EP #9 The Future is Bitcoin w/ Michael Saylor

In this episode, Michael and Peter discuss the future of Bitcoin, money as economic energy, how Michael would build a new world, and the future of cyberspace. You will learn about: 10:17 | The future of Bitcoin 37:01 | Is there still a risk with Bitcoin? 1:07:01 | The next move is Cyberspace 1:18:00 | Michael Saylor’s 10 observations Michael Saylor is an entrepreneur and business executive. He is the co-founder, former CEO, and executive chairman of MicroStrategy, a company that provides business intelligence, mobile software, and cloud-based services. MicroStrategy is the world's biggest publicly traded corporate owner of Bitcoin, with 129,218 BTC. _____________ Resources Learn more about Michael’s free education academy, Saylor Academy. Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter Consider a journey to optimize your mind and body with Life Force. Learn more about Moonshots & Mindsets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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

• 0:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, I agree with you there.

• 0:06Speaker 00

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

• 0:23Peter Diamandis?

  And a massive transform to purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am, this is what I'm gonna do, this is the dent I'm gonna make in the universe.

• 0:35Peter Diamandis?

  Welcome to Mindsets and Moonshots. It's my pleasure to welcome a longtime friend, one of the smartest people I know, Michael Saylor. Michael is an entrepreneur, executive, inventor, author, philanthropist. He is also perhaps the most prominent and brilliant Bitcoin proponent on the planet. He's the executive chairman of Microstrategies, a company founded in 1989 just out of MIT, where he served as CEO for 33 years straight. Microstrategies is the largest independent publicly traded business intelligence company and the largest holder of Bitcoin on its balance sheet. He is a first principles thinker extraordinaire and provides the most clear and cogent arguments for Bitcoin I've ever heard.

• 1:17Peter Diamandis?

  Beyond Bitcoin as a compelling, he has a compelling mastery of financial markets, history, technology, inner workings of blockchain, and makes a compelling conversation to have and listen to. He is the creator of the Saylor Academy, Saylor.org, providing free educational services to over 1 million students to date. Full disclosure, Michael and I were both fraternity brothers at, they had dealt a Kai at MIT. He was, I think, three or four years behind me. We both earned degrees in aeronautical, in astronautical engineering, and Michael also got a degree in science, technology, and society. Michael, a pleasure to have you here, pal.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  Nice to see you again, Peter.

• 1:57Peter Diamandis?

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

• 2:38Peter Diamandis?

  or store of value replacing gold, what, what could Bitcoin get to? What's the math behind that?

• 2:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, the way I think about that is, uh, I consider the value of all of the, uh, property in the world that's used to store wealth. So right now, if you're a, if you're a wealthy individual and you wanted to give money to your grandchildren, you have a number of choices. You can either buy bars of gold or you can buy ranches. You could buy blocks of Manhattan or buildings. You can buy, uh, shares of companies, corporate stocks. You could put money in a savings account and maybe buy sovereign debt or bonds, corporate bonds or, or other bonds.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  And, uh, when you add up all this stuff, it's like $500 trillion worth of, of stuff that people use. And, uh, the challenge with all these things is, is how do I know if I had a million dollars today that it would still be worth a million dollars 100 years from now?

• 3:43Peter Diamandis?

  A million dollars in, in buying power, if you would, yes?

• 3:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, if, you know, money is economic energy. And so I want to have a certain share of economic energy in the civilization. And I want to maintain it for a, a long time, for generations. So if I buy a city block in Manhattan, it's kind of intuitive that over 200 years, the value of that city block will go up. And if more people move in in Manhattan, it will go up. And so the positives are people move in the city and I got a share of the economic activity of the city. The negatives are it's going to get taxed by the mayor of Manhattan. There's going to be zoning regulation by the neighborhood zoning board. It's going to get potentially taxed by the state of New York.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  Some, it might be the politician decides they really want to build Central Park on my block of land and they just take it from me and they pay me, you know, submarket or maybe they want to turn my land into an airport or into a port. So you own property. It sounds really good, but you have to fight to maintain that property over 100 years and your children's children will have to fight to maintain it. So if I took a million dollars of economic value in, you know, 100 years ago and I held it in dollars, the US dollar is expanding about 7% a year for the past 100 years.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  So if you do the math, you find that you lose 99% of the economic value in cash. And that's why nobody in their right mind would put a million dollars of cash in a box and, and put a time lock on it and in the year 21, 20, expect their great grandchildren to open the box and for it to be worth anything. It will be worth nothing. Sure. If I put a million dollars of gold in a box, 100 years from now, the challenge is will the bank or the government seize the gold? Pretty much every country on earth stole everybody's gold over the last 100 years. If you had it in Germany, it got stolen multiple times. You know, the British, the French, the Japanese, the Russians, even the Americans stole everybody's

• 5:54Speaker 00

  gold. So, and if it didn't get stolen, that's what, that's what we call counterparty risk. Seize your confiscation. If it didn't get stolen, if you, if you increase the gold supply by 2% a year, then you realize the half-life of money in gold, that, that seems a half-life of, of energy in a battery.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  The half-life of money and gold is 35 years.

• 6:16Peter Diamandis?

  Which, by the way, we increase it by 2% because we're mining new gold every year, right? It isn't a limited fixed amount.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  You can't stop the gold miners from mining gold. So ultimately, the economic energy stored in the container of gold is dissipating at 2% to 3% a year, which means you're going to cut it in half once, twice, three times. Right? So you're going to be down to 12.5% of what you had, even if it doesn't get seized. So when you think about these things, you realize that gold doesn't really hold economic energy great. It just happens to be the best portable, non-sovereign way to move energy around.

• 7:01Peter Diamandis?

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

• 7:05Speaker 00

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

• 7:45Speaker 00

  The oldest, uh, oldest cliche is, "Lost the family farm because we couldn't pay the property taxes."

• 7:52Peter Diamandis?

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

• 8:09Speaker 00

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

• 8:40Peter Diamandis?

  The dictators, the rulers, the kings.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  The sovereigns.

• 8:44Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 8:44Speaker 00

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

• 9:25Speaker 00

  And the reason they can afford to do it is because there's no tax, because they make the tax laws.

• 9:30Peter Diamandis?

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• 10:14Peter Diamandis?

  All right, let's get back to the conversation in the episode. So let's assume, as you've said, and I completely agree, gold is getting diluted. You said, we said threefold over a course of 100 years. Land and buildings are being taxed and evaporated, if you would, by taxation. So if people start realizing Bitcoin as a strong store of value that isn't dissipating, isn't being taxed. What is your, you walked through some of the numbers. If it, if it takes a percentage of the store of value of land or gold and so forth. What could be the, the price of Bitcoin in the future? Not making any guarantees, but.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  When you think of it as digital gold, then it should replace gold. Gold's worth $10 trillion and that takes Bitcoin to 500,000. But when you think of it as digital property, like replacing buildings and land and other long storeholds of wealth, then, you know, you're up by a factor of 20 or 30 from there. I mean, it should not be... It's much better than digital gold because I can move Bitcoin at the speed of light and I can program it to a million transactions an hour on an iPhone or a website. You can't do that with gold. So it's got more utility than gold, which means it's probably worth 20 or 30 trillion if it just replaces the gold. But instead

• 11:40Speaker 00

  of buying the Fountainblow Hotel, which is a nice hotel, you know, worth whatever billions in Miami Beach, instead of buying that, instead of buying the equivalent amount of Bitcoin, if you bought the Bitcoin, you can move that to any city in the world every hour of the day, compose it, decompose it, recompose it, dematerialize it. And, you know, when there's a nasty tax on it, you can just move yourself to a different jurisdiction where there's a better tax treatment. And if you think of it like that, then it's a multi-hundred-trillion-dollar asset class. So a 10 trillion is 500,000, and 100 trillion is 5 million. So I think, you know, we're marching toward 10 trillion dollars, which is...

