How To Spread Bitcoin Adoption To Everyone
This is a transcribed version of a special edition “Bitcoin Magazine” podcast with Aleks Svetski and Michael Saylor having a long-form conversation about the implications of Bitcoin and its effects on the world.
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Transcript
[00:00:13] Aleks Svetski: The level of craziness and the level of intervention and the level of kind of like. What Alan Watts would call “do-goodery.” right. You’ve got people who, whether their intent is good or bad, irrespective their process is a little bit ridiculous.
And ESG is one of these examples, right? It’s trying to pretend your way into prosperity. It’s, you know, let’s let’s wrap corporations and institutions and companies, and at some point individuals into another set of arbitrary rules for the stated purpose of saving energy or doing social good, or, you know, good governance or whatever, but you actually end up doing the opposite.
So, you know, in many ways, Bitcoin ends up in the firing line of that, whether we like it or not, and we can be as apolitical as we want about it. But, you know, there, there comes a point where you need to sort of draw the line and say no, you know, this is. We’re jumping off a cliff here.
This behavior is ridiculous. You know, Sri Lanka, I saw Marty bent, posted something about Sri Lanka today, who was one of the first countries, you know, messing around with this ESG stuff. And, you know, they’re having a collapse of food and energy and all this sort of stuff. So I feel like it’s tricky.
It’s it sounds nice and principled to be apolitical, but at the same time, it’s almost impossible to kind of stay apolitical when everything is becoming political.
[00:01:41] Michael Saylor: So I, I think that you have to engage in the political dialogue. That’s true. But you also could do it in a constructive way, or you can do it in a destructive way. For example the ESG narrative is just used by a competitor to undermine another competitor. So the oil companies used ESG to get people to shut down nuclear power plants.
Okay. So if you are, if you’re going to be effective, you need to identify who your real enemy is. Your enemy, the enemy of the nuclear power plants. Weren’t people that wanted to protect the environment. The enemy of the nuclear power plant was lobbyists paid off by oil companies to shut them down. And if you actually put, if you actually put that front and center, you’d probably be much more effective.
[00:02:33] Aleks Svetski: actually.
[00:02:34] Michael Saylor: When online gambling was shut down, it was Indian reservations funneling money through fundamentalist Christian organizations to a lobbyist in DC that convinced politicians that gambling online is an abomination of the eyes of God. Okay. So if you’re supporting online poker, you could declare a war on, you know, like all of the evangelical Christians and 25 million Southern Baptists, but they weren’t really your enemy.
You’re your enemy. Your enemy was a couple of marketing people working for a casino on a reservation that actually, you know, staged a gorilla marketing effort. And if you were to go to every church, And protest against the churches and say, you know, the churches are our enemy and Christianity is the enemy.
You would’ve picked a fight that you can’t win. That was unnecessary. The ESG objections to Bitcoin don’t come from environmentalists. They don’t come from institutional investors. Are, they come from alt corners. It’s the proof of stake networks that pay the lobbyist to lobby the politicians.
They write the op-ed pieces. They plant the stories. They pay for academic research. All of this stuff is sponsored by the other crypto competitors. And so if you were to say, oh the Europeans are stupid or the politician is stupid, or the environmentalist or enemy or big companies are enemy, or the institutional investors are enemy.
You would basically be chasing a red herring, right? You effectively, what’s going on is your enemy wants you to go to war with someone a hundred times as big as you, and they’re laughing their ass off and you’re taking the bait, right? It’s like I go into a town, you know, and there are two gangs and they each have a hundred warriors.
So I kill one of the warriors from one gang and I pin it on the other gang and I kill one of the guys from the other gang and I pin it on the first gang and I leave town and I wait for the two gangs to kill each other. And then I come back and take over. You see, as there was, this was all just a false flag, operation of sorts.
So yeah, that doesn’t mean you can’t get engaged with politics, but you probably should keep in mind, you know, who you’re really competing against generally. It’s competitors are weaponizing the political process to defeat their arrival. Right. And if I’m gonna do it right, I have to wrap myself in the mantle of being environmentally friendly, or I have to be doing it for the public.
Good, right? Like my competitor, whatever is bad for the environment. And then I get some politician to do that, and the politicians are gonna want some moral justification, but ultimately if you follow the money, you’ll find that, that they’re just supporting another competitor. And it works both ways.
Right? Ironically the oil companies buried the nuclear power companies using the political process. And then later on you know, the solar and the wind people bury the oil companies using the same process. They’re just weaponizing the political process. So you can’t not engage, but. You can be a little bit more thoughtful about how you engage
Figure out who really is, who is driving the narrative. And generally most of these organizations they’re influenced by their donors to do whatever is right. You know, it’s interesting. If you look at the American diabetes association who gives money to the American diabetes association in order to fight diabetes
[00:06:15] Aleks Svetski: it’s not like Coke and Pepsi and all those guys or the candy companies.
[00:06:20] Michael Saylor: and and when you and when you read the ma head, it says something like we don’t really know what causes diabetes. Okay. But we do know what causes diabetes but the organization doesn’t wanna say what causes diabetes, because. To a certain degree, their sponsors have have a vested interest in no one deciding what causes diabetes.
It’s better. If it’s just an unfortunate disease that we can treat with expensive drugs.
[00:06:48] Aleks Svetski: Yeah, but see, at what point does one draw the line and stop playing within a false Overton window, right? Because that’s what all of these things seem to be. I guess what I’m hearing from you is that the strategy is, you know, U use their Overton window and use their arguments. , you know, kind of like a, almost like an Aikido, you know, flip the energy back their way versus, you know, the other strategy being more confrontational and just saying no, that I will not operate in that Overton window.
This is true. And this makes sense over here, not over there. So I dunno it’s a tricky one. I mean, I’m obviously more confrontational when I see something stupid. I need to point out that it’s stupid because it’s stupid. And it’s it’s a tricky one.
[00:07:37] Michael Saylor: Yeah I think it’s complicated. Your best strategy is to is the strategy, which persuades the people with the power to support your point of view, right? if you don’t persuade the people with the power to support your point of view, you haven’t succeeded. So you just gotta figure out how to do that.
Generally, I find that being constructive and cheerful and educational is a lot more effective than being toxic and confrontational. Look on Twitter. If you’re toxic and confrontational, you just get blocked and then you have no influence over anybody that follows that person ever again.
So. And it, you know, if you walk into a mayor’s office and you’re toxic and confrontational, you just get kicked out and that’s the end of that. And they just assume that whatever you liked is wrong and they, and not only do they not give you what you wanted, they go outta their way to, to not give you what you wanted because it’s personal.
So I think you never really wanna make it personal. And you that phrase, those, that gods would destroy. They first make mad.
And the other point is, you know, do you wanna succeed or do you just wanna fight? Right. because the, I, if we come back to sun zoo and the like, right, the ideal thing is to win the war without fighting,
Not to engage in a hundred battles that you win. Right. And so coming back to Bitcoin, what you want is for every nation, organization and individual to embrace it and support it. That’s what you want. So if you’re if you’re spending a lot of time to tell the world why somebody is stupid and has character flaw, right? You’re ripping somebody else down, but that’s not building a Bitcoin, right? Ultimately you gotta choose your fights very carefully. And I think there’s some fights we’re taking.
For example, I think it’s reasonable to fight the gold bugs because we both agree with sound money, but every dollar invested in gold is a dollar non invested in Bitcoin. And that’s a battle we can win. We should win because it’s a benefit to them when they switch. It’s a benefit to Bitcoin when they switch. Right. I don’t think it’s all that constructive to fight a battle to eliminate the, you know, the Euro like. The odds of actually persuading 20% of gold bugs to abandon gold and adopt Bitcoin as the reserve currency are a lot higher than the odds of persuading 20% of the Europeans to stop using the Euro and leave the EU.
You see? So, so there’s some battles that just, I don’t think make that much sense and other battles make a lot of sense. They’re ones that are winnable and by the way, the best battle is, if you must fight a battle, the battle you wanna fight is against ignorance. And the past in favor of the future, everybody wants to go into the future, knows they’re going into the future.
And you’ll find, I would think 95% agree if I said, do you think modern technology can make your life better? I think you find not everybody. Some people would say I wanna live off the grid, you know, with. 19th century tech but most people would say, yeah, modern technology is generally better and I wanna embrace it. So if you look at the really powerful entities and companies that grow very rapidly, they grow by not forcing people to make a difficult decision. you know, I give away free Facebook. I give away free Google. Like how hard is it for Google to spread to a billion people? They give it away for free. They don’t tell you, you have to abandon your religion or abandon your nation, or abandon your citizenship or fight with your government or fight with your employer. They just give you a free search. So, so I think that the best thing is just give people, technology. Technology represents something better in the future that came out of human ingenuity. The, and if you can do that, you don’t have to fight with anybody. You’re just at your pure education. The next best is if you must fight is fight a battle to persuade people that they’re better off buying a Bitcoin than buying a rental apartment as a store of value, or they’re better off buying a Bitcoin than buying a bar of gold and explain to them why Bitcoin is better than a bar of gold or better than a rental apartment, or better than, you know, a bunch of lumber in the back of the house. And, you know, if you frame it like that, right, the nation of Lumber’s not gonna get offended. I mean, we’re probably the gold bugs get a little bit upset, but a again at the end of the day, they’re the most organized. What about all the other, you know, person that wants you to buy three apartment units and Airbnb them on the weekend in order to like retire that person’s not gonna fight you back.
So I think if you fight that asset war, there’s a hundred trillion dollars there, right? We’re 500, we’re less than 500 billion. So Bitcoin can can increase by a factor of 200 from here simply by getting people to change their asset allocations. And you know, so between that and technology, those are just educational pursuits. And then you’re gonna ha you’re gonna have competitors that’ll say, yeah don’t use Bitcoin use my BI use my proof of stake thing and do it without electricity. And you’re gonna have to explain that without the electricity, you don’t have a commodity, you have a security and a security needs to be registered and taken public with full and fair disclosures.
Cuz it’s centralized you. You need to explain that in a cheerful constructive way, but you need to explain it and then you, maybe you need to explain how. Yeah, regardless of all those things, right? The Bitcoin network is 10,000 times more secure and more reliable and more long lived than the other thing.
