germany. Politics shut down the nuclear industry, and the price of energy shot up by a factor of 20.

Yeah, right, and and so politics shuts down the use of fertilizers, politics shuts down the use of nuclear, politics is, you know, shutting down, you know, I, I've got a natural gas well, but nobody wants to actually create a pipeline. Politics shuts down free trade, right? Uh, prices were all plunging, and then we reversed it by putting tariffs on free trade and uh and stopping the sh the shipping. So I think ultimately the the long-term Arc is a good one, and then let me take, I give you an example of politics and education. We could give uh a free college education, a free college degree to everybody on Earth. The great majority of the people in the education establishment don't want to do that; they actually see that as an athma because their, their view of education is the goal of education is to get the budget for Education as high as possible and create the most number of jobs for educators. So if I could actually have one, you know, one teacher of algebra that taught a billion people, that would be viewed as anatha to politicians; they don't want one algebra teacher teaching a billion people, they want a million algebra teachers teaching fewer people. So ultimately, I think you can't, you can't pursue uh entrepreneurial aims without considering the politics. Politics have impacted Uber; they impact fintech; they impact crypto; they, the question is, do you have a disruptive enough, so like when Google came around, they de dematerialized, demonetized, and destroyed libraries, right? I mean, it's like when's the last time you went to a library? Um, but they didn't ask, and in fact, the web sort of has transformed the entire Hollywood media system, and I think if Hollywood media had understood what was going to be happening, they would have tried to stop it, but they didn't.

Okay, well, I, I, I agree on in in general, I'm The Optimist, but let me give you a pessimistic an example of failures. Okay, there is no online poker right now, even though there could be, there, you know, uh, there used to be a site called trade Sports where you could go and you could bet on the statistical outcomes of all manner of things like elections and who was going to win the Super Bowl and and weather, and that got shut down in the same sweep that shut down online gambling; they just defunded that. Um, if you look at Zillow, Zillow is like a great a great uh application in the US. Try zerfing Zillow in uh the Caribbean or in Europe, and what you'll find is 20 years afterwards it still doesn't have any data and it doesn't work anywhere in the world outside the US, and that's, that's because of the market structure and, you know, supported by the political system. So you would think that um after 20 years or 10 years of inventing something it would get embraced by the world, but it hasn't, and it won't, and it and so there are plenty of examples of breakthrough technology that would make the world a better, let's take nuclear, you know, in the US they've never built a nuclear power plant since the formation of a nuclear Regulatory Commission, and so in 50 years we shut down the nuclear power industry, even though, even though it's one of the safest forms of of power, even though it's the cleanest, safest form of energy, and you know what, I think, I think, you know, I didn't understand it when I was younger, but now I see how politics works; I think it was the oil and gas industry that paid the EnV environmentalist to protest against the nuclear industry to spoke to to stoke fear in the hearts of people so that they could protect oil and gas and coal, and now the irony is you've got the solar and the wind industry stoking fear of oil and gas industry, and they're still shutting down the nuclear industry. So I think that there's a lot of uh politics and there it's jockeying of competitor, and one competitor wants to wants to weaponize the political system to shut down another competitor.

How is it possible? In France they Embrace nuclear, and in Germany they reject nuclear, and uh and the human race is supposed to be full of intellectuals and objective Engineers, engineering a better world. So let's talk about, can we engineer a a Greenfield Better World in cyberspace or on Mars or in in O'Neal colonies? I mean, you know, if if we're going to be going someplace, you the worst thing I want to imagine is that we bring old style politics and divisions with us into new in new Arenas. Have you thought about, you know, what you would do for an economic system if if we were, you know, a new nation state if you would were being created offworld or a new? I think about the future of of web 3 being, I'm going to have a citizenship and operate in in a virtual world. I think when you're, when you're engineering these things, you have to consider first the first the engineering envelope: are you on the scurve, or are you after the S curve, or are you before the S curve, and it, you know, if you're too early, you might be a decade early, but you might be a hundred years early, like uh Google Glass 10 years ago; it's nowhere closer to reality today than it was 10 years ago.