• 12:25Speaker 00

  Yes. Sorry, sorry, 10 million dollars a coin, which is why Bitcoin enthusiasts see it's just a very great long-term store of value. And it's a great investment idea because it meets the needs of 8 billion people. The average person, the middle-class person that drives an Uber or works as a dentist, they can't buy $387 worth of a building in New York City every month is their savings plan, right? But and a guy, a person in Africa can't buy a small share of a nice piece of property. They can't buy $127 worth of Caso painting.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  So Bitcoin offers property rights at any scale, any amount of money, anybody in the world. And you can, you don't have to worry about, will people like Picassos? Will they still want buildings in Vegas or New York? Will some politician tax it away from me? Well, you know, can I take it through an airport? So if you're looking for an egalitarian utilitarian way for people to save money and protect their life force or protect their economic wealth for the next hundred years. And you are looking for something that's kind of consistent with the mobile wave, Android phones, iPhones, websites, that's truly global, that is, it's more appealing

• 13:51Speaker 00

  to people in Nigeria and Argentina than it is appealing to people in Manhattan.

• 13:56Peter Diamandis?

  I'm going to, I'm going to get there, right? Because it really is part of creating a world of abundance. It is critically important as a means for that. You know, Michael, I wake up every morning with you and your tweets. I enjoy your, I enjoy your tweets. It's definitely, I love this one from a little bit ago. And it was, it was important and prophetic. You said, I thought it was late. You said, I thought I was late to Bitcoin, but apparently not.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:21Peter Diamandis?

  And, and that's one of the important things that I think people need to get. It's not too late to Bitcoin, especially if we are, have the potential to hit 500,000, 5 million, $10 million of Bitcoin. It's still early in the deceptive phase of its growth.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  I thought, you know, I thought when Google came public, I was too late. But if you, you know, if you look at the really great successes of our lifetime, Peter, the, the digital monopolies, the Apple, the Google, you know, the YouTube, the Facebook.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  You know, these things.

• 14:58Peter Diamandis?

  The micro strategy.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  We thought that we were late to them, but the truth is, Google would have been a good idea to invest in, you know, all the way up to like a few months ago.

• 15:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, no, I was.

• 15:11Speaker 00

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

• 15:38Peter Diamandis?

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

• 16:08Speaker 00

  You know, Bitcoin represents a paradigm shift. It's the digital transformation of money, property and energy. And paradigm shifts are so profound that you're staring at them and you don't realize they took place because your worldview is constructed based upon a bunch of assumptions that you've always taken for granted. And so what Thomas Kuhn says in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and what we studied at MIT is, there's only two circumstances under which people willingly undergo a paradigm shift. And one way is you wait for the old guard to die. And the millennials kind of, they get it because they're different and, and the Einstein,

• 16:51Speaker 00

  you know, said, God does not play dice with the universe. Einstein never liked quantum theory. You know, you could be a brilliant person, but you won't embrace the paradigm shift while you're alive in the absence of a crisis. The second way you get paradigm shift is a war. You're right. When there's a war and there are bombs dropping from above, you don't believe in atomic power, but then someone drops a nuclear weapon and the city evaporates and all of a sudden you become a believer and you reassess your priorities.

• 17:23Peter Diamandis?

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

• 17:39Speaker 00

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

• 18:20Speaker 00

  all of a sudden, 80-year-old man decides he loves this now. And so it has to just click.

• 18:27Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  Right?

• 18:28Peter Diamandis?

  So what clicked for you with Bitcoin? Was it, when was it? Was it March of, was it?

• 18:34Speaker 00

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

• 18:56Peter Diamandis?

  Six weeks later, right?

• 18:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. Financial assets were having the best year ever. People had great years. I mean, a lot of these hedge fund managers, they had the best year of their life in 2020 or 2021. And Main Street assets were having the worst year in 30 years. And I had a company with $500 million in cash that was dead money. It was idle. It was generating 0% interest. The Federal Reserve said, "We're not going to raise interest rates for four years." The company's stock was in the tank. At one point, in essence, when we were going through this, our company was valued at $60 a share in cash

• 19:39Speaker 00

  and $60 a share in the software business. And that was like one times revenue. And so, you know, I looked at the world and I said, you know, if the cash is dead money and if our stock is viewed as dead money, we've got a choice between a fast death, a slow death, or we write out of the cash and we take a risk. The fast death is I just give the $500 million back to the shareholders in a dividend or a buyback. Now, I knew that wasn't going to save the company because I'd been buying back the stock for the last five years. I bought $300 million worth of stock back or something. And the only thing what happened would be the stock would go from $120 a share to $60 a share.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  And then all the stock options, the employees would be underwater. Then all the employees would get headhunted away by Amazon and Google and Facebook, you know, and then we wouldn't be able to compete with Microsoft. And, you know, we compete against a company which has more power than God, right? Microsoft, right? Every company on earth is their customer. They're more powerful than all but about a handful of countries on this earth. And they can do whatever they want, wrap it into their product, give it away for free if they want. So the challenge of giving up the capital was first we'd lose our financial capital and then we'd lose our human capital. And then we'd have no reason to exist and the company was going to zero. So notwithstanding whether you care whether a company lives or not,

• 21:06Speaker 00

  I didn't see it in the interest of my shareholders to watch the stock go to $60 a share and then watch us slide. You know, we'd have to sell the company. So the second strategy is hold the cash. But the cash is, you know, cash trash. Ray Dalio says that is generating 0% interest. And the money supply expanded by 20% a year for the past two years. You can see it in US single-family homes, which shot up 40% in price. And so if the money's being devalued 20% a year and you're generating 0% interest, you've got a negative real yield of minus 20%. And I did the math in my head and I concluded that pretty much the $500 million in purchasing power would be cut into $250 million

• 21:48Speaker 00

  of purchasing power in 36 to 48 months. So that's a slow death.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  It's, it's, I could use cash to pay my employees, but ultimately, we were sitting and mired. And, uh, and so, that doesn't work. And so, in that situation, we decided we should do something transformational. And, you know, and, and if you went into a Harvard B school class and corporate strategy said, what are you gonna do? The investors want the cash back. You can't generate a yield on the cash. The company needs to grow. Well, the answer is you do a transformational acquisition. So if I could have bought VMware, or if I could have bought WhatsApp, or if I could have bought Snapchat, if I could buy like a super high-growth digital monopoly,