And so you have to explain that, but you’re better off. I think a classic marketer would say you’re better off to segment the market. You’re better off to say, Bitcoin is digital energy. It’s a commodity, you know, you buy it because you can’t stockpile oil and you don’t wanna own 37 rental apartments and you don’t wanna carry gold bars through airports.
That’s why you buy Bitcoin. These other things, they’re securities their software companies and software programs. If you wanna invest in apple or Google or Facebook or some proof of stake network, they’re all investments, make sure you got full and fair disclosure, make sure you know, who owns it, make sure you know what to expect, but their investments in technology companies and Bitcoin’s competing. you’re gonna warehouse soybeans for a decade. Yeah. It’s competing against steel and oil and natural gas and land. And it’s it’s a digital property, digital commodity, and it’s the highest form of digital commodity. It’s digital energy. It’s IOR to last forever. You can oscillate it at a thousand megahertz.
It’s a cool thing. Let me tell you all about it. If you segment the market like that. No, it’s like, I guess I’d like some of that. What else is digital energy? There’s another network a hundred times smaller, you know, check out the market cap of the other proof of work networks. They’re one, you know, there are 50 basis points, 70 basis points of Bitcoin.
So they’re like I think I wanna own the one that’s a hundred times bigger.
Okay. And just and then go knock on the next door. there’s a lot of doors to knock on, right?
[00:15:28] Aleks Svetski: a good framing. That’s a good framing. I mean, I mean, what about all the people who are kind of fed up with all of the overreach and shenanigans, particularly over the last two years? You know, cuz there seems to be, I mean, when I’ve been out there pitching Bitcoin, there seems to be a craving for the message that I know is more adversarial, but people seem to be.
Wanting or craving, like how do
[00:15:59] Michael Saylor: that’s, there’s a political party and a political message, which is, you know, the libertarian party reflects that message less government,
Right? The Republican party, you know, reflects a slight difference from the democratic party and the libertarian party reflects a bigger difference. The Ron Paul libertarian party.
Kind of aligns closest with what the Bitcoiners would say. I think I would say join that party, pursue those politics, but I would brand them as libertarian or brand or create that party. I don’t think I would conjoin it with Bitcoin. See if your position is you think the government’s overreached fiscally, you don’t agree with their foreign policy, you don’t agree with the tax policy.
You don’t agree with their domestic policy. You don’t agree with their energy policy. You don’t agree with their medical policy. You don’t agree with their education policy. You don’t agree with their trade policy, their tariff policy, their domestic manufacturing policy, their labor and union policies.
Sure. But that’s politics. You know what I mean? Like that’s a lifetime of fights. And remember back to laser eyes, each one of those fights is just as hard. In fact, probably a lot harder than the Bitcoin. So I think that if you said you have to win all those fights for Bitcoin to be successful, right?
You’re kind of, you’re picking a hundred other battles to fight and it’s counterproductive and destructive because we need those people, right. There are people that, you know, in the democratic party, we need them to support Bitcoin. There are people in the Republican party, we need them to support Bitcoin.
You might disagree with Republican politics. You might disagree with democratic politics. the majority of the country. I don’t know if it’s 50% or 80%, but the majority of the country disagrees with the libertarian party. Otherwise they would’ve elected somebody by now. So those are political fights and yeah.
The Bitcoin community is is very aligned with a lot of those views. Right. And so am I, but my point is, yeah, you don’t need to fix, you’re now dealing with the 50% other problems in the world,
Right. You’re trying to fix the schools and fix the hospitals and fix the foreign policy and fix the fiscal policy.
And you’re trying to, let’s say it a different way. Why’s the currency collapsing because of all these policy interventions. So if you wanna fix the currency, you have to fix a hundred things that are radical, that are highly confrontational that are that no one can agree on. If you wanna fix the Fiat currency, or you can simply educate people that Bitcoin is better than gold and Bitcoin will be a million dollars a coin, and you’re not gonna fix any of those other things.
You’re just gonna fix Bitcoin. And you’re gonna make everyone that supports Bitcoin a hundred times as powerful.
So you see, like, do you wanna actually incrementally do good or do you just wanna fight? Cause I don’t, you know, I think that if you just wanna fight, right, you can also go to Ukraine and you can fight on one side or the other side.
It’s not clear to me. Like we fought in Iraq for 20 years. What did we fix? Like, like how much energy do you have to fight over this? And I would say there’s noth, there’s no reason why you can’t get involved in politics if you want to. I just think that conjoining the politics, it’s a mistake for Bitcoin to become associated with one party or the other party like is Bitcoin pro-abortion or anti-abortion I don’t think it’s either of those things.
Right. It’s better to stay neutral and stay Switzerland. At the point that the Bitcoin becomes politicized at that point 45, 40% of the country will reject you reflexively without listening to a word. You say,
[00:20:15] Aleks Svetski: Yeah. I agree with that. I think
[00:20:16] Michael Saylor: What let’s pick any of a hundred challenges we have in this country name one thing out of the hundred biggest disagreements we have that we have worked through in a civil fashion in the past 10 years.
[00:20:28] Aleks Svetski: yeah. Zero. Yeah.
[00:20:30] Michael Saylor: but so, so there, there aren’t many Alex there aren’t examples of six political successes in the last 10 years.
We don’t have many, but there are plenty of examples of technology, successes, Uber technology success. Apple, Google Netflix, Facebook Disney, plus what’s up all the games, even arguably cryptocurrency Bitcoin technology, successes. We have many. And why, because technologies are neutral apolitical, and there’s a general consensus in this country that we are technology leaders, not every country, right?
Like let’s say we lived in a fundamentalist religious theocracy that fought that technology was evil from Satan and we would all burn in hell and they were against new FAL gadgets. Then maybe the technology strategy wouldn’t be a good one in that country. Like I, for example, I don’t really think in North Korea, right North Korea, Cuba they’re against property rights. right. They’ll murder you for trying, saying, I wish to own private property, right? That’s a felony. Okay. So there are certain jurisdictions where they’re very hostile to to a property strategy. There are theoretical jurisdictions where it be, they be hostile to technology strategy. Although it’s practical matter. Most people like technology, like even the north Koreans, they were into hacking. Right. I mean, they must totally love the guys that hacked the Sony servers right. To steal all that contraband. So they’re not against that. So, so we’re back to this question, right? What can you accomplish? I think Alex, I’m 50. I’m 57. And so I’ve, you know, I’ve gotten dozens of patents and I’ve launched dozens of businesses and I’ve had lots of ideas and I love them all. And I’ve had thousands, tens of thousands of employees, and I’ve tried different things and I’ve spent billions of dollars doing different things. And what I’ve learned over the course of my life is generally you overestimate what you can accomplish when you have a passion for a good idea, and you underestimate the maintenance cost and you underestimate how challenging it’s going to be to to profit and to enjoy that idea. So like you, if you have a good a good business, you have to factor a huge amount of energy. If you work full time to maintain that business, it’ll stay effective. As soon as you say it’s like I launch a restaurant and then I go and I open up another restaurant, the other side of town and that’s successful.
So I go to Chicago and I open up a third one and then I go to San Francisco and open up the fourth one. And then, you know, I go to Miami and open up fifth one and I get back to, you know, New York city where my first restaurant is and all my customers are gone and my employees quit, you know?
And then the New York times is writing an article about how my restaurant used to be good, but now the food is garbage. And then the other restaurants, you know, the partners like default on something or the landlord basically triples the rent. And pretty soon I’ve like gone bankrupt, you know, some politician rezones my district.
And what you realize is you underestimate all of the challenges you overestimate, what you can accomplish, and people get bored very quickly. So they, you know, they tend to wanna go on and fight the next fight. It’s like, you know, like, Napoleon charging, he lost an entire army charging into Russia on the path to Moscow stupid.
But then he charged into Egypt, Napoleon lost an army in Egypt. Okay. Really then, you know,
[00:24:40] Aleks Svetski: Germans did the same thing.
[00:24:41] Michael Saylor: and the Germans are the same thing, you know, and the Americans, you remember Charlie Wilson’s war, Charlie Wilson’s war is all about how stupid the Russians are to go in Afghanistan and how Americans gleefully made fun of the Russians were being so stupid as to go in
[00:24:55] Aleks Svetski: Then did the same thing.
[00:24:57] Michael Saylor: I think we did the same thing. It’s like, you know, the human can, by the way, Julius Caesar lost an army in Egypt, right? It’s a never ending story, which is people always overestimate what they can accomplish. I launched about 10 businesses. The first one is still. The winning business, right? The first one, and what I found is that one you really had to focus on with your heart and soul. And generally what you find is in your thirties, someone hits it big and they launch a successful business and then some, and then they think two years later, what’s my next big success. And they have this idea. They’re just gonna knock off five big successes in a row. Okay. And everybody, eventually they hit that in Tropic frontier where they can’t compete anymore.
And it’s, it could be thought of a different way. There’s probably 10,000 things you can do that you can acquire, that you can buy, that you can launch that you can do. There’s probably a hundred of them that you can be competitive in. Where you are as good as the best person in the world.
Everywhere else. Yeah. You got it in the business, but you’re not world class, maybe a hundred and there’s probably one of them that you can be competitive in and make a profit at and grow consistently better at over time, such that you stay competitive.
So that threshold of enter the market, be profitable, make money in the market and grow forever against the smartest, most competitive people in the market that is 10,000 times harder than a, can you just do it? So people tend to pick fights that they can’t win and then they pick fights that they win, where they win the battle, but they lose the war.
It’s like, okay, you, okay? So what are you gonna do if you actually get Russia? Okay. Like you’re not gonna be able to govern it. You wanna fun read the history of William, the conqueror, William, the conqueror, you know, rose through, through unfortunate circumstance.
He was an orphan and he rose to conquer Normandy and was a success, got everything he ever wanted, you know, got married, had kids, perfect life. And then he decided he got in his head that he was the rightful heir to the UK. And he had to charge across the channel and conquer Britain. And he’s thought a thousand years later is this great, awesome guy, William, the conqueror.