Sure, you know, so so firstly you figure out are you in the Zone where some amount of engineering can make a difference. We weren't in that zone for aerospace engineering from the mid 80s all the way till 2010 or 2015, and then at some point we moved into a Zone where you can start to engineer new and interesting space and air vehicles, and we're, we're kind of moving back in the zone. Yeah, you and I when we were uh in in Aerospace and uh, you know, I was a few years ahead; I was had just taken a break from Medical school; I came back to do an aerospace engineering deg undergraduate degree, and I needed to take unified engineering and multivariable calculus, and then I just, I hung out with you and and the the fellow cor 16s to try and and do our problem sets together because doing them by yourself was was definite suicide. Um, but this was like 17 years post Apollo 17, you know, which had landed in in 1972, and the shuttle Challenger exper exploding, it just happened, and it was like, you know, it was like anybody who was passionate about space, it was like it was, it was dead in the water, and it had been for, you know, after that for another 20 years. It's just now, you know, Elon is is revitalizing it with Starship and and and Falcon. That's like, we can get to the moon 50 years ago, but we didn't go back because it wasn't commercially viable. Like when you're thinking about these things, the the question is are is your intent to inspire or to commercialize, and if your intent is to inspire, you go to Everest, you go to the South Pole. Shackleton was inspirational, you know, Apollo was inspirational, but not commercial; people aren't living on the South Pole; they're not living on the moon; we're not making money there. So uh, I think you got to consider are you trying to commercialize something, and and that's a a different state space of things you can do, and I think the second question is you got to consider the politics and the cultural drivers, and you know, we're we're not really on the Earth today, right? We're not going to create a new nation anytime soon, and as long as nation states uh persist, you'll have strong uh say Fiat currencies, and you have to, you have to adjust your commercial activity right to sit within that envelope. In Zillow, they, they're not going to succeed in Europe if they can't get access to the listings, no matter how good their Tech is, no matter how they could spend billions and billions and billions of dollars, it's not going to make a difference, and then um and and in the US they could do certain things, but they can't do other things.

Are you, is is there any part of you that's excited about space still, about where it's going? Is it has anything recatalog propulsion technology and you know specific energy of fuels and and efficiency of them? There isn't an order of magnitude Improvement in jet engines in the last 40 years; the the the Gul stream 6 or the global Express is 20% more efficient than 30 years ago, so we're not getting order of magnitude increases. So if if you really want to change the world, you have to give 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 orders of magnitude increase. So I'll be, I think fundamentally it comes down to energy, right? When you can actually put a sugar cube in a coffee cup and and wrap a fusion reactor around it, and you can generate enough energy uh to fly you know Electro car for 20 years straight off of the sugar cube, then I'm enthusiastic, and if you want to go to Mars, you know, you got to have water and you got to have massive amount of energy, you know, to heat this stuff up, you know, just like even in Ron Moore's, you know, remake, you know, For All Mankind, he like, we're going to the Moon, we found water on the moon, and we, you know, we can use the water to Stage. Okay, well, if we had a if, you know, in Ron Moore's making of it, they've got like pocket nuclear reactors on the moon in the 1980s combined with water. By the way, I've, I really have enjoyed that series; it's they've done a beautiful job.

Yeah, so my issue is uh is I would be enthusiastic if we if we you know commercialized fision and fusion and energy sources, and if we work through some of the materials issues, and then I think maybe there's something there, but right now it's pretty clear that if you gave me 10 billion dollar or hundred billion dollar and I had a choice between uh can I provide education for free to 8 ion people, can you make 8 billion people live a happier life for five additional years, can you uh can you fix the money in the world and make trade a 100 times as efficient, those are all potentially doable things, can I actually put a million people on the moon or 10 million people in a self-sustaining Colony on Mars? I don't think you're going to do it for a hundred billion dollars, I don't. So so I think that it falls into the category of inspirational and experimental; we're looking for something, and look, if the Germans can't figure out how to generate electricity in Germany because they reject technology, you know, like why don't we fix our own planet, and right now on our on our own Planet we're rejecting technology right and left, and there are massive political struggles. So I, I guess the the appeal of the off-planet people, the hinin people, is this planet is too crowded; it's beat; we just got to get out of here, and where there's more living bstrm, right? We need living space away from the politicians, and that was, that was always the libertarian appeal, like Go West Young man, go. I think the libertarian appeal wasn't about more, there's plenty of space on this planet; it was I want to go someplace that doesn't have a set of laws already in place where I can create my own uh set. I mean, there's there's no there's no space on the planet where there's not a political, I mean unless you have an army and you can you can take over a country and Conquer it, I mean there're you still don't have political, you still don't have peace.