• 22:39Speaker 00

  or some, uh, some moonshot thing that would go to the sky, then yeah, maybe that saves the company. But, those are few and far between. Most of the time, these acquisitions that you do are dilutive. And I knew they're dilutive, because like Pete, it's not my first rodeo. I lived through this. I invented, uh, you know, I launched 12 different product lines to grow the business, and I, and there were singles and doubles or whiffs, and I know that just innovating won't always help you. And then I bought the stock back, and I, you know, and I knew that didn't work. And then I spent hundreds of millions of dollars on sales and marketing to expand the business, and that didn't work. And so, I, and then I watched all my competitors,

• 23:20Speaker 00

  Business Objects, Cognos, every company, I watched them do acquisitions to try to grow, and every one of them failed. In that strategy, there was a 99% mortality rate. Wow. Every, the reason where the biggest independent business intelligence company left is because the other 100 all went private, got bought up, got amalgamated, and sucked into the bowels of IBM and Oracle, and then dismantled, over the course of 20 years. So, I kind of knew, I tried everything, for a decade. I knew it wasn't gonna work from first, you know, from first observations. So I thought, well, what if I could find a digital gold, which was better gold than gold?

• 24:04Speaker 00

  Something that is better than gold, but also a big tech monopoly?

• 24:10Speaker 00

  And here are my three criteria. I want it to be a better gold than gold. I want it to be a big tech monopoly, and I want no one else to appreciate it. I want it to be underappreciated. And that's what Bitcoin was in the second quarter of 2020. The instant, no one thought it was an institutional asset, even though Amazon's stock had doubled in the second quarter. Bitcoin was trading about the same as it had been trading in 2018 or 2019. You know, it had been, it got up to 10,000, it had smashed down to 4,000, it was back at 10,000. So I looked at it and I said, well, you know, based on all the information, you would think that a digital property network or a global digital money network

• 24:55Speaker 00

  is more valuable, knowing that people are losing confidence in currencies, losing confidence in central banks, losing confidence in governments. And this is a non-sovereign, open decentralized system. So it struck me that the fundamentals were good.

• 25:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, you would think that.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  But it wasn't appreciated.

• 25:14Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 25:14Speaker 00

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

• 25:45Peter Diamandis?

  Yep.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  And I'm the guy in 2011 that bought Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google's stock, you know, and they all worked out well. And I thought, the year's 2020, we're at the end of the mobile wave. You know, I, I tell a story of, you know, I tell a funny story in the mobile wave about my niece on a beach and she's like... I don't know, eight years old and she wants the big apple. And I said, oh, you want to go to New York City? She's like, give me the big apple for my birthday. And I said, you want to go to New York City? She goes, no, I want the iPad. And I thought, okay, little girl wants an iPad. That means that the entire world wants this and this is going to be a big deal. So buy Apple stock. Well, in 2020, I'm talking to the same niece. And I said, what do you think?

• 26:30Speaker 00

  And she goes, yeah, well, I just bought some Amazon stock. And like Amazon's trading at like $3,300 a share, you know? And, and it just doubled. I'm like, okay, well, if 20 somethings now know they should buy Amazon and Apple and Google. This is not an, this is not a misunderstood technology trend anymore. Every Uber driver understands that.

• 26:53Peter Diamandis?

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

• 27:01Speaker 00

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

• 27:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, this was the number, right? Since August 10th of 2020, when you adopted Bitcoin.

• 27:42Peter Diamandis?

  Microstrategies has outperformed 97% of all S and P 500 stocks. Congratulations, that's amazing. Do you have a self-described purpose? You know, I, one of the things that I'm super, that I'm focused on in, in the show is helping people sort of get compelled to a purpose. Cause I think a, an individual, an entrepreneur with a purpose is the way to make the world a better place, right? The right mindsets and a driven purpose. What's your purpose right now, Michael?

• 28:10Speaker 00

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

• 28:14Peter Diamandis?

  I hear you, buddy.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  Engineer a better world. I think that I think that engineering is divine. I mean, you got to respect engineers. If you look at what it takes to build a bridge, what it takes to build an aircraft, a spaceship, a nuclear reactor, a ship, a building, a skyscraper, what it takes to cold roll steel, you know, you know, or create steel or to extract petroleum out of the ground or navigate celestially or build a, you know, build a mobile phone or a radio or a television. It's pretty clear as if you look at the history of humanity and look at the history of science,

• 28:58Speaker 00

  that that great improvements in the civilization and the human condition, they're all tied to technology.

• 29:04Peter Diamandis?

  A hundred percent.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  If you master fire, electricity, oil, nuclear power, you know, fill in the blank, higher level mathematics, these things make a difference. Antibiotics, it's unquestionable if you study it. And, you know, on the other hand, there's a lot of other things people engage in and, you know, some pursuits, you know, I like art, music, they're good. Politics is like half and half, right? Half the time it helps and half the time it hurts. And it's unclear whether it's hurting when they think they're helping or whether they're helping when they think they're hurting. But I think clearly engineering is a better moral high ground to stand on.

• 29:47Peter Diamandis?

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

• 29:59Speaker 00

  I've had a passion for a lot of things in life. But if we just focus upon Bitcoin right now, I think the fundamental issue is the energy balance in the civilization is broken. I think if you look at the civilization, you could say half of it is, is we provide goods and services and we trade with each other in order to upgrade the human condition and build things of value, right? We build bridges and buildings, we provide goods and services. But the other half is the money, the financial assets in the economy that create the financing, the liquidity that allow the trading.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  And money, the way I see money is, is in the ideal world, there'd be a certain ledger, a certain amount of money, a hundred million units or a hundred billion units, and no one would make any more, and God would keep track of the ledger. And if I owed you, you know, it's, it's in the celestial ledger, and then when you owe me, it's the same. Nobody can cheat anybody. Everybody can trade with everybody.

• 31:09Peter Diamandis?

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

• 31:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, and it's all, it's just fair, fair and a fair and equitable medium to trade, or system for trading. But the real world is, we use currencies and we use properties instead of having a true money. So if you use the dollar and we trade it, it loses 7% of its value a year, except for the last two years when it loses 20% of its value a year. But that's the best anybody's gonna get, because if you're trading in pesos, or you're trading in Nigerian currency right now, these, these currencies are losing 50% of their value a year. And so, this is the same as, as you're an athlete, Peter, and

• 31:55Speaker 00

  I bleed you a pint of blood every year, and it takes you about four weeks to recover. And so you don't run the marathon in the four weeks after I bleed you. That's like 5% inflation. But, you know, what happens when I bleed you a pint of blood every month? Right? Now, now you're just getting blood to death.

• 32:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 32:17Speaker 00

  You know, I'm reminded that George Washington died because his well-meaning physicians bled him to death. And they thought they were helping. They, I mean, the medical establishment literally thought that they were gonna help bleed off the, you know, the ill humors.

• 32:30Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 32:31Speaker 00

  But they bled him to death. And, and this is not complicated. If you look at a hyperinflating economy, be it Weimar Republic, or Zimbabwe, or look at what's going on right now in Lebanon, or Turkey, or Argentina. When the currency collapses, the businesses collapse. This is the same thing as when I, when you're in a car accident, and you open an artery, and you're literally bleeding out on the pavement. Well, eventually, when you bleed out, your brain stops, your heart's, you get a heart attack, your lungs don't work, you know, you suffocate. System collapses. System collapse. So what's the fundamentals of triage, which is first, stop the bleeding. They're not, like, I see you there.