That’s his name? He’s the only guy in a thousand years that ever conquered Britain. But if you read the story of what happened, he had only took him a couple of weeks to conquer Britain, but he couldn’t govern Britain. His entire life fell apart. His family fell apart. His wife turned against him, his son declared war on him.
He fought two civil wars against his own son. And eventually he died at war with his own children, you know, and was rolled into a ditch penniless, you know, couldn’t even afford a funeral, this greatest of all conquerors of a thousand years. And if you read the biography, the conclusion is he overextended bit off, more than he could chew because he had a massive ego. And so the story of people with massive egos wanting to write the wrongs of the world, Is throughout history, everywhere in every business, every company, you know, like it’s a 99% mortality rate in my business, they all fail because of bad acquisitions. The reason software companies fail is cuz the CEO has to keep expanding.
They have to keep growing. And if you can’t grow and they either try to grow organically and they break the company or they grow through acquisitions and they break the company and it’s literally like 99% likely. It’s just, that’s what happens. And so when you look at that, the conclusion you come to is if you have one good idea, get up every day and figure out how to spread that message or how to protect that good idea. Like we, we shouldn’t be trying to fix 27 other problems in the world. What we ought to do is make sure that no one corrupts the Bitcoin code. It’s more important for example, that we don’t F with the network and screw it up. It’s more important that we protect the integrity of what we have. And 98% of the world doesn’t even know what we have. And so educating France or educating Germany on why the auto adopt nuclear reactors or getting in some massive fight over, you know, government overreach in the medical business, all of these things are just other battles. They’re for somebody.
But, you know, if you really wanna be a nuclear activist, I would say you should be 150% focused on That thing. Right. Don’t tie yourself to any other thing.
[00:30:01] Aleks Svetski: you mentioned before. We haven’t seen any political wins, which I agree with. But we’ve seen many technological ones. Do you think we’ve seen any cultural or social sort of wins or revolutions or come up ins in the last couple decades?
[00:30:18] Michael Saylor: I mean, I guess the progressives could argue that. I mean, they’ve, there have been a lot of progressive, you know, agenda items that have made good progress over time.
[00:30:27] Aleks Svetski: Is that more political or cultural or do you kind of place them in the same bucket?
[00:30:33] Michael Saylor: Yeah. I think they’re the same.
[00:30:35] Aleks Svetski: Interesting. Okay. What makes political and cultural the same in your.
[00:30:38] Michael Saylor: There are cultural war, but let’s take Critical race theory, right. Or something going on in the school system or or teaching any particular theories in school. The reason they’re political is because the government controls the school system and the government, you know? And so the political unions contribute to the party which contributes, you know, guidance to the government.
The government changes the rules to to spread a certain policy through the schools,
To the extent that the government has power over, over whatever right.
[00:31:11] Aleks Svetski: So it becomes cultural in that sense. So it’s kind of like top down cultural enforcements that have. Bottom up emergent culture, which is, I mean, naturally how it was anyway,
[00:31:22] Michael Saylor: Look, politics matter. Right. So there’s no doubt, like, like politics shut down the nuclear power industry.
Politics do matter in a lot of places, politics resulted in say single family homes, getting subsidized by the government via Fred Mac and Fannie Mae. And that drove down the cost of home mortgages and it drove up the price of homes and it it shifted the dynamic and it enriched a lot of people in the real estate industry.
Right. So politics do matter. I’m not saying they don’t matter. What I’m saying is that if you’re in, if you believe that Bitcoin is good for the human race and good for the civilization, you should limit your political engagement to what’s good for Bitcoin and not get involved in all the other political fights.
The other political fights make you toxic cuz half the politicians, right? Pick a, take a position, right. And you’re gonna actually alienate 30, 40% of the politicians. And you might need those politicians. There’s if we come back the way a company act. Right. Like, let’s take the Disney corporation.
No, you know, the Disney challenges they’ve got in Florida of late with Disney world, they got political
Companies, shouldn’t be political. They shouldn’t express political preferences this way or that you’re, you know, you remember the old phrase shut up and sing.
You know, you, if you’re a singer, you want everybody in the audience to love you for your song. As soon as you start to express a political opinion, whether it’s right or left or whatever it is, then there’s gonna be some in the audience that’s gonna take offense. And you’ve just diminished your ability to spread your actual message. So the question is, what are you trying to do?
Are you trying to sing a song or are you trying to actually spread a political message? If you were a really good rock and roll singer? I wouldn’t say go on stage and say gold sucks. Bitcoin is good. You know, like. right, because your agenda is to entertain the audience, right? So be profe being professional means keeping your personal views out of your professional platform. So I, I just think generally, if you’re gonna be professional, if you’re professionally pursuing the agenda of fixing the energy and the civilization via Bitcoin, and if you believe that Bitcoin is great technology, which is, will be great money, which could be a great currency, which can fix a lot of things. You’re better off to just stay professional and cheerfully, constructively advocate for Bitcoin. You’re gonna find people that disagree with you and they hate you, or they hate Bitcoin. But like, if some, when somebody that’s really a critic or a hater on say Twitter, when they say something really offensive, I don’t go and directly attack them.
That’s not gonna persuade anybody. They have 5 million followers that follow them because they respect what they have to say. So if you attack that person, you alienate their followers. And if you engage in a debate with anybody about any subject, other than Bitcoin you’re potentially alienating followers. So, I mean, so, in this particular case, the constructive engagement is just is if you’re gonna troll, somebody is to say, you know, you have that point of view. There are some people that happen to have this point of view. And this is the reason they have this point of view. And here is a place you can go to get more information, right?
Like you, you can turn a conversation 90 degrees. Like sometimes you think the Bitcoin is bad because you think it’s a currency, but did you know it’s actually, we think of it as a property, not a currency. Someone will say, Bitcoin is bad, cuz it’s bad for the because it’s a currency and I like the us dollar.
And so I don’t like Bitcoin. Remember Donald Trump said that once I like the us dollar, I don’t like Bitcoin. The response is not, you’re not smart enough. Right? The response is, don’t say if you were smarter, you wouldn’t say that. Don’t say that the response is actually I understand why you would say that other people have been led to believe it’s a currency because of the phrase cryptocurrency.
But in fact, we’ve come to see that it’s actually a property and it’s been designated as a property by the IRS. So, so it’s a digital gold superior to gold in every way. And if you like gold, you might like Bitcoin a bit better than gold, but it is not a threat to the country or to the currency.
Now that might not persuade the person that was against Bitcoin, but the 500,000 people that read the comment. We’ll look at it and maybe 10% of them would be persuaded. And if you flip 10% of 500,000 people, you just got 50,000 new comments by being polite and respectful and constructive and not confrontational, but just engaging.
Now, some people won’t even let you engage that much, right? I mean, but, and you have to judge that. The ideal thing to do though is to engage in a technical, constructive fashion to educate, you know, while you empathize, like I empathize with you, you wanna help the world. And you think that Bitcoin is bad because someone is taking advantage someone here, but, you know, Bitcoin is actually good because of this and this and this will help the world and help you achieve your mission. If we go out every day and we explain to people how they can achieve their goals in life with our technology, We won’t persuade everybody, but you’ll have the least toxic pushback.
[00:37:01] Aleks Svetski: Do you think what’s your thoughts about the growing number of people who for example, have something against. property. So, I mean, Mark Moss and I wrote this thing here as a, as an answer to kind of the collective of ideology. And I mean, communism in a phrase obviously was summed up as the abolition of private property.
So, so there seems to be a growing number of people who, you know, want people to own nothing and be happy.
[00:37:28] Michael Saylor: I think that the right, I don’t think it’s that constructive to attack attack, powerful entity, like attacking the world bank or attacking the IMF or attacking the world economic forum. I don’t think it’s that constructive because they don’t think that they’re against anything. They think they’re trying to help.
and 40% of the society doesn’t think any different. So all you’re doing is isolating yourself. Let’s take a place where they don’t like property Cuba. They don’t like property. Like, it’s illegal to own anything. North Korea it’s illegal to own anything. They don’t like property. Okay. I wouldn’t suggest that you fly to North Korea and take out a banner and campaign to try to change the country.
They’re just gonna shoot you. Right. So the point really is if someone is really totally against property rather than, you know, you wanna go campaign for regime change in North Korea, like what’s that doing for your family? Right? Like how’s that? Helping everybody in America, a better idea is you have 250 million or 350 million people in the United States that believe in property right in front of your face.
Why don’t you just go introduce Bitcoin to them and get a thousand times more, more powerful.
[00:38:44] Aleks Svetski: do you
[00:38:45] Michael Saylor: If you’re gonna go to war with another country, why don’t you go ahead and get a thousand times more powerful before you pick that
[00:38:52] Aleks Svetski: . Yeah I think that sentence there sums up the entire position is
[00:38:56] Michael Saylor: And it’s the other issue is sometimes people are looking to be disagreeable. Like you can, for example the head of the IMF is actually pretty intelligent economist, and she said some things that are very positive about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. You could either embrace that and say, look, it looks like she understands what’s going on.
And you can, you could be, you know, focusing upon convincing the IMF to embrace Bitcoin, cuz it helps them achieve their mission. Or you could just reject every banker everywhere in the world that works for any entity that. There are people that are still mad about what happened on Jack O island a hundred years ago.
Right. But the point is when you’re tweeting, you know, Neil cash, Garry’s time, you know, time interview from 10 years ago, right. You’re just being confrontational. On the other hand, if you just embrace the actors and the institutions today, then you’re being you’re being cooperative. And what we ought to be trying to do is persuade them and win them over as opposed to do you really wanna remind someone that they should fight with you and you’re their mortal enemy forever, right?
If you declare war on someone, what that means is they need to declare war back on you. So I just, I don’t see it’s constructive to, to pick those fights. If someone says something you find disagreeable, you can choose to say, they’re my enemy forever because of a character flaw, or you can choose to say they said something.
I find disagreeable because they were misinformed or hadn’t focused on the matter. And no one has explained to them why they should adopt the opposite point of view. See if you take the second view, you’re just gonna go educate them. And at the very least, you’re not gonna be toxic. If you take the former view, then you’re gonna cause them to be a hundred X more confrontational toward you, then they otherwise would be right.