Yeah, you, I, I agree with that, and so part of the part of the question is will how will Humanity seed itself going forward? Before we move to outer space, we will move to cyberspace. Yes, I agree with. So the next big move is how about if we give property rights and we make Rich 8 billion people in the real world byov moving their wealth into cyberspace where it'll be protected from debasement and destruction? I love that, I love that. When you put stuff in orbit, when you're putting an outer space, I put a million pounds in orbit and I can move it around, it'll go in orbit forever; that's the Breakthrough. But when I put a billion dollars in cyberspace, I'm putting a billion dollars in orbit; it'll last forever. Right now the halflife of your money is seven years or something. So so the next big move is fix the energy, the the political economic Energy System in our civilization, because by my calculation we're wasting somewhere in the order of 1020 trillion dollars a year because our economics are broken. And so what could you do if I gave you 10 trillion a year in the dividend to work on science, right? So so there's no point and losing 10 trillion a year every year for the next 30 Years why we try to do something scientific because we're just bleeding out. It's back to the issue of stop the bleeding before I'm not getting a PhD while I'm bleeding to death on the sidewalk.

Hey everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode; want to tell you about something I've been doing for years, every quarter or so, having a FLOTUS come to my home to draw Bloods to understand what's going on inside my body, and it was a challenge to get all the right blood draws and all the right tests done, so I ended up co-founding a company that sent of fonus to my home to measure 40 different biomarkers every quarter, put them up on a dashboard so I can see what's in range, what's out of range, and then get the right supplements, medicines, peptides, hormones to optimize my health. It's something that I want for all my friends and family, and I'd love it for you. If you're interested, go to myli force.com back/Peter to learn more. Let's get back to the episode. I'm going to change the subject to uh one that I'm passionate about and I'm working on and is connected in a way to uh to bitcoin, which is the area of longevity, and my question for you, Michael, is how long do you want to live? I want to live as long as I can be constructive and enjoy the enjoy life. Okay, so so if you have the ability to have the cognition, the Aesthetics, the mobility, you know, for the next, you know, 60 or 100 years, you're good with that? I'd be okay with that. Okay, that's, that's important. There's there's a connection for me in between uh between Bitcoin and longevity; you know, there's a lot of work going on; this is most of my company's Investments right now are in this area, the idea that we can slow, stop, and even reverse aging, working on aund million age reversal ex prise right now to to turn back your biological age 20 years. Um, you know, I'm I'm just curious your thoughts about about this conversation and and do you have this conversation with anybody? Does that of interest to you? I mean, there's similar because big coins about conservation of economic energy, and you're talking about conservation of Life Energy, life force; they're both pursuing Immortal Life. One Is The Immortal Life of your economic energy; the other is The Immortal Life of your of your Consciousness. Um, and the enemy is uh dissipation of energy, right? You know, dissipation, bleeding off of energy and bleeding off of life's energy in in in which is sickness, right? Today we live in a sick care system uh that basically uh, you know, Therapeutics are about maintaining your sickness, not curing it, to a large degree. John D Rockefeller lived to the age 99 and 34, 99, almost a hundred, and uh he's famously known for having set up, you know, the entire modern American Medical system, maybe the medical system of the world, and endowing doctors and the like, but he famously rejected all medical care; he was homeopathic, and his view was a lot of the doctors were quacks, and uh and many of the drugs and the surgeries were iatrogenic. His thoughts are echoed by Upton Sinclair who wrote the fasting cure more than a hundred years ago where he basically observed that most diagnosis, most drugs, most surgeries were counterproductive, and the best thing you could do when you're sick is just stop eating for a while while, and he wrote an entire book about it like two in 1910. And when I think about health and I observe what we've learned over the past few years or or however long it is, it's it's um healthy living, right? Think about, I'm inspired by Paleolithic uh, you know, the entire paleo Theory; how did human beings live for three million years as hunter gatherers and asked the question a 100,000 years ago, did your great exg grandfather or grandmother do the thing you're about to do? And if the answer is like drink large copious amounts of alcohol, pure sugar, take lots of pharmaceutical drugs, you know, have your stomach stapled, right, and have other random surgeries, probably not, or sit on a chair and watch TV. But if uh if you say to yourself, get up, move around, get exercise, eat lean proteins, eat a mixture of organic foods, drink water, right, that probably they did that. And so I tend to be skeptical of uh of a lot of medical intervention; I, I think that the modern establishment invents a lot of a lot of diseases so they can treat them. Like they want to tell you that your six-year-old kid has Attention Deficit Disorder so they can give them Aderall, but we didn't have Aderall growing up and we didn't take it, and uh we got on just fine, and maybe maybe, you know, getting bored of things that are boring is a positive trait and not a negative trait. I think one of the other things that science tells us to do is to de-stress and have fun.