• 33:15Speaker 00

  It doesn't matter, your arm is broken, right? What matters is, first, are you breathing? And is, you know, make sure there's oxygen, and then second, stop the bleeding, and then we can work on the rest of you. So I think that inflation, monetary expansion is, is bleeding to death. We just saw a country collapse, Sri Lanka. Yeah. Just collapsed about a month ago, literally. Uh, and, um, and the currency stops, and when the currency stops, you can't buy energy, and that, you know, they have an edict where they say private citizens can't buy gasoline anymore. Okay, so what happens when your currency loses value, you don't have liquid energy, you can't buy food, right?

• 33:57Speaker 00

  You're gonna starve to death, freeze to death, if you don't get beat to death by your neighbor, okay? So, so if you ask me, what is my mission? My mission is fix the money, but what does that mean? It means fix the energy balance in the civilization. There's, there's a bunch of inefficiencies. One inefficiency is eight billion people can't trade with each other. They can't. Yeah, if you wanted to trade between a country, a company in South America and a company in Africa, you would have to get access to your local currency, then the dollar, then go through the Federal Reserve or a central bank in New York City, then go through the central bank

• 34:38Speaker 00

  in Africa, then another local bank, and there's seven people that can steal the money along the way, and there's three billion people can't even get a bank account. And you can't write a computer program, right?

• 34:51Peter Diamandis?

  I get it. And the only thing that's changed this over, you know, and it's extraordinary, the life that we're living today, even in the developing world compared to 100 years ago or 500 years ago, definitely 1,000 years ago. You know, it used to be just the king and the queen on the hilltop and everybody else an abject squalor. And even the king and the queen had a life far less than, than, you know, people living in, on the street in Venice here have. But it's always, it's always been technology that's changing the game. And so when I talk about this, and I want to break it down a little bit, I talk about what I call the six D's of exponentials, right? That when you digitize something, in the beginning, it begins a process of very deceptive growth.

• 35:35Peter Diamandis?

  It's very slow. Until, you know, 30 doublings later, you're a billion times better and it's disrupting an entire ecosystem. And along the way, it's dematerializing, demonetizing and democratizing. And so Bitcoin is very much all of those, those things. The deceptive period of time, Bitcoin isn't the first cryptocurrency to be proposed as a digital store of cash, right? It's, it's, but it is the one that survived.

• 36:09Speaker 00

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

• 36:52Speaker 00

  And, and so it is the, it is the first, you know, digital commodity that kind of caught fire, that sparked.

• 37:01Peter Diamandis?

  I remember hearing about it, actually at Singularity University back in 2010, 11, 12, from some of the fringe. It was just in the earliest days.

• 37:14Peter Diamandis?

  I think there were, there were life-ending situations that it did avoid along the way, right? I mean, it's, is it stable now? Fully stable? Is, is the risk gone?

• 37:29Speaker 00

  I think that it's pretty stable at this point. I think that the great risk came in the first few years.

• 37:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  It's just, it's just like, again, coming back to the metaphor of a fire. If you start a fire, right? And you can put the fire out in, in the first few minutes, but at some point when the fire is taken over the entire warehouse, or it's broken out into the entire forest, you can't put the fire out. So, I think, I think at this point, it's, it's beyond that event horizon. But certainly, back in 2012, 2011, 2013, a lot of questions, like, would it be deemed property by the IRS?

• 38:08Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 38:09Speaker 00

  You know, would it be banned or outlawed? You know, online gambling got banned, and they just shut it down dead on arrival. So there are a lot of things that, that do get squelched. And this, this had to get to a sufficiently decentralized, diffuse point where no one regulator, no one nation state would think they could stop it. And I think we're clearly there now. We, you, you can see that now with the utterances coming out of the White House, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the head of the SEC, and the head of the CFTC. But you couldn't have been sure about that in 2012.

• 38:44Peter Diamandis?

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

• 38:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I did.

• 39:00Peter Diamandis?

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

• 39:06Speaker 00

  I don't, it wasn't, it didn't take that long. It wasn't terribly difficult.

• 39:11Peter Diamandis?

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

• 39:34Speaker 00

  Einstein tells us matter is energy, and energy is matter. And, um...

• 39:42Speaker 00

  If you look at the advances of the human civilization, many people don't think in terms of energy. But if you thought about it, you'd realize that steel is highly concentrated metallic energy. And the reason that you can build a 100-story skyscraper is because you put so much energy into a material that it could withstand the force of gravity up to 100 stories. And so because you have steel, you can build a bridge, you can build a skyscraper, it'll last 100 years. So that concentrated energy allowed your aspirations to become expansive in time and space. Right? That's why we have the Bronze Age giving way to the steel age, right?

• 40:27Speaker 00

  Oil is concentrated liquid energy, right? And John D. Rockefeller kind of gave us standardized liquid energy. Standard oil was a pretty big deal. And if you, you know, consider trying to cross the Atlantic with wind energy instead of with oil, you could see that it really did catapult the civilization forward. Bitcoin represents digital energy. And in that way, if you think hard about it, you realize it represents digital matter too. It's the first time, it's the singularity whereby we open this portal and energy can flow into the digital realm.

• 41:04Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 41:05Speaker 00

  When Satoshi invented a way to transfer value from me to you without a trusted intermediary, I can send you a million dollars, no bank involved. Okay, the critical thing with solving what they call the double spend problem. But the double spend problem means I send you the million, I don't have it, you have it. Okay? That's a very lowbrow colloquialism, right? In engineering, at MIT, we would refer to that as respecting the laws of conservation of energy.

• 41:34Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  It's like, I move 100 kilograms from me to you, right? It can't be in both places at the same time. I converted matter into energy, energy into matter, right? I can have one or the other. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms, it can vibrate. Right, Nikola Tesla said, "You understand the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration." So, this is a big eye-opener, because what you see is that everything in the digital realm before Bitcoin was non-conservative. It was digital information. I send you Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as an MP3 file, you've got it, I've still got it.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  And it could be redistributed 18 billion times. Sure. So, you don't own it, you just have a copy. So, all of those businesses, Facebook, Google, Apple, they're all based upon digital information revolution, first on the web, and then on a mobile phone. And Bitcoin's big innovation was, we don't just move digital information anymore, we move digital energy. It's a conservative property. And if I can move a million dollars of energy from me to you, I can move a billion dollars of energy from me to you.

• 43:01Speaker 00

  But if I can move it from me to you, if I can move it over 10,000 miles, I can move it over 10,000 days. I can move a billion dollars from here into the future 30 years. And so, that's a second breakthrough. And then the third breakthrough is, if I can move energy through time and space, I can materialize, manifest, energy in cyberspace. Right, the big breakthrough is the creation of a billion dollars of something in cyberspace. There's a, JP Morgan had a phrase, he said, "Gold is money, everything else is credit."