So, so you’re actually kind of undermining your own interest to, to pick those fights. I don’t think you need to. I think it’s okay to say, look, Bitcoin is great for people to like property rights. and let me explain to you why this is aligned with property rights and freedom and technology and integrity.
I think that’s fine. I think I think flipping it and saying no we’re freedom fighters. And so I’m going to go off to the middle east and I’m gonna fight for the freedom rights of,
[00:41:36] Aleks Svetski: of,
[00:41:37] Michael Saylor: you know, of this faction or that faction. Like now you kind of get, you got the tail wagon, the dog, or you lost the plot. The goal is not to fight over a hundred other things. The goal is not to write all of the wrongs in the world that you disagree with. That’s like angry young man behavior. The goal is to win and the way you win is focus and don’t make enemies, right? Like it’s like, it’s easy to make enemies.
It feel, it feels good by the way. you know, it’s like for example, it’s like Elon Musk tweet something and some people wanna go and like, and attack him this way and that, and then they find out he’s gonna own Twitter. It’s like, oops. Like, like, like the thing that I find really a music is people will go and en and engage in a massive ad home and an attack on an individual where they just disparage their character and everything else, because they said something that they disagree, that the person disagreed with.
And then they forget it. And three months later they want to go and engage with that same person or get their help. And, you know, I think I think what you find is, look, I, if you look at the blue checks among the blue checks, 95% of the time, they’re very polite to each other and that’s cuz they have something to lose.
They’re named, they have a reputation and it will reflect badly upon them, their constituents and their reputation. If they act in a toxic fashion, it it’s it undermines their institution, their career, their credibility on the other hand anonymous actors on Twitter, especially the small Nim accounts.
They don’t stand for an institution and they don’t necessarily have that same reputation. They will go and be very toxic. And I can see the benefits of speaking truthfully and putting information on the record. But the issue with the toxicity is like, if you’re toxic to me, Alex, do you know what I do on Twitter?
When someone’s toxic to me, I look for about a hundred milliseconds block. and never think about them for the rest of my life. Like you literally will get a hundred milliseconds. I don’t type, you know, you’ve been rude on blocking you, right? I’m not gonna Bo I’m not going to literally click more than one button I’m going to block.
And when I do, you will never, ever right. Be able to engage in my stream ever again. So I think the blue checks, they know that they’re like if one of them is like, I wouldn’t go and be rude to someone with 5 million followers cuz they just block me and I will lose access to all 5 million of their followers forever. Maybe I would like to be able to say something to the forget about the people. Think about the 5 million people underneath them, right? You need to get to those people. So being polite and constructive means that you stay engaged in the conversation. As soon as you you go J you just slightly tweak it to be ad Homin them.
You know, the best you can hope for is they mute you. But the more likely thing is they block you. And that same dynamic happens on other platforms and in the real world, which is, you’re just completely outta the conversation. So your goal is to persuade someone. If you’re, it’s like, if you’re a salesperson, you know, this, if you spent 20 years sell selling to someone, you show up, they have the money, you wanna make the sale.
So they start by telling you’re stupid and you’re ugly, and you’re poorly dressed, and you’re not as smart as them. And they could do your job better than you could do the job. And the competitor gave a better price and blah, blah, blah. And they just trash you, you just smile and nod and. They tell you, they’re not gonna buy from you.
And you say I’ll be here when you’re ready and you go home and maybe like three years later, you show up and you get the sale. And when you get to sale, you don’t say you know, you really were rude to me and you were, you know, a jerk, you just take the money and smile. The customer is always right, because
[00:45:51] Aleks Svetski: Cause
[00:45:52] Michael Saylor: you could do the opposite.
Right? You could just say, I don’t want your money. You were a jerk to me. Okay. But the bottom line is most people are jerks, like at some point in their life. And by the time you X out all of the people that you find disagreeable, there’s nobody left to do business with. And and there’s no and you’ve been exed out of this society.
So you’re gonna have to live on an island somewhere and, you know, try generating your own electricity and fishing for your own food on the island and hope you never have to replace your, take out your appendix or something, cuz it’ll be difficult. So. We have to get along with each other. We don’t have to correct each other’s flaws. We don’t have to win every battle. All we need to do is just educate the world.
[00:46:44] Aleks Svetski: let me pivot, I wanna talk to you about engineering. You were on Lexus’s pod recently, and you sort of said that civilization gets a, B plus in engineering and the philosophies or the economic sort of area gets a D minus you know, largely because we’ve made progress and, you know, we’ve had a bit of a wash in that realm.
But I guess I wanted to ask one nuanced piece about that is technology or engineering seems to be far more progressive in nature. Like as in we build on top of it, whereas philosophies or principles or economics seem to be or morality, for example, seems to be more principled in nature. It’s not something that you know, once you’ve figured out like a methodology for living, you know, or a philosophy of morality, for example, it kind of stays the same, right?
The it’s not like engineering, which you sort of continue to build on top of. So I guess first is, do you have a thought on that? And then next, I want to ask you about engineering for complexity, because I’ve got a little bit of a digresion on that.
[00:47:51] Michael Saylor: I think that to the extent we depoliticize things, we make progress. The decision to use steel instead of wood in a house is not so much political. And when you build a steel building, it’s demonstrably better.
So the fact that you can demonstrate virtue. In an apolitical way is what causes science and technology to advance. It’s not always right. If you have a theocracy where you can’t right, like look what they did to Galileo, right?
[00:48:22] Aleks Svetski: Also um, I mean mean mean also Russia and Stalin, right? Same.
[00:48:24] Michael Saylor: yeah. If you have a culture that doesn’t let you do that in an apolitical way, then you don’t advance so fast. But generally the advantage of engineering disciplines is I can build, if I build a bad plane, it crashes and burns and it’s obvious.
And if I build a good plane and you get in and you fly, it’s obvious, same with ships, same with railroads. Same with a lot of things, same with guns, right? I mean, you know, you pull the trigger and blows up in your face. Right. You know, it doesn’t matter whether you’re you have this political view or that political view, you prefer the gun that works the way you wanted it to work.
And so those things tend to be very virtue driven and they’re very Darwinian too. Right.
Whereas if you look at the fields of economics and philosophy, we’re still debating the right form of government for 2,500 years,
Right. Democracy versus monarchy versus autocracy oligarchy versus whatever it is.
There’s still a debate. We haven’t resolved that debate really. So I think that those are harder. O obviously my philosophy is if you wanna better the human condition, you’re better off to invest in technical solutions than political solutions.
[00:49:43] Aleks Svetski: Totally
[00:49:44] Michael Saylor: And that’s why I say Bitcoin as a digital energy is a technical solution. Non-con non controversial. the successor to electricity. Bitcoin as a digital currency is a political solution, highly controversial. Revolutionary one is revolutionary and the other is evolution. One of them is political. The other one is technol technical. One of them, you know, invites engineering professors to consider whether this is sound or not the other invites economic professors, you know? And so you can see, like in winning the battle of the hearts and the minds, are you more likely to convince an engineer that Bitcoin is good or convince an economist?
That Bitcoin is good?
[00:50:40] Aleks Svetski: I guess it depends the kind of economist, right. You know, maybe the modern politically influenced economist will be a little bit tougher because they
[00:50:47] Michael Saylor: It’s been hard though, right?
[00:50:49] Aleks Svetski: Yeah.
[00:50:49] Michael Saylor: The majority of economists you know, aren’t even in flavor of, they’re not even in favor of a non-inflationary currency. So, so, my view is we’re better off to focus on the technology than the politics or than the economics. But if, and if we must get involved in economics, we’re better off to focus upon just asset allocation of assets, rather than focus upon currency replacements. Currency is always gonna be political, right? And the next logical fight is the Argentines fighting with the Americans over whether or not Argentine Argentinian citizens can hold us dollars. And if it’s gonna be a.
[00:51:34] Aleks Svetski: a debate.
[00:51:36] Michael Saylor: Let the Argentine government fight with the us government over that. Right? I mean, they, the United States is not likely to have all their citizens jailed while they debate with the Argentine state department over the dollar problem in Argentina.
Right. But you don’t wanna as a Bitcoin or go down to Argentina and have that same fight, you know, you’re gonna end up in a cage.
[00:52:02] Aleks Svetski: coming back to the engineering thing. So I wrote a piece a little while ago that looked at, I was taking summer Jordan Peterson’s work and his chapter two in his 12 rules for life, kind of takes the reader on a journey about this idea of chaos and order. And he talks about matter and what matters.
And I guess the study of matter could be described as more engineering que it’s more empirical in nature. And particularly over the last 500 years, there’s been a great skew in civilization towards the advancement in the study of matter, right. And things like religion or philosophy or economics, et cetera, that kind of sits more in the in the realm of what matters.
And, you know, that’s a study of, you know, how to live, et cetera. Now I’ve I grappled with this idea of, we’ve seen so much technological or engineering type progress that, you know, we maybe in some sense, what we’ve done is we’ve tried to take all of the studies of what matters. So the more. You know, the more philosophical nature things and try to place them in an empirical box and use engineering type modalities to kind of fix them.
And this sort of where what I’m getting to here is like the idea of central planning and entire economy, or you know, complex systems being able to be distilled into these simple models and if only the variables within the model. So like these human beings should just be variables and if we can fit them in the box, then everything will be perfect.
And we have these utopian ideals of how society should be run. So I guess wonder whether we can fix things purely through an empirical lens you know, as engineers or do we, can we kind of get ourselves. Stuck there. And I mean, the end of my essay was basically this idea that Bitcoin kind of fuses the worlds of matter and what matters because Bitcoin is, you know, transcends just being a technological idea.
Like it’s, it transcends engineering, it’s temporal, social cultural, and in some sense, even you’ve got a religious element to it, but I wonder what your thoughts are there on those two worlds, because they are both important. If we skew too far towards the empirical, then you kind of sanitize the life out of civilization in a sense.
[00:54:31] Michael Saylor: Yeah. I’m not quite sure you’re getting very philosophical on me, but I guess what I have to say about Bitcoin is Bitcoin represents it. It is matter and energy in cyberspace.
That’s the big idea we ought to focus on and we ought to be sending that message to all engineers everywhere that without Bitcoin you don’t have matter or energy in cyberspace and everything that exists in the, in.