Um, what are you doing for fun these days? I try to get out a lot; I like gardening; I get out in the gardens; I do a lot of running, walking through nature; you know, I like the boat; I get out on the water; I play chess. I like that, that's good, a good Pursuit; you're you're able to lose yourself in a very intricate calculations. Yeah, a lot of reading, lot, you know, there's a there's a world of infinite learning now; you can pretty much learn anything, any amount about anything at your fingertips if you just start to Surf through podcast or Google or Yahoo or or YouTube or the like. And so I have 11, my 11-year-old boys are learning everything they could possibly need to learn on YouTube these days; it's extraordinary. Um, Chad Hurley had no idea what he was what he was creating, or maybe he did, but I don't think he saw the potential of what of what's become. If if you were Emperor King and I'm not or or you know head of of of Bitcoin Inc or not, say go back Emperor King, what what changes would you make in the world right now, Mike? What what would be the most important changes uh that that you would make in re-engineering our civilization top down? What are your top like five? I think uh less government would be helpful. Okay, libertarian Tendencies; I love that. I won't go into detail because it's all very highly controversial, but I just think in general we have too many rules and uh and too many well-intentioned politicians that are attempting to help, but they unintentionally introduce iatrogenic interventions. So do do we go with the in order to add a law you have to remove a law, and do we go with a Dem direct democracy? Just just less, just less less well-intentioned politicians helping us how to live. Uh, beyond that, uh, I think the world would benefit if uh everyone had just free infinite education online; there's no reason why you can't learn most things for free, and so making uh making education free is a good thing. I also think that there's no reason why 8 billion people shouldn't be able to get a wallet that holds any mixture of currencies and assets and properties in their wallet and trade with each other. I, I would say I'm a I believe in Trad; I, I think that if you want to if you want to encourage abundance then allow people to freely trade with each other at High Velocity without anybody siphoning off part of the trade with the with the minimum of friction. Yeah, right, like there there are a lot of places where they just it's impos like it's impossible to trade if you manufacture something in a certain Central African Republic and you're dependent upon the CFA, which is the currency, the currency terminates in Europe; you can't trade it; go to your computer terminal; there's not even a price for it; it's you there's there's not even an exchange rate for it. There are people that live either unbanked or they live in a currency which is not a hard currency; if that person could be your tutor, you know, or your accountant, you know, how do they get paid? How do they do business? So I think an open monetary system, an open, I think the internet has gone a long way toward giving us an open Communication System; I think just spreading more openness would be a benefit. I think that the uh that having common language, common mores, common currencies, uh common ability to communicate, all of those things have moved the human race forward, and the opposite of all those things, compartmentalization, right, and uh and the like uh drags us backwards.

Do you have a mindset that you think has been like the most important mindset for you that's allowed you to succeed? What would you describe that mindset as? Let me boil it down to 10 observations. I was asked by by uh somebody for advice for his children entering adulthood, and he said, can you just write down your advice for them? Sure, I thought about it, and I boiled it down to 10 phrases: one, Focus your energy; you have limited energy in your life; you think you can accomplish more than you can accomplish; you really can't do a hundred things; you might be able to do, you can't do 10 things; you may you'll be lucky to do one thing, but Focus your energy. The second is guard your time; people are going to actually chew into it, and if you're trying to accomplish something and you're and if you're not thoughtful about your time it'll be dissipated. Yes. The third is train your mind; you, you, you know, train your mind to do whatever it is you've decided, whether it's music or math or engineering or something. The fourth is train your body; you should stay in stay healthy; take care of yourself; if your body breaks down, you know, your mind will follow. Fifth, think for yourself; the world's full of people that are telling you what to think, and they spend their entire life plan narratives and ideas in your head, most of which are dysfunctional that are self-serving to sell. We didn't have breakfast; people invented breakfast to sell you cereal, right? When you were I, I were growing up, there was no add; they invented add to sell adal like stuff happens. So think for yourself and decide whether or not you believe what people

Are you telling me I think the sixth is curate your friends. You know, you don't need many; you just need a few. Decide who you want to be in your social sphere.