• 43:45Speaker 00

  And what that means is, you have a bar of gold that is money, that is valuable, everything else a piece of paper, which just is a derivative of, or is a security that represents someone else's gold. So, you want the money, you don't want the credit. Now, in the world we live in right now, before Bitcoin...

• 44:08Speaker 00

  You can have a million dollars in your bank account, but it's credit. It's the bank says you have it and the bank can take it away from you. Yes. And you can only move it pursuant to their permission to move it. And right now, the bank doesn't give you an API to move money. There is no, you could have a billion dollars and 10,000 programmers. You can't create a program that'll pay $19, $22 transactions between here and Africa on a Saturday afternoon. You just can't do it. And guess what? For 30 years, you can't do it. And, and so all progress has come to a grinding halt in the financial world

• 44:47Speaker 00

  in the absence of money in cyberspace because credit in cyberspace is a, is a monopoly, which is caught up in a bureaucracy. So if we come back to Bitcoin, what is it really? It represents the true digital transformation of money, of property, of energy, of matter. Right? This is, this is four fundamental things a civilization is made of. For example, can you figure out how to create a wall in the real world? Right? I, I use steel. I use bricks. I have a brick wall. Peter, run as hard as you can into my brick wall. Okay.

• 45:28Speaker 00

  Well, so you run as hard as you can and you smash your face and you end up in the hospital. You ran into a brick wall. You can do that as an engineer in the real world because you have matter. And if you have energy, you can convert to matter, convert into a brick wall. You can do the opposite, right? I can aim a gun at the brick wall, blow it up. Or I can burn it and vaporize it, right? So, so we have that in the real world and that's the basis of the civilization. Now, how do I create a wall in cyberspace? See, here's the idea. If I have money, if I have Bitcoin in cyberspace, I can actually create a program where you want to come to my website,

• 46:12Speaker 00

  you have to post a million satoshis. And then if you, I don't know, start swearing at me, I debit you a thousand satoshis for every swear word. Okay? Or if you start trying to fish me or steal from me, right? Or if you just hang out on my website, I start charging you microtransactions, like I charge you a thousand satoshis a second. Okay? I can't do that with a credit card, because a credit card is credit. I can do it. Like, can you think of any way to lose a billion dollars in 30 seconds in cyberspace?

• 46:52Peter Diamandis?

  Besides losing my keys?

• 46:56Speaker 00

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

• 47:30Peter Diamandis?

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

• 47:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's sad. It's the tragedy of our time. But I tell this story because in a world of credit, this is a guy that, you know, you couldn't have undone. He could have hired an army of lawyers to bend reality in every which way with 16 different appeals. But when you're subject to the laws of nature and conservation of energy, there is no appeal for a mistake. And his life was snatched away from him in a couple of seconds or less because he made a mistake, because those are the consequences of that. There are no consequences in cyberspace without digital energy. The reason that Facebook is broken and Google is broken and Twitter is broken and we have armies of bots.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  Right? You know Twitter has 500,000 to a million fake accounts created a day.

• 48:28Peter Diamandis?

  Wow.

• 48:29Speaker 00

  300 million a year. Okay, there are no consequences because it's free. And so there's no truth. So if what I want to do is I want to create matter and energy in cyberspace. I need a system which respects conservation of energy and that means I need you to post a million dollars and you need to actually lose it in a split second if you make a mistake. That guy lost 40 billion dollars in one second. That's how fast it went. One second, 40 billion dollars because he was living in the real world. And if you smash up your airplane? Same thing. In the real world, there are consequences. In cyberspace, in a world of credit, there are no consequences.

• 49:14Speaker 00

  And if you consider, let's take Visa. When I send you money via Visa, you want a $20 deposit, I send it to you, there's a 2.5% fee. And it takes 60 days to settle. Which means that the velocity of the money, you know, the frequency with which I can oscillate the money is six times a year. And the cost, the friction on the motion of the money is such that after it moves 30 times, it's gone.

• 49:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 49:44Speaker 00

  Okay, so what if I told you I wanted to oscillate the money at 10 kilohertz? And I wanted it to be without friction, right? And that's what music is. So what Bitcoin represents, it represents the ability to move energy at high frequency. Like how about 1,000 times a second? How about move a billion dollars in second? How about, you know, you're saying to me, why would I ever want to charge somebody a billion dollars a second? What the answer is, if someone attacks me 30 million times in one second, and I charge them $30 an attack, it's going to cost them a billion dollars to do that.

• 50:27Speaker 00

  Today, a denial of service attack is, you know, effectively for the price of the electricity, and there are no consequences. And that's why we have cyber insecurity, and we have so much toxicity. And, and you can't even trust what people post online, because they're probably a bot, and they're not even a real person. And, you know, Peter, like, every 15 minutes, there's a Michael Saylor scam account spun up on YouTube with 20,000 fake listeners. And I spend a million dollars a year taking them down, and they just put them up faster than I take them down. And there's just no way to stop it, because there is no, there are no consequences in

• 51:10Speaker 00

  that cyber arena, because there is no digital energy to create consequences.

• 51:15Peter Diamandis?

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

• 51:59Peter Diamandis?

  Comms and, and compute is demonetizing at a rapid rate. Have you ever read a book called Zero Marginal Society by Jeremy Rifkin?

• 52:11Speaker 00

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

• 52:14Peter Diamandis?

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

• 52:36Speaker 00

  I think the most promising things, to your point, clearly are are utilitarian entitlements that you can create with zero marginal cost or zero variable cost. So, you know, you know, if we think about things like education, like at my sailor, sailor.org site, I think we sign up 80,000 or 90,000 new students a quarter. And and so now we're teaching a lot more than MIT did, and we do it for one one thousandth of the price that it would cost them. But instead of teaching one and a half million students, it could be 15 million students or 150 million students or 1.5 billion students.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  It scales at literally the marginal cost of some electrons. So you could you could create a PhD for $1,000 or $2,000 all in for the, you know, price of an iPad and some electricity.

• 53:33Peter Diamandis?

  It's going to be similar for health with, you know, AI diagnosticians and robotic surgeons. And, you know, the stuff that we spend a lot of money on is is demonetizing. And when it demonetizes, it does democratize. I think I think the change in the fiscal economic system that enables people, you know, this is for me, the underpinning of of creating a world of abundance where we meet the needs of every man, woman, and child on the planet, right? If they've got access to the tech and they have access to the to the to the financial energy to utilize the tech, what could what could stop this? What could slow down?

• 54:13Speaker 00

  The driver is technology and engineering. That's that's those are the good guys.

• 54:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  And the danger, the nemesis is politics.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  So ultimately, you know, you know, you paint a picture of, yeah, this is great. Energy is getting cheaper, but it isn't getting cheaper in Europe right now. In Germany, politics shut down the nuclear industry and the price of energy shot up by a factor of 20.