Internet domain in the digital domain is merely a simulation or a model of something in the real world. The significance of, you know, being able to transfer something of value without an intermediary means that if I can transfer it to you without intermediary, I can instantiate it or I can manifest it without an intermediary.
And that means it stands alone in cyberspace rather than being an image of something that is in the real world. The image in the real world makes it a security.
[00:55:35] Aleks Svetski: world.
[00:55:36] Michael Saylor: Whereas when you actually manifest the actual unit, the Satoshi in the digital realm, it is matter. I can create something of substance in the digital realm.
Using Bitcoin. And if that’s the case, then that, that introduces the field of engineering and physics into cyberspace. And that’s, what’s been missing in the entire digital realm. The digital realm for the past 30 years lacked matter in energy and you just had simulations. And that meant that computer science might have been relevant, but all the other sciences were never relevant.
Like all of the learnings and mechanical engineering and civil engineering and thermodynamics and physics and material science and aeronautical engineering, all of those insights. They’re not relevant if there’s no matter and no energy in the digital realm. So I think that that what makes Bitcoin magical is that for the first time we introduce. This concept of I mean, someone on Twitter the other day was talking about irreversible transactions. They said, why was Satoshi so fascinated by irreversible transactions? You know? And they approached it from a, you know, a very, I think a narrow point of view, the idea like we can’t have irreversible transactions cuz that allows, you know, we can’t fix money laundering and we can’t CS and how do we get control of the system? But my thought was, yes, Satoshi wanted irreversible transactions, but the idea for irreversible transactions came from the great almighty when the universe was created. Right. Cause you know, in the, you know, let there be light right in the beginning, there was nothing. And then there was light light is energy.
So the first thing that happens is energy. And then from and matter is energy and time flows in the beginning, right before time flow be before time, there was nothing.
[00:57:45] Aleks Svetski: Yeah. Maybe it was all the simulation at that point. Yeah.
[00:57:48] Michael Saylor: And so what happens well when you actually introduce the concept of irreversibility, you introduce entropy and time, right? The pass, the progression of time is the progression of disorder in their inextricably intertwined and matter.
And energy are inextricably intertwined. And Bitcoin is like that big bang.
And in the big bang, you know, in the beginning, right, there was nothing. And then all of a sudden the time change starts to form and there’s irreversibility. And now there’s the passage of time. And now there’s. Electricity run through the Shaw 2 56 protocol to become digitized energy, a digital asset. the beauty of the protocol was it was introduced as a conservative protocol, not an openended protocol, right? One that the universe has a bound of 21 million. And, you know, and because we had that, we had for the first time this sort of bearer instrument that represents energy, that’s conservative.
And if I can transfer it to myself, to yourself without an intermediary, then I can instantiate it. And if I can instantiate it I can persist it. The ability to persist energy without an intermediary is what allowed us to cut the cord with the banks. Now the money flowing over the internet. Wasn’t a reflection.
It wasn’t a shadow of the money in the visa network. It wasn’t a shadow of the money in a bank, right. To paraphrase, you know, Platos, you know, shadows in the cave, parable
It’s like, are you looking at shadows or are you looking at the real thing? Everything was shadows of the real thing until Satoshi. And now we actually have the real thing also known as a, you know, re reified information, but reified, fancy word for objective, you know, an object, right?
A materialization materialized information. So you could say it’s materialized information. Sure. Or you could say it was dematerialized energy, which is the opposite way to say the same thing. So if you’re focused upon matter and matter is relevant, because matter is conservative, then the most extraordinary thing is the creation of matter in cyberspace. Cuz now I can construct a billion dollar structure in cyberspace, apart from any institution or individual, right? You could literally release the thing in cyberspace and it can live on its own. You wanna, you could in theory, create some kind of program, an AI program that was wealthy, that could live forever with assets or with wealth that is completely separate from any physical counterparty. Right there and that that has all sorts of implications for efficiency through time and space and persistence
[01:01:18] Aleks Svetski: yeah. There’s
[01:01:18] Michael Saylor: and engineering.
[01:01:20] Aleks Svetski: specifically what you said about the forward movement of time. I think when that dawned on me a number of years ago, and I’ve kind of written about this before, and I’ve often said that Bitcoin’s greatest impact on human civilization is the reintroduction of consequence.
And I think these two things interplay with each other here is that the fact that Bitcoin. Makes matter in cyberspace to use your words when you’re in a simulation and there’s no consequence and you can just behave the way you want. You create these sort of deviations. It doesn’t function like real life anymore.
But when you reintroduce a consequence, then you need to think twice about what you’re doing. And it is like the forward motion of time in reality, because if I go tomorrow and jump off a cliff and I die, there’s no rewind button. I can’t fix that. And it’s the same ways if I send some Bitcoin to the wrong address there’s no reversibility.
So, so it’s like a mapping that the map actually fits the territory for the first time in civilization’s history. And that consequence piece for me is really interesting because then it links back. a healthier study of what matters. When we said before, like the study of what matter is like, you know, you’ve had all these things like religion and philosophy, et cetera, they’ve been an attempt to try and grapple with how one must behave when contended with the consequence of actions in the real world.
And because we’ve kind of built all these fantasy models when it comes to whether politics or economics or all this other shit that’s going on in the world today, everything’s kind of like playing pretend like I saw on the news this morning, I was on the, at the gym and I saw president Biden tells the states to lower the price of gas.
It’s like, , you can’t just pretend your way into like fixing a problem. And this is, you know, Bitcoin kind of removes that ability to pretend and by reintroducing consequence it like. I don’t know, it, it fixes that dynamic between matter and what matters,
[01:03:22] Michael Saylor: Yeah. We’re, you know, we’re skeptical of central planning for obvious reasons and things that work well be because they’re beyond the domain of politics. So economics, philosophy, politics, all these things are political in nature. And that means that central central planners and politicians can intervene and will intervene. And generally the interventions are all well, meaning and ineffective. And the more interventions they have, the more pain cause and the best cases are just well, meaning and effective and economically crippling. And the worst case is they’re well, meaning and effectively and devastating. They create war and destruction and topple the entire civilization.
Right? So things that are beautiful are things in nature that are beyond the reach of politics.
So a politician can’t stop the force of gravity. you know, like all these people say, you know, why would I ever wanna have an irreversible transaction? Like when you drop a rock off a cliff, it’s irreversible transaction,
Why would you wanna have it?
Because every machine works based upon those principles, right? If I wanna build a dam, I need to know that the water always flows downhill and then no politician is gonna cause the water to flow uphill, randomly, you know, per code because it breaks the dam, internal combustion engines work on principles, you know, hot air expands, pistons, fire, you know, centrifugal forces at work. So you can’t build a mechanism without without energy and matter and natural law and no political intervention. And that means. If there is no matter in cyberspace, then nothing you do in ma in cyberspace matters. And that’s why you get, that’s why you get 180 million fake accounts on Twitter every year, because nothing matters. And that’s why you get all the garbage and the spam and the fishing attacks and the toxicity because nothing matters. And when things start to matter, there are consequences. And when there are consequences you know,
[01:05:42] Aleks Svetski: There’s
[01:05:43] Michael Saylor: unhealthy in nature because nature recycles, every unhealthy thing very quickly. I had a goose on my property the other day and it broke a leg. , you know, a, Goling a small goose and there’s like 50 other geese too. So I have a lot of geese, but this one broke a leg and we tried to save it by putting it in the pond and it lasted one day. And the next day I got up and I just saw a bunch of goose feathers all around the garden, no goose.
[01:06:09] Aleks Svetski: oh, wow.
[01:06:10] Michael Saylor: It’s either Fox got it. Or now got it. You know, and there’s nothing to be done about it. You’re not going to see anything that isn’t healthy in nature. No lawyers, no courts, right? No, no appeal. And you can’t, you know, you can’t create a mechanism without matter and energy. And so if I what’s the difference, right?
If the transaction is reversible, then I can transfer the money every two months. And the money velocity is six times per year. If the transaction is not revers or is irreversible, I can move it every hour, right? Thousands of times a year on the base layer, but I could move it every second on lightning, or I can put it on a layer three and tweak it a bit and I can move it a thousand times a second. So what’s the difference between reversible or political and irreversible? Right. And I gotta say like today I picked up the phone and I approved a wire transfer from a bank to another bank. Okay. I could do 10 transactions per week on the phone. That’s the 20th century way using people. And reversible transactions and the velocity, when you go to irreversible and matter, and energy is gonna go to a kilohertz or 10 kilohertz or a thousand kilohertz. And so it’s not like 10 X better, or a hundred X better, or a thousand X better. It’s like
[01:07:55] Aleks Svetski: It’s
[01:07:56] Michael Saylor: singing a,
[01:07:57] Aleks Svetski: paradigm. Yeah, exactly.
[01:07:59] Michael Saylor: try, singing a song by like tapping your foot on a rock as fast as you can. Yeah. And you see you, you can’t, you know, Beethoven symphony are not gonna come, you know, due to one guy hitting himself over the head with a rock. And that’s what we’re trying to do right now, Alex. Right. Everything we built in cyber space, right. There’s shadows of reality. And as much as we tell ourself, We built something functional. It’s what is it? It’s like, it’s a grotesque, it’s a grotesque monstrosity of something functional. It’s like you can spin up 500,000 accounts a day on Twitter.
Ha. They’re all fake. You know, you can place 1000 comments a minute on Twitter. They’re all toxic, garbage, fake, right? They’re fake because there’s no consequences. There’s no matter there’s no energy. So we create things that have the appearance of functionality, but they’re not truly beautiful and they’re not functional. And If we actually take this to the next extreme consider, consider all the buildings in the world, constructed with steel. Now take away all the steel and consider what the world looks like. Now consider all the structures in cyberspace built without Bitcoin,
Nothing beautiful, every, you know, everything twisted and perverted in some way, shape or form. Now imagine we introduce a crypto steel, this thing we call Bitcoin digital inter you know, we run machines and cyberspace on digital energy and we build walls and buildings and structures, and fortreses in cyberspace with digital matter. And now for the first time there are consequences and things do matter. And what beautiful machines will we make and and what kind of, you know, toxic garbage will we purge from the system? You start just by giving everybody on Twitter and orange check and get rid of all the bots, get rid of all the fake accounts, just get rid of everything, get rid of all the scammers.