The seventh is curate your environment. Yes, where do you want to be? Put yourself in a safe place, a calm place, a productive place, right? Whether it's controlling what you have in your room or what you have in your house, or physically where you live, or what country you live in, or the like, but curate it.

Eight, keep your promises. If you make a promise, keep it. If you lose—if people lose faith in you—they won't help you; they won't trust you ever again. It's just bad karma.

Nine, stay cheerful and constructive. Right, there's a lot of reasons to get negative, but it won't help. And so, whatever you're pursuing, no matter how many cynics and critics come at you, you have to continually, cheerfully, constructively pursue it and not focus upon the negatives, because it just distracts and dissipates energy.

And then, 10th, upgrade the world. Right, be an engineer; upgrade; leave the world a better place. Whether it's your garden, your house, your product, your book, something, right? You know, and you're awake, hopefully you upgrade the world such that someone can trace some improvement to the fact that you existed on this planet. And that's that's my mindset.

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

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

Are you going to build that?

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

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

Yeah, it's a lovely thought, isn't it?

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

Yes, because uh, it's just an organically evolving thing. And if you roll the clock back 13 years, it was just a few cypherpunks working on it, and then it picked up power, and now exponential—baby, exponential! There's people in every country and every language working on something, and they're doing it because it's the right thing to do, and they feel like this is their best hope at creating something truthful that is beyond—beyond corruption. It's an incorruptible, beautiful thing.

And like, let's take Wikipedia. Like, people are corrupting Wikipedia right now, right? They were just trying to redefine the definition of recession.

Yes, I saw that. If you—if you get famous enough and controversial enough, they'll go to your Wikipedia and they'll just write stuff about you; you know, relentlessly attack you. And what we—what we see is that uh, history is written by the victors, and you start to wonder what really happened a thousand years ago, you know, because the Romans tell you the Carthaginians, you know, kind of worshipped idols and burned their babies or something, but maybe the Carthaginians would have said something different if they hadn't had their city raised and sacked. You know, my—my mission, my purpose is to inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future for Humanity. And uh, I love that one of the tweets you put out uh, it said, "Everywhere in the world, Bitcoin represents free, Freedom, money, and hope," and I think people need hope more than anything else on the planet.

Yep, they need hope. We got to give them hope. And the way you give them hope is you either give them—you give them uh, empowerment through education, or you give them empowerment through technical utility, or both, or you give them power through economic energy, but you—you know, it's the most depressing thing would be not that I don't have money; the most depressing thing would be, I give you $100,000, Peter, you live in Africa, and then the money is worthless in 12 months because a politician debases it to zero with hyperinflation. Or even worse, not giving it—I work my butt off to earn it, and I have an entire year's worth of savings that is no longer able to feed my family. You know what I talked about with the skyscraper? I said, because steel is highly concentrated metallic energy, you could build a 100-floor building or you could build a bridge that spans a thousand meters. That's because you can walk out and trust the steel; you can hope for something expansive. And the same is true with money. If the money won't last a hundred years, you can't have a hundred-year dream. If the—if I told you everything you own will—will dissipate on January 1st of next year, your life is hopeless, and so therefore you just spend and squander everything in the next few months because you know it's going to be gone on January 1st of next year. So the time horizon, that the scope of the aspirations in space and time of humanity is controlled by the technologies we have at our disposal, and money is just a technology, like antibiotics is a technology.

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

Yeah, it's a—it's—and it is beautiful in that way. If you—if you have a world where the internet reaches anybody on Earth and where you have a monetary network like Bitcoin that reaches—enlightening—that reaches everywhere on Earth, and if you have uh, a technology like Zoom or—or like that reaches everywhere on Earth, then you can trade, you can educate, you can inspire, you can trade with, you can work for, you can employ anybody on Earth, and that allows people to reach their full potential, and then after they do it, they can have hope that they'll be able to retain their life force and their life savings, and that allows them to dream for something better for their family, their friends, right, their children—a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future. I guess it's a lot better than we ever had in the history of the world, so that's something positive to be said.

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

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

See you, buddy.

Yeah, you too. Keep up the good one. [Music] Thanks.