• 54:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 54:39Speaker 00

  Right? And, and so politics shuts down the use of fertilizers. Politics shuts down the use of nuclear. Politics is, you know, shutting down, you know, I've got a natural gas well, but nobody wants to actually create a pipeline. Politics shuts down free trade, right? Prices were all plunging and then we reversed it by putting tariffs on free trade and, and stopping the shipping. So I think ultimately the, the long-term arc is a good one. And let me take, I'll give you an example of politics and education.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  We could give a free college education, a free college degree to everybody on earth. The great majority of the people in the education establishment don't want to do that. They actually see that as anathema because their, their view of education is, the goal of education is to get the budget for education as high as possible and create the most number of jobs for educators. So if I could actually have one, you know, one teacher of algebra that taught a billion people, that would be viewed as anathema to politicians. They don't want one algebra teacher teaching a billion people. They want a million algebra teachers teaching fewer people.

• 56:01Speaker 00

  So ultimately, I think you can't, you can't pursue entrepreneurial aims without considering the politics. Politics have impacted Uber, they impact fintech, they impact crypto.

• 56:15Peter Diamandis?

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

• 56:39Speaker 00

  Okay, well, I I agree on in in general, I'm the optimist. But let me give you a pessimistic or example of failures.

• 56:49Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 56:49Speaker 00

  There is no online poker right now, even though there could be. There, you know, uh, there used to be a site called Trade Sports, where you could go and you could bet on the statistical outcomes of all manner of things, like elections and who is going to win the Super Bowl and and weather. And that got shut down in the same sweep that shut down online gambling. They just defunded that. Um, if you look at Zillow, Zillow is like a great, a great uh, application in the US. Try surfing Zillow in uh, the Caribbean or in Europe. And what you'll find is 20 years afterwards, it still doesn't have any data and it doesn't work anywhere in the world outside the US.

• 57:33Speaker 00

  And that's, that's because of the market structure and, you know, supported by the political system. So you would think that um, after 20 years or 10 years of inventing something, it would get embraced by the world, but it hasn't and it won't. And it, and so there are plenty of examples of breakthrough technology that would make the world a better. Let's take nuclear, you know, in the US, they've never built a nuclear power plant since the formation of a nuclear regulatory commission. And so in 50 years, we shut down the nuclear power industry, even though.

• 58:07Peter Diamandis?

  It's one of the safest forms of of power.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  Even though it's the cleanest, safest form of energy. And you know what I think? I think, you know, I didn't understand it when I was younger, but now I see how politics works. I think it was the oil and gas industry that paid the environmentalist to protest against the nuclear industry to spoke to to. Stoke fear in the hearts of people so that they could protect oil and gas and coal. And now the irony is you've got the solar and the wind industry stoking fear of oil and gas industry and they're still shutting down the nuclear industry. So I think that there's a lot of politics and it's jockeying of competitors.

• 58:55Speaker 00

  And one competitor wants to weaponize the political system to shut down another competitor. And how is it possible in France they embrace nuclear and in Germany they reject nuclear? And the human race is supposed to be full of intellectuals and objective engineers engineering a better world.

• 59:14Peter Diamandis?

  So let's talk about can we engineer a green field better world in cyberspace or on Mars or in O'Neill colonies? I mean, you know, if we're going to be going someplace new, the worst thing I want to imagine is that we bring old style politics and divisions with us into new arenas. Have you thought about, you know, what you would do for an economic system if we were, you know, a new nation state, if you would, were being created off-world? Or I think about the future of Web 3 being I'm going to have a citizenship and operate in a virtual world.

• 59:55Speaker 00

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

• 1:00:21Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

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

• 1:00:45Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, you and I, when we were in aerospace and, you know, I was a few years ahead, I was just taking a break from medical school. I came back to do an aerospace engineering. Undergraduate degree and I needed to take Unified Engineering and Multi-Variable Calculus. And then I just, I hung out with you and, and the fellow Core 16ers to try and, and do our problem sets together because doing them by yourself was, was definite suicide. But this was like 17 years post Apollo 17, you know, which had landed in, in 1972. And the shuttle Challenger exploded and it just happened.

• 1:01:28Peter Diamandis?

  And it was like, you know, it was like anybody who was passionate about space, it was like, it was, it was dead in the water and it had been for, you know, after that for another 20 years. It's just now, you know, Elon is, is revitalizing it with Starship and Falcon.

• 1:01:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's like, we can get to the moon 50 years ago, but we didn't go back because it wasn't commercially viable. When, when you're thinking about these things, the, the question is, is your intent to inspire or to commercialize? And if your intent is to inspire, you go to Everest, you go to the South Pole. Shackleton was inspirational, you know, Apollo was inspirational, but not commercial. People aren't living on the South Pole. They're not living on the moon. We're not making money there. So I think you've got to consider, are you trying to commercialize something? And, and that's a, a different state space of things you can do. And I think the second question is you've got to consider the politics and the cultural drivers.

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  And, you know, we're, we're not really on the earth today, right? We're not going to create a new nation anytime soon. And as long as nation states persist, you'll have strong, say fiat currencies and you have to, you have to adjust your commercial activity, right? To sit within that envelope. In Zillow, they, they're not going to succeed in Europe if they can't get access to the listings, no matter how good their tech is, no matter how, they could spend billions and billions and billions of dollars, it's not going to make a difference. And then, um, And in the US, they could do certain things, but they can't do other things.

• 1:03:06Peter Diamandis?

  Are you, is there any part of you that's excited about space still? About where it's going, is it, has anything recatalyzed?

• 1:03:12Speaker 00

  My issue with that, Peter, is fundamentally, you know, it's a propulsion and materials issue.

• 1:03:20Peter Diamandis?

  It is.

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  Right, there are just fundamental issues there, you know, and, and if you look at propulsion technology and, you know, specific energy of fuels and, and efficiency of them.

• 1:03:31Peter Diamandis?

  They've not changed.

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  There isn't an order of magnitude improvement in jet engines in the last 40 years. The Gulfstream Six or the Global Express is 20% more efficient than 30 years ago. So, we're not getting order of magnitude increases. So, if, if you really want to change the world, you have to get one, two, three, four, five orders of magnitude increase. So, I'll be, I think fundamentally it comes down to energy, right? When you can actually put a sugar cube in a coffee cup and, and wrap a fusion reactor around it, and you can generate enough energy to fly, you know, electro car for 20 years

• 1:04:16Speaker 00

  straight off of the sugar cube, then I'm enthusiastic.

• 1:04:20Peter Diamandis?

  I've seen that movie.

• 1:04:21Speaker 00

  And if you want to go to Mars, you know, you got to have water, and then you got to have massive amount of energy, you know, to heat this stuff up. You know, just like even in Ron Moore's, you know, remake, you know, For All Mankind, he's like, "We're going to the moon, we found water on the moon, and we, you know, we can use the water to stage." Okay, well, if we had a, if, you know, in Ron Moore's making of it, they've got like pocket nuclear reactors on the moon in the 1980s combined with water.

• 1:04:53Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:04:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, so my issue is, is I would be enthusiastic if we, if we, you know, commercialized fission and fusion and energy sources, and if we work through some of the materials issues, and then I think maybe there's something there, but right now, it's pretty clear that if you gave me $10 billion or $100 billion and I had a choice between Can I provide education for free to eight billion people? Can you make eight billion people live a happier life for five additional years? Can you fix the money in the world and make trade 100 times as efficient? Those are all potentially doable things. Can I actually put a million people on the moon?