I think all the scammers on YouTube, I think as far as I can see, there’ve been 25,000 Michael sailor, Bitcoin giveaway scams launched in the past six months, 25,000.
[01:10:44] Aleks Svetski: it’s
[01:10:45] Michael Saylor: Okay. So what’s the cost of that. I spend a million dollars a year trying to fight that me million dollars a year, like with people like with these kind of headaches, you know, and the world’s full of that kind of stuff. And the problem is we just don’t have the right materials working in the digital realm.
[01:11:06] Aleks Svetski: I
[01:11:06] Michael Saylor: when I go ahead
[01:11:07] Aleks Svetski: no, I was just gonna say it reminds me of two things. One is An analogy that I used in a recent article called the blind man analogy. I say that the way society seems to operate today is like a blind man attempting to build a house with an elastic tape measure. And you know, Bitcoin kind of gives us a tape measure and actually gives us sight.
So, you know, it the level of difference in the two kind of structures could be described by that kind of analogy as like a sighted person with an actual tape measure versus a blind person with a, with an elastic tape measure. But we, I wanted to just park that analogy. The interesting thing about fixing matter in the digital realm is that you introduce cost.
You introduce consequence. It actually, I would argue that a lot of these innovation, and this is something that I think Peter teal would probably echo is that. we’ve seen so-called software eat the world, but do it in a strange sort of way where, as you said, like we’ve got all these perverted innovations, like we, we don’t need another, you know, dig, pick app full of bots and you know, God knows what else is in there.
Like we’ve got actual problems in the SP in the realm of atoms, not of bits that need to be solved, but there is a skew to go towards innovation in bits and bites. And dematerialization all this sort of stuff, because it’s all made up. It’s all fantasy. There’s no economic cost. There’s no consequence.
So it’s just like this weird self-reinforcing game where I think most of the innovation, all of the brains, all of the engineering power that the world has, seems to have gone into financial engineering and mindless software engineering, where, and all of the meaningful problems are not being solved because there’s been this lack of Anchor in the digital realm back to the physical realm.
And I think that is a, an underappreciated element of what I think Bitcoin fixes in the world to a large degree. And I don’t know what that means. Long term, you know, maybe quality over quantity, you know, maybe pushing the world towards you know, solving so-called problems that have been too quote, unquote, expensive to solve, or the opportunity cost being too expensive because it’s easier to just build another random software product that doesn’t actually solve a problem, but makes some VC some money.
[01:13:27] Michael Saylor: I, I think the real interesting, innovative work is to be done on top of Bitcoin, either developing, expanding new lightning libraries and the light, you know, harnessing the lightning protocol or building applications using various parts of lightning protocol or improving it or building on layer, threes, and just building proprietary, centralized applications.
that that have Bitcoin embedded in ’em. And I think that there’s been an underinvestment in that, and there’s been an overinvestment in creating new base layer chains, way too much focus on proof of stake networks and like 19,800 coins, you know, and I look at all of it and I, you know, I’m hard pressed to see, but just endless recursive financial engineering without solving the fundamental problems.
Whereas the fundamental problems that are interesting are things like, like, if you can stream sat then you know, why couldn’t I actually spin up a sta a spaces where anybody that shows up that meets a certain credential filter gets a hundred sets a second or a thousand sat a second. And then I’d literally be like,
[01:14:44] Aleks Svetski: then
[01:14:44] Michael Saylor: like like shining sunshine on.
If I’m, if I stream sat by the second or by the millisecond, it’s literally like shining sunshine. Sunshine is light, SATs are energy, like Q of energy. And if you did that, then you could turn into a marketing application. And I think people are starting to think about this like marketing apps where you like, listen to earn, like, why would I do that?
If you’re a PhD cardiologist, and I wanna attract a bunch of PhD cardiologists, and maybe I would set up something where they get paid some money to come and join my space to help me solve a problem. And so that would be a marketing application. And every marketing person in the world could create these systems that radiate money, radiate energy, and you can flip it the other way, which is I’m gonna suck the energy out of you.
If you wanna enter my space, you’re gonna have to pay a hundred sets a second or a thousand sets a second. Right. And that’s a, that’s another another form of friction. And then you can create lightning walls or like a firewall where you have to pledge a hundred thousand or 10,000 sat to enter across the wall.
And you may forfeit it, you know, like, you know what it’s like if you went in a burning building, if you go to a burning building in the real world, you would walk in and then it’s gonna get hot. And then some point you’re gonna start to burn and then eventually you’ll be dead.
Right? That’s consequence now, burning building.
Can you create a burning building in cyberspace? You enter the building.
Money into this civilization and it and metastasizes, and it spreads until it is substantially all of the money. If we demonetize everything everywhere, maybe we cure half of the problem, which is good. I think that’s enough. It might take a hundred years. I’m hard pressed to think it takes less than a hundred years.
Feels like it’s like a multi-generational exercise if we’re successful. And then at the end of it, you’re still gonna have debates about whether to give four year old kids, pharmaceutical products to treat their a D right. You’re still gonna have debates over, over religion. You’re still gonna have debates over, you know, someone at age 87 is dying and someone wants to give them a million dollar treatment.
And someone else says that’s too expensive. Right. And you’re gonna have all those issues and you know, someone’s born and they just have a view that they should beat you. It’s gonna happen. We’re not gonna some other science or technology breakthrough might address some of that problem. And we still got the problem of how do we go to Mars and should we stop there?
And should we go to alpha and Tori or beyond, these are all problems, you know, and some people wanna live forever and not the problem is we can’t live forever and other people don’t think we should live forever. And the problem is stopping the people that wanna live forever. Right? And those things are gonna go on.
We’re not gonna address those. I don’t think we need to. I think that the PR that the root problem that Bitcoin has put their fingers on is there’s a lack of conservation of energy in the civilization. There’s a, there’s an energy imbalance and everything that we think of is money that we use is money. And right now we use gold and we use $90 trillion of currency derivatives and a hundred trillion dollars of bonds. And we use trillions of dollars of equity and we use collectibles. We use all sorts of other derivatives. There’s a lot of things we use as money. All of those things we use as money are low velocity, inefficient, transmitters of energy that, that drain energy and the cost of that you could measure in the tens of trillions, 10 trillion, 20 trillion a year, some huge amount, right?
20 trillion is the GDP of the United States, right? Nominally measured. So the cost of the broken money or the lack of a proper monetary system is many trillions a year compounding for the next, for the last a hundred years for the next a hundred years. fixing that is it’s no different than if you’re an athlete.
And and you were bleeding a pint of blood an hour and I didn’t stop the bleeding. Right? I mean, the number one rule of triage just stopped the bleeding first. First make sure you can breathe right. Three minutes without air and you’re dead and then make sure your bleeding stops cuz you’ll bleed out in a few minutes.
And then after that figure out what the rest of the problem is. So I think that we should think of ourself as trying to stop the bleeding the source of the bleeding as a lack of effective money. And the human race has never had an effective money. A mathematically sound thermodynamically sound money, right?
Goal was the closest thing, but it was it’s way too inefficient. It bleeds energy too fast in time and in space. Right. You can’t really use it. So. we now have a situation where 10 basis points of the civilization has a limited has a, has an effective store of value. And of course, nobody has an effective medium of exchange, right?
So you could probably say it’s like two or three or four basis. Points of the entire economy is efficient 99.9, 5% of all the economic activity in time and in space is woefully inefficient.
[01:20:35] Aleks Svetski: Totally.
[01:20:36] Michael Saylor: And how inefficient, you know, you, it, we probably gotta assume we’re losing 10 to 15% of energy. If you were writing a calculus equation, right?
The time variable was losing 15% of your energy with time. And then there’s another dissipation coefficient, which is how much energy per transaction,
[01:20:59] Aleks Svetski: Oh, there’s that then there’s the cost of the institutions. There’s the cost of the the misallocation of mal investment blind consumerism, you know, the gambling the distortion of of people’s time preferences. So yeah, there’s waste all over the place.
[01:21:14] Michael Saylor: If you just come back to this idea that we’re like three basis points, 1, 2, 3 basis points permeated, you can see that a factor of 10, you know, gets you to 30 basis points. A factor of hundred gets you to 3% of potential. And so a hundred X from now were 3% of potential,
A thousand X from now.
We’re 30% of potential. And so there’s massive, tremendous opportunity here. And we can do this in a very cheerful, constructive way simply by focusing people on the technology and just showing them how much more efficient, how much higher the quality of living is for any entity any part of our civilization.
Should they adopt a better energy technology?
[01:22:08] Aleks Svetski: Do you think that’s tricky in, because I agree with you in some sense, but I feel like the way, the level of craziness and the level of intervention and the level of kind of like. What Allen Watts would call like Oody right. Like these you’ve got people who, whether their intent is good or bad, irrespective their process is a little bit ridiculous.
And ESG is one of these examples, right? It’s trying to pretend your way into prosperity. It’s, you know, let’s let’s wrap corporations and institutions and companies, and at some point individuals into another set of arbitrary rules for the stated purpose of saving energy or doing social good, or, you know, good governance or whatever, but you actually end up doing the opposite.
So, you know, in many ways, Bitcoin ends up in the firing line of that, whether we liked whether we like it or not, and we can be as apolitical as we want about it. But, you know, there, there comes a point where you need to sort of draw the line and say no, you know, this is. We’re jumping off a cliff here.
This behavior is ridiculous. You know, Sri Lanka, I saw Marty bent, posted something about Sri Lanka today, who was one of the first countries, you know, messing around with this ESG stuff. And, you know, they’re having a collapse of food and energy and all this sort of stuff. So I feel like it’s tricky.
It’s it sounds nice and principle to be apolitical, but at the same time, it’s it’s almost impossible to kind of stay apolitical when everything is becoming political.
[01:23:42] Michael Saylor: So I, I think that you have to engage in the political dialogue. That’s true. But you also could do it in a constructive way, or you can do it in a destructive way. For example the ESG narrative is just used by a competitor to undermine another competitor. So the oil companies used ESG to get people to shut down nuclear power plants.
Okay. So if you are, if you’re going to be effective, you need to identify who your real enemy is. Your enemy, the enemy of the nuclear power plants. Wasn’t people that wanted to protect the environment. The enemy of the nuclear power plant was lobbyist paid off by oil companies to shut them down. And if you actually put, if you actually put that Front and center, you’d probably be much more effective.
[01:24:35] Aleks Svetski: actually.
[01:24:35] Michael Saylor: When when online gambling was shut down, it was Indian reservations funneling money through fundamentalist Christian organizations to a lobbyist in DC that convinced convinced politicians that gambling online is an abomination of the eyes of God. Okay. So if you’re supporting online poker, you could declare a war on, you know, like all of the evangelical Christians and 25 million Southern Baptists, but they weren’t really your enemy.
You’re your enemy. Your enemy was a couple of marketing people working for a casino on a reservation that actually, you know, staged a gorilla marketing effort. And if you were to go to every church, And protest against the churches and say, you know, the churches are our enemy and Christianity is the enemy.
You would’ve picked a fight that you can’t win. That was unnecessary. The ESG objections to Bitcoin, they don’t come from environmentalists. They don’t come from institutional investors. Are, they come from alt corners. It’s the proof of stake networks that, that pay the lobbyist to lobby the politicians.
They write the op-ed pieces. They plant the stories. They, they pay for the academic research. All of this stuff is sponsored by the by other crypto competitors. And so if you were to say, oh the Europeans are stupid or the politician is stupid, or the environmentalist or enemy or big companies are enemy, or the institutional investors are enemy.
You would be basically you would be chasing a red herring, right? You effectively, what’s going on is your enemy wants you to go to war with someone a hundred times as big as you, and they’re laughing their ass off and you’re taking the bait, right? It’s like I go into a town, you know, and there are two gangs and they each have a hundred warriors.
So I kill one of the warriors from one gang and I pin it on the other gang and I kill one of the guys from the other gang and I pin it on the first gang and I leave town and I wait for the two gangs to kill each other. And then I come back and take over. You see, as there was, this was all just a false flag, operation of sorts.
So yeah, that doesn’t mean you can’t get engaged with politics, but you probably should keep in mind, you know, who you’re really competing against generally. It’s competitors are weaponizing the political process to defeat their arrival. Right. And if I’m gonna do it right, I have to wrap myself in the mantle of being environmentally friendly, or I have to be doing it for the public.
Good, right? Like my competitor, whatever is bad for the environment. And then I get some politician to do that, and the politicians are gonna want some moral justification, but ultimately if you follow the money, you’ll find that, that they’re just supporting another competitor. And it works both ways.
Right? Ironically the oil companies buried the nuclear power companies using the political process. And then later on you know, the solar and the wind people bury the oil companies using the same process. They’re just weaponizing the political process. So you can’t not engage, but. You can be a little bit more thoughtful about how you engage
Figure out who really is, who is driving the narrative. And generally most of these organizations they’re influenced by their donors to do whatever is right. You know, it’s interesting. If you look at the American diabetes association who gives money to the American diabetes association in order to fight diabetes
[01:28:17] Aleks Svetski: it’s not like Coke and Pepsi and all those guys or the candy companies.
[01:28:22] Michael Saylor: and and when you and when you read the ma head, it says something like we don’t really know what causes diabetes. Okay. But we do know what causes diabetes but the organization doesn’t wanna say what causes diabetes, because. To a certain degree, their sponsors have have a vested interest in no one deciding what causes diabetes.
It’s better. If it’s just an unfortunate disease that we can treat with expensive drugs.
[01:28:49] Aleks Svetski: Yeah, but see, at what point does one draw the line and stop playing within a false Overton window, right? Because that’s what all of these things seem to be. I guess what I’m hearing from you is that the strategy is, you know, U use their Overton window and use their arguments. , you know, kind of like a, almost like an Aikido, you know, flip the energy back their way versus, you know, the other strategy being more confrontational and just saying no, that I will not operate in that Overton window.
This is true. And this makes sense over here, not over there. So I dunno it’s a tricky one. I mean, I’m obviously more confrontational when I see something stupid. I need to point out that it’s stupid because it’s stupid. And it’s it’s a tricky one.
[01:29:39] Michael Saylor: Yeah I think it’s complicated. Your best strategy is to is the strategy, which persuades the people with the power to support your point of view, right? if you don’t persuade the people with the power to support your point of view, you haven’t succeeded. So you just gotta figure out how to do that.
Generally, I find that being constructive and cheerful and educational is a lot more effective than being toxic and confrontational. Look on Twitter. If you’re toxic and confrontational, you just get blocked and then you have no influence over anybody that follows that person ever again.
So. And it, you know, if you walk into a mayor’s office and you’re toxic and confrontational, you just get kicked out and that’s the end of that. And they just assume that whatever you liked is wrong and they, and not only do they not give you what you wanted, they go outta their way to, to not give you what you wanted because it’s personal.
So I think you never really wanna make it personal. And you that phrase, those, that gods would destroy. They first make mad.
And the other point is, you know, do you wanna succeed or do you just wanna fight? Right. because the, I, if we come back to sun zoo and the like, right, the ideal thing is to win the war without fighting,
Not to engage in a hundred battles that you win. Right. And so coming back to Bitcoin, what you want is for every.
Nation organization and individual to embrace it and support it. That’s what you want. So if you’re if you’re spending a lot of time to tell the world why somebody is stupid and has character flaw, right? You’re ripping somebody else down, but that’s not building a Bitcoin, right? Ultimately you gotta choose your fights very carefully. And I think there’s some fights we’re taking.
For example, I think it’s reasonable to fight the gold bugs because we both agree with sound money, but every dollar invested in gold is a dollar non invested in Bitcoin. And that’s a battle we can win. We should win because it’s a benefit to them when they switch. It’s a benefit to Bitcoin when they switch. Right. I don’t think it’s all that constructive to fight a battle to eliminate the, you know, the Euro like. The odds of actually persuading 20% of gold bugs to abandon gold and adopt Bitcoin as the reserve currency are a lot higher than the odds of persuading, 20% of the Europeans to stop using the Euro and leave the EU.
You see? So, so there’s some battles that just, I don’t think make that much sense and other battles make a lot of sense. They’re ones that are winnable and by the way, the best battle it, if you must fight a battle, the battle you wanna fight is against ignorance. And the past in favor of the future, everybody wants to go into the future, knows they’re going into the future.
And you’ll find, I would think 95% agreement if I said would you, do you think modern technology can make your life better? I think you find not everybody. Some people would say I wanna live off the grid, you know, with. 19th century tech but most people would say, yeah, modern technology is generally better and I wanna embrace it. So if you look at the really powerful entities and companies that grow very rapidly, they grow by not forcing people to make a difficult decision. you know, I give away free Facebook. I give away free Google. Like how hard is it for Google to spread to a billion people? They give it away for free. They don’t tell you, you have to abandon your religion or abandon your nation, or abandon your citizenship or fight with your government or fight with your employer. They just give you free search. So, so I think that the best thing is just give people, technology. Technology represents something better in the future that came out of human ingenuity. The, and if you can do that, you don’t have to fight with anybody. You’re just at your pure education. The next best is if you must fight is fight a battle to persuade people that they’re better off buying a Bitcoin than buying a rental apartment as a store of value, or they’re better off buying a Bitcoin than buying a bar of gold and explain to them why Bitcoin is better than a bar of gold or better than a rental apartment, or better than, you know, a bunch of lumber in the back of the house. And, you know, if you frame it like that, right, the nation of Lumber’s not gonna get offended. I mean, we’re probably the gold bugs get a little bit upset, but a again at the end of the day, they’re the most organized. What about all the other, you know, person that wants you to buy three apartment units and Airbnb them on the weekend in order to like retire that person’s not gonna fight you back.
So I think if you fight that asset war, there’s a hundred trillion dollars there, right? We’re 500, we’re less than 500 billion. So Bitcoin can can increase by a factor of 200 from here simply by getting people to change their asset allocations. And you know, so between that and technology, those are just educational pursuits. And then you’re gonna ha you’re gonna have competitors that’ll say, yeah don’t use Bitcoin use my BI use my proof of stake thing and do it without electricity. And you’re gonna have to explain that without the electricity, you don’t have a commodity, you have a security and a security needs to be registered and taken public with full and fair disclosures.
Cuz it’s centralized you. You need to explain that in a cheerful constructive way, but you need to explain it and then you, maybe you need to explain how. Yeah, regardless of all those things, right? The Bitcoin network is 10,000 times more secure and more reliable and more long lived than the other thing.
And so you have to explain that, but you’re better off. I think a classic marketer would say you’re better off to segment the market. You’re better off to say, Bitcoin is digital energy. It’s a commodity, you know, you buy it because you can’t stockpile oil and you don’t wanna own 37 rental apartments and you don’t wanna carry gold bars through airports.
That’s why you buy Bitcoin. These other things, they’re securities their software companies and software programs. If you wanna invest in apple or Google or Facebook or some proof of stake network, they’re all investments, make sure you got full and fair disclosure, make sure you know, who owns it, make sure you know what to expect, but their investments in technology companies and Bitcoin’s competing. you’re gonna warehouse soybeans for a decade. Yeah. It’s competing against steel and oil and natural gas and land. And it’s it’s a digital property, digital commodity, and it’s the highest form of digital commodity. It’s digital energy. It’s IOR to last forever. You can oscillate it at a thousand megahertz.
It’s a cool thing. Let me tell you all about it. If you segment the market like that. No, it’s like, I guess I’d like some of that. What else is digital energy? There’s another network a hundred times smaller, you know, check out the market cap of the other proof of work networks. They’re one, you know, there are 50 basis points, 70 basis points of Bitcoin.
So they’re like I think I wanna own the one that’s a hundred times bigger.
Okay. And just and then go knock on the next door. there’s a lot of doors to knock on, right?
[01:37:30] Aleks Svetski: a good framing. That’s a good framing. I mean, I mean, what about all the people who are kind of fed up with all of the overreach and shenanigans, particularly over the last two years? You know, cuz there seems to be, I mean, when I’ve been out there pitching Bitcoin, there seems to be a craving for the message that I know is more adversarial, but people seem to be.