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  Or 10 million people in a self-sustaining colony on Mars? I don't think you're gonna do it for 100 billion dollars. So I think that it falls into the category of inspirational and experimental. We're looking for something. And, look, if the Germans can't figure out how to generate electricity in Germany because they reject technology, you know, like, why don't we fix our own planet? And right now, on our own planet, we're rejecting technology right and left, and there are massive political struggles. So I guess the appeal of the off-planet people, the Heinlein people, is "This planet is too crowded, it's beat, we just gotta get out of here."

• 1:06:25Speaker 00

  And where there's more living, le bensström, right? "We need living space away from the politicians." And that was always the libertarian appeal, like, "Go west, young man."

• 1:06:36Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  There's no space on the planet where there's not a political...

• 1:06:51Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, unless you have an army and you can take over a country and conquer it. I mean, there's sea setting...

• 1:06:57Speaker 00

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

• 1:06:59Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

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

• 1:07:14Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, I agree with you there.

• 1:07:15Speaker 00

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

• 1:07:30Peter Diamandis?

  I love that, I love that video.

• 1:07:31Speaker 00

  When you put stuff in orbit, when you're putting it in outer space, I put a million pounds in orbit and I can move it around and it'll go in orbit forever. That's the breakthrough. But when I put a billion dollars in cyberspace, I'm putting a billion dollars in orbit, it'll last forever. Right now, the half-life of your money is seven years or something. So, so the next big move is fix the energy, the political economic energy system in our civilization. Because by my calculation, we're wasting somewhere in the order of 10, 20 trillion dollars a year because our economics are broken. And so what could you do if I gave you 10 trillion a year in a dividend to work on science?

• 1:08:16Speaker 00

  Right, so, so there's no point in losing 10 trillion a year, every year for the next 30 years while we try to do something scientific. Because we're just bleeding out. It's back to the issue of stop the bleeding before, I'm not getting a PhD while I'm bleeding to death on the sidewalk.

• 1:08:32Peter Diamandis?

  Hey, everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode. Let's tell you about something I've been doing for years. Every quarter or so, having a phlebonimus come to my home to draw bloods, to understand what's going on inside my body. And it was a challenge to get all the right blood draws and all the right tests done. So I ended up co-founding a company that sends a phlebonimus to my home to measure 40 different biomarkers every quarter, put them up on a dashboard so I can see what's in range, what's out of range, and then get the right supplements, medicines, peptides, hormones to optimize my health. It's something that I want for all my friends and family, and I'd love it for you. If you're interested, go to mylifeforest.com/peter to learn more.

• 1:09:17Peter Diamandis?

  Let's get back to the episode. I'm going to change the subject to one that I'm passionate about and I'm working on and is connected in a way to Bitcoin, which is the area of longevity. And my question for you, Michael, is how long do you want to live?

• 1:09:32Speaker 00

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

• 1:09:37Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:09:46Speaker 00

  I'd be okay with that.

• 1:09:47Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, that's, that's important. There's, there's a connection for me in between, between Bitcoin and longevity. You know, there's a lot of work going on. This is, most of my company's investments right now are in this area, the idea that we can slow stop and even reverse aging, working on a $100 million age reversal X prize right now to, to turn back your biological age 20 years.

• 1:10:12Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I'm just curious your thoughts about this conversation. And do you have this conversation with anybody? Is that of interest to you?

• 1:10:22Speaker 00

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

• 1:10:48Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  John D. Rockefeller lived to the age 99 and 3/4. 99, almost 100. And he's famously known for having set up, you know, the entire modern American medical system, maybe the medical system of the world, and endowing doctors and the like. But he famously rejected all medical care. He was homeopathic, and his view was a lot of the doctors were quacks. And many of the drugs and the surgeries were iatrogenic. His thoughts are echoed by Upton Sinclair, who wrote The Fasting Cure more than 100 years ago,

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  where he basically observed that most diagnosis, most drugs, most surgeries were counterproductive, and the best thing you could do when you're sick is just stop eating for a while. And he wrote an entire book about it in 1910. When I think about health and I observe what we've learned over the past few years, or however long it is, it's...

• 1:12:07Speaker 00

  Healthy living, right? Think about, I'm inspired by Paleolithic, you know, the entire paleo theory. How did human beings live for 3 million years as hunter-gatherers?

• 1:12:19Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 1:12:20Speaker 00

  And ask the question, 100,000 years ago, did your great ex-grandfather or grandmother do the thing you're about to do? And if the answer is like, drink large copious amounts of alcohol, pure sugar, take lots of pharmaceutical drugs, you know, have your stomach stapled, right, and have other random surgeries, probably not, or sit on a chair and watch TV. But if, if you say to yourself, get up, move around, get exercise, eat lean proteins, eat a mixture of organic foods, drink water, right, probably they did that.

• 1:13:03Speaker 00

  And so, I tend to be skeptical of, of a lot of medical intervention. I, I think that the modern establishment invents a lot of, a lot of diseases so they can treat them. Like, they want to tell you that your six-year-old kid has attention deficit disorder, so they can give them Adderall. But we didn't have Adderall growing up, and we didn't take it, and we got on just fine. And maybe, maybe, you know, getting bored of things that are boring is a positive trait and not a negative trait.

• 1:13:39Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:13:46Speaker 00

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

• 1:14:10Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:11Speaker 00

  A lot of reading. Well, you know, there's a, there's a world of infinite learning now. You can pretty much learn anything, any amount about anything at your fingertips. If you just start to surf through podcasts or Google or Yahoo or YouTube and the like. And so

• 1:14:31Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:15:10Speaker 00

  I think less government would be helpful.

• 1:15:14Peter Diamandis?

  Okay libertarian tendencies. I love that.

• 1:15:17Speaker 00

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

• 1:15:34Peter Diamandis?

  So do we go with the, in order to add a law, you have to remove a law? And do we go with a direct democracy?

• 1:15:41Speaker 00

  Just, just less.

• 1:15:44Peter Diamandis?

  Just less.

• 1:15:44Speaker 00

  Less well-intentioned politicians helping us how to live. Beyond that, I think the world would benefit if everyone had just free infinite education online. There's no reason why you can't learn most things for free. And so making, making education free is a good thing. I also think that there's no reason why eight billion people shouldn't be able to get a wallet that holds any mixture of currencies and assets and properties in their wallet. And trade with each other. I would say I'm a, I believe in trade. I think that

• 1:16:25Speaker 00

  if you want to, if you want to encourage abundance, then allow people to freely trade with each other at high velocity.

• 1:16:36Peter Diamandis?

  Without anybody siphoning off part of the trade.

• 1:16:38Speaker 00

  With the, with the minimum of friction.

• 1:16:41Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:42Speaker 00

  Right? Like, there are, there are a lot of places where they're just, it's impossible, like, it's impossible to trade. If you manufacture something in a certain Central African republic and you're dependent upon the CFA, which is the currency, the currency terminates in Europe, you can't trade it. Go to your computer terminal, there's not even a price for it. It's, you, there's, there's not even exchange rate for it. There are people that live either unbanked or they live in a currency which is not a hard currency. If that person could be your tutor, you know, or your accountant, you know, how do they get paid? How do they do business? So I think an open monetary system and open, I think the internet

• 1:17:27Speaker 00

  has gone a long way toward giving us an open communication system. I think just spreading more openness would be a benefit. I think that the, that having common language, common mores, common currencies, uh, common ability to communicate, all of those things have moved the human race forward. And the opposite of all those things, compartmentalization, right? And, uh, and the like, uh, drags us backwards.