Wanting or craving, like how do
[01:38:01] Michael Saylor: that’s, there’s a political party and a political message, which is, you know, the libertarian party reflects that message less government,
Right? The Republican party, you know, reflects a slight difference from the democratic party and the libertarian party reflects a bigger difference. The Ron Paul libertarian party.
Kind of aligns closest with what the Bitcoiners would say. I think I would say join that party, pursue those politics, but I would brand them as libertarian or brand or create that party. I don’t think I would conjoin it with Bitcoin. See if your position is you think the government’s overreached fiscally, you don’t agree with their foreign policy, you don’t agree with the tax policy.
You don’t agree with their domestic policy. You don’t agree with their energy policy. You don’t agree with their medical policy. You don’t agree with their education policy. You don’t agree with their trade policy, their tariff policy, their domestic manufacturing policy, their labor and union policies.
Sure. But that’s politics. You know what I mean? Like that’s a lifetime of fights. And remember back to laser eyes, each one of those fights is just as hard. In fact, probably a lot harder than the Bitcoin. So I think that if you said you have to win all those fights for Bitcoin to be successful, right?
You’re kind of, you’re picking a hundred other battles to fight and it’s counterproductive and destructive because we need those people, right. There are people that, you know, in the democratic party, we need them to support Bitcoin. There are people in the Republican party, we need them to support Bitcoin.
You might disagree with Republican politics. You might disagree with democratic politics. the majority of the country. I don’t know if it’s 50% or 80%, but the majority of the country disagrees with the libertarian party. Otherwise they would’ve elected somebody by now. So those are political fights and yeah.
The Bitcoin community is is very aligned with a lot of those views. Right. And so am I, but my point is, yeah, you don’t need to fix, you’re now dealing with the 50% other problems in the world,
Right. You’re trying to fix the schools and fix the hospitals and fix the foreign policy and fix the fiscal policy.
And you’re trying to, let’s say it a different way. Why’s the currency collapsing because of all these policy interventions. So if you wanna fix the currency, you have to fix a hundred things that are radical, that are highly confrontational that are that no one can agree on. If you wanna fix the Fiat currency, or you can simply educate people that Bitcoin is better than gold and Bitcoin will be a million dollars a coin, and you’re not gonna fix any of those other things.
You’re just gonna fix Bitcoin. And you’re gonna make everyone that supports Bitcoin a hundred times as powerful.
So you see, like, do you wanna actually incrementally do good or do you just wanna fight? Cause I don’t, you know, I think that if you just wanna fight, right, you can also go to Ukraine and you can fight on one side or the other side.
It’s not clear to me. Like we fought in Iraq for 20 years. What did we fix? Like, like how much energy do you have to fight over this? And I would say there’s noth, there’s no reason why you can’t get involved in politics if you want to. I just think that conjoining the politics, it’s a mistake for Bitcoin to become associated with one party or the other party like is Bitcoin pro-abortion or anti-abortion I don’t think it’s either of those things.
Right. It’s better to stay neutral and stay Switzerland. At the point that the Bitcoin becomes politicized at that point 45, 40% of the country will reject you reflexively without listening to a word. You say,
[01:42:17] Aleks Svetski: Yeah. I agree with that. I think
[01:42:18] Michael Saylor: What let’s pick any of a hundred challenges we have in this country name one thing out of the hundred biggest disagreements we have that we have worked through in a civil fashion in the past 10 years.
[01:42:30] Aleks Svetski: yeah. Zero. Yeah.
[01:42:32] Michael Saylor: but so, so there, there aren’t many Alex there aren’t examples of six political successes in the last 10 years.
We don’t have many, but there are plenty of examples of technology, successes, Uber technology success. Apple, Google Netflix, Facebook Disney, plus what’s up all the games, even arguably cryptocurrency Bitcoin technology, successes. We have many. And why, because technologies are neutral apolitical, and there’s a general consensus in this country that we are technology leaders, not every country, right?
Like let’s say we lived in a fundamentalist religious theocracy that fought that technology was evil from Satan and we would all burn in hell and they were against new FAL gadgets. Then maybe the technology strategy wouldn’t be a good one in that country. Like I, for example, I don’t really think in North Korea, right North Korea, Cuba they’re against property rights. right. They’ll murder you for trying, saying, I wish to own private property, right? That’s a felony. Okay. So there are certain jurisdictions where they’re very hostile to to a property strategy. There are theoretical jurisdictions where it be, they be hostile to technology strategy. Although it’s practical matter. Most people like technology, like even the north Koreans, they were into hacking. Right. I mean, they must totally love the guys that hacked the Sony servers right. To steal all that contraband. So they’re not against that. So, so we’re back to this question, right? What can you accomplish? I think Alex, I’m 50. I’m 57. And so I’ve, you know, I’ve gotten dozens of patents and I’ve launched dozens of businesses and I’ve had lots of ideas and I love them all. And I’ve had thousands, tens of thousands of employees, and I’ve tried different things and I’ve spent billions of dollars doing different things. And what I’ve learned over the course of my life is generally you overestimate what you can accomplish when you have a passion for a good idea, and you underestimate the maintenance cost and you underestimate how challenging it’s going to be to to profit and to enjoy that idea. So like you, if you have a good a good business, you have to factor a huge amount of energy. If you work full time to maintain that business, it’ll stay effective. As soon as you say it’s like I launch a restaurant and then I go and I open up another restaurant, the other side of town and that’s successful.
So I go to Chicago and I open up a third one and then I go to San Francisco and open up the fourth one. And then, you know, I go to Miami and open up fifth one and I get back to, you know, New York city where my first restaurant is and all my customers are gone and my employees quit, you know?
And then the New York times is writing an article about how my restaurant used to be good, but now the food is garbage. And then the other restaurants, you know, the partners like default on something or the landlord basically triples the rent. And pretty soon I’ve like gone bankrupt, you know, some politician rezones my district.
And what you realize is you underestimate all of the challenges you overestimate, what you can accomplish, and people get bored very quickly. So they, you know, they tend to wanna go on and fight the next fight. It’s like, you know, like, Napoleon charging, he lost an entire army charging into Russia on the path to Moscow stupid.
But then he charged into Egypt, Napoleon lost an army in Egypt. Okay. Really then, you know,
[01:46:41] Aleks Svetski: Germans did the same thing.
[01:46:43] Michael Saylor: and the Germans are the same thing, you know, and the Americans, you remember Charlie Wilson’s war, Charlie Wilson’s war is all about how stupid the Russians are to go in Afghanistan and how Americans gleefully made fun of the Russians were being so stupid as to go in
[01:46:57] Aleks Svetski: Then did the same thing.
[01:46:58] Michael Saylor: I think we did the same thing. It’s like, you know, the human can, by the way, Julius Caesar lost an army in Egypt, right? It’s a never ending story, which is people always overestimate what they can accomplish. I launched about 10 businesses. The first one is still. The winning business, right? The first one, and what I found is that one you really had to focus on with your heart and soul. And generally what you find is in your thirties, someone hits it big and they launch a successful business and then some, and then they think two years later, what’s my next big success. And they have this idea. They’re just gonna knock off five big successes in a row. Okay. And everybody, eventually they hit that in Tropic frontier where they can’t compete anymore.
And it’s, it could be thought of a different way. There’s probably 10,000 things you can do that you can acquire, that you can buy, that you can launch that you can do. There’s probably a hundred of them that you can be competitive in. Where you are as good as the best person in the world.
Everywhere else. Yeah. You got it in the business, but you’re not world class, maybe a hundred and there’s probably one of them that you can be competitive in and make a profit at and grow consistently better at over time, such that you stay competitive.
So that threshold of enter the market, be profitable, make money in the market and grow forever against the smartest, most competitive people in the market that is 10,000 times harder than a, can you just do it? So people tend to pick fights that they can’t win and then they pick fights that they win, where they win the battle, but they lose the war.
It’s like, okay, you, okay? So what are you gonna do if you actually get Russia? Okay. Like you’re not gonna be able to govern it. You wanna fun read the history of William, the conqueror, William, the conqueror, you know, rose through, through unfortunate circumstance.
He was an orphan and he rose to conquer Normandy and was a success, got everything he ever wanted, you know, got married, had kids, perfect life. And then he decided he got in his head that he was the rightful heir to the UK. And he had to charge across the channel and conquer Britain. And he’s thought a thousand years later is this great, awesome guy, William, the conqueror.
That’s his name? He’s the only guy in a thousand years that ever conquered Britain. But if you read the story of what happened, he had only took him a couple of weeks to conquer Britain, but he couldn’t govern Britain. His entire life fell apart. His family fell apart. His wife turned against him, his son declared war on him.
He fought two civil wars against his own son. And eventually he died at war with his own children, you know, and was rolled into a ditch penniless, you know, couldn’t even afford a funeral, this greatest of all conquerors of a thousand years. And if you read the biography, the conclusion is he overextended bit off, more than he could chew because he had a massive ego. And so the story of people with massive egos wanting to write the wrongs of the world, Is throughout history, everywhere in every business, every company, you know, like it’s a 99% mortality rate in my business, they all fail because of bad acquisitions. The reason software companies fail is cuz the CEO has to keep expanding.
They have to keep growing. And if you can’t grow and they either try to grow organically and they break the company or they grow through acquisitions and they break the company and it’s literally like 99% likely. It’s just, that’s what happens. And so when you look at that, the conclusion you come to is if you have one good idea, get up every day and figure out how to spread that message or how to protect that good idea. Like we, we shouldn’t be trying to fix 27 other problems in the world. What we ought to do is make sure that no one corrupts the Bitcoin code. It’s more important for example, that we don’t F with the network and screw it up. It’s more important that we protect the integrity of what we have. And 98% of the world doesn’t even know what we have. And so educating France or educating Germany on why the auto adopt nuclear reactors or getting in some massive fight over, you know, government overreach in the medical business, all of these things are just other battles. They’re for somebody.
But, you know, if you really wanna be a nuclear activist, I would say you should be 150% focused on That thing. Right. Don’t tie yourself to any other thing.