• 1:18:00Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:18:08Speaker 00

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

• 1:18:20Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 1:18:20Speaker 00

  I, I thought about it and I boiled it down to 10 phrases. One, focus your energy.

• 1:18:28Speaker 00

  You have limited energy in your life. You think you can accomplish more than you can accomplish. You really can't do 100 things. You might be able to do, you can't do 10 things. You may, you'll be lucky to do one thing, but focus your energy. The second is guard your time. People are gonna actually chew into it. And if you're trying to accomplish something and you're, and if you're not thoughtful about your time, it'll be dissipated.

• 1:18:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:18:51Speaker 00

  The third is train your mind. You, you know, train your mind to do whatever it is you've decided, whether it's music, or math, or engineering, or something. Uh, the fourth is train your body. You should stay in, uh, stay healthy, take care of yourself. If your body breaks down, you know, your mind will follow. Fifth, think for yourself. The world's full of people that are telling you what to think. And they can spend their entire life planting narratives and ideas in your head, most of which are dysfunctional, that are self-serving to sell. We didn't have breakfast. People invented breakfast to sell you cereal.

• 1:19:35Speaker 00

  When you or I, I were growing up, there was no ADD. They invented ADD to sell Adderall. Like, stuff happens. So, think for yourself and decide whether or not you believe what people are telling you. I think the sixth is curate your friends. You know, you don't need many. You just need a few. Decide who, who you wanna be in your social sphere. The seventh is curate your environment.

• 1:19:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:19:58Speaker 00

  Where do you want to be, right? Put yourself in a safe place, a calm place, a productive place. Right? Whether it's controlling what you have in your room, or what you have in your house, or, or physically where you live, or what country you live in, or the like, but curate it. Eight, keep your promises. If you make a promise, keep it. If you lose, uh, if people lose faith in you, they won't, they won't help you. They won't trust you ever again. It's just bad karma. Nine. Stay cheerful and constructive.

• 1:20:33Speaker 00

  There's a lot of reasons to get negative, but it won't help. And so whatever you're pursuing, no matter how many cynics and critics come at you, you have to continually cheerfully, constructively pursue it and not focus upon the negatives, because it just distracts and dissipates energy. And then tenth, upgrade the world. Right? Be an engineer, upgrade, leave the world a better place, whether it's your garden, your house, your product, your book, something, right? You know, and you're awake, hopefully you upgrade the world such that someone can trace some improvement to the fact that you existed on this planet. And that's my mindset.

• 1:21:18Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:21:49Speaker 00

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

• 1:22:29Speaker 00

  and it would empower everybody on earth to take possession of their life force.

• 1:22:36Peter Diamandis?

  Are you going to build that?

• 1:22:39Speaker 00

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

• 1:22:43Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:23:03Speaker 00

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

• 1:23:05Peter Diamandis?

  It is a vibrant and colorful thought, for sure.

• 1:23:10Speaker 00

  It refers to the hundreds of millions of people everywhere in the world that are doing something in the manner of a swarm in order to pursue integrity and truth and beauty in cyberspace. And you ever walk into a Bitcoin mining center, you hear this wine, it sounds like a wine of hornets. But Bitcoin itself ultimately is about creating a truthful ledger, and I've talked about it. It is energy in cyberspace. It's encrypted. It's encrypted energy. What you're doing is you're taking electricity, you're running it through a

• 1:23:48Speaker 00

  SHA 256 modulation, and you're spitting out a block of Bitcoin which is encrypted, and then you're putting successive layers of encryption on the blocks over time, which represent reified energy, right, or reified information. And so, it's a, it is a, I describe it as like a fire in cyberspace. You know, you can think of it as a fire, a chain reaction in cyberspace, but you can also think of a swarm creature as very organic.

• 1:24:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:24:23Speaker 00

  Because it's just an organically evolving thing. And if you roll the clock back 13 years, it was just a few cypherpunks working on it, and then it picked up power, and now...

• 1:24:34Peter Diamandis?

  Exponential, baby. Exponential.

• 1:24:36Speaker 00

  There's people in every country and every language working on something, and they're doing it because it's the right thing to do, and they feel like this is their best hope at creating something truthful.

• 1:24:50Speaker 00

  That is beyond, beyond corruption. It's an incorruptible, beautiful thing. And like, let's take Wikipedia. Like, people are corrupting Wikipedia right now, right? They were just trying to redefine the definition of recession.

• 1:25:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, I saw that.

• 1:25:05Speaker 00

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

• 1:25:37Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:26:00Speaker 00

  Yep. They need hope. We gotta give them hope. And the way you give them hope is you either give them, you give them, uh, empowerment through education, or you give them empowerment through technical utility.

• 1:26:13Peter Diamandis?

  Or both.

• 1:26:13Speaker 00

  Or you give them power through economic energy, but you, you know, it's the most depressing thing would be, not that I don't have any money. The most depressing thing would be, I give you a hundred thousand dollars, Peter. You live in Africa and then the money is worthless in 12 months because a politician debases it to zero with hyperinflation.

• 1:26:34Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:26:44Speaker 00

  You know what I talked about with the skyscraper? I said, because a steel is highly concentrated metallic energy, you could build a hundred floor building, or you could build a bridge that spans a thousand meters.

• 1:26:58Speaker 00

  That's because you can walk out and trust the steel. You can hope for something expansive. And the same is true with money. If the money won't last a hundred years, you can't have a hundred year dream. If the, if I told you everything you own will dissipate on January 1st of next year, your life is hopeless and so therefore you just spend and squander everything in the next few months because, you know, it's going to be gone on January 1st of next year. So the time horizon, the scope of the aspirations in space and time of humanity is controlled by the technologies we have at our disposal and money is just a technology like antibiotics

• 1:27:43Speaker 00

  is a technology.

• 1:27:44Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:28:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, and, and it is beautiful in that way. If you, if you have a world where the internet reaches anybody on earth and where you have a monetary network like Bitcoin that reaches and lightning that reaches everywhere on earth. And if you have a technology like Zoom or, or like that reaches everywhere on earth, then you can trade, you can educate, you can inspire, you can trade with, you can work for, you can employ anybody on earth. And that allows people to reach their full potential. And then after they do it, they can have hope that they'll be able to retain their life force and their life savings.

• 1:28:58Speaker 00

  And that allows them to dream for something better for their family, their friends.

• 1:29:05Speaker 00

  Right there, children.

• 1:29:06Peter Diamandis?

  A hopeful, compelling, and abundant future.

• 1:29:09Speaker 00

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

• 1:29:15Peter Diamandis?

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

• 1:29:34Speaker 00

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

• 1:29:37Peter Diamandis?

  See ya, buddy.

• 1:29:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, you too. Keep up the good work.

• 1:29:40Peter Diamandis?

  Thanks.