The Saylor Series | Episode 7 | The Virtues of Strong Money

Link to the podcast: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-what-is-money/the-saylor-series-episode-7-5nUwegcuAz3/

Robert Breedlove [03:28]: Alright guys! We are back with Saylor Series Episode 7! Today we will be diving even deeper into Bitcoin theory and as always if you guys haven’t seen Episodes 1–6 that led us to this point I highly suggest you go and check those out. They build a lot of foundation that we draw upon continually as we progress further into this series. So today we’re gonna discuss Bitcoin as a monetary missile, which if you remember from Episode 1, missiles are one of the quintessential Stone Age technologies so we draw analogies to that. We also talk about Bitcoin as the creature that never sleeps. Again to the great Kraken itself and why this makes it a superior form of money. We’ll also look at the effects of humans intervening into complex systems and what that does to complex systems and the consequences that it generates. And finally we’ll look at some of the reasons why Bitcoin may actually be the sole sound store of value for the 21st Century, we’ll compare it to alternatives and draw the reasons why it is superior across a number of dimensions. Then we’ll get into the Talebian concept of via negativa and how it relates to Bitcoin and technology more generally. Finally we get into a really interesting aspect of Bitcoin not often discussed. And that is the — we look into the fanaticism of Bitcoin maximalists as an asset, as a value creator for this asset class itself. And that leads us naturally into discussion of Bitcoin as a religion. We’re gonna go deep again today. I’m really excited for this one. So let’s dive in!

Robert Breedlove [05:20]: Bitcoin is a monetary technology that we’re able to deliver with much more force. Force in the physics definition being Mass x Acceleration, or Mass also being equal to Energy. So we’re able to channel this energy in a very targeted and specified format at a very high speed and recalibrate almost instantaneously to always optimize our yield.

Michael Saylor [05:49]: Doesn’t it sound like a cruise missile?

Robert Breedlove: Yeah!

Michael Saylor: Or a projectile weapon? And we’re back to the issue of, What happened to the guys without the guns when the guys with the guns showed up? What happened to the guys without the airplanes when the guys with the airplanes showed up?

Robert Breedlove [06:08]: So you’re holding the proverbial high ground behind the wall of encrypted energy, but you can also send these financial — I guess you can call them financial weapons — out in a very targeted fashion based on what the market’s signalling. Right? What’s the demand for loans or what have you.

Michael Saylor: Yeah in theory isn’t a crypto bank the smartest, fastest, strongest financial entity in the world? Because it’s going to be working while everybody’s sleeping! Just like YouTube and Facebook and Apple networks — they’re working while you’re sleeping, 24/7/365. And to a certain extent you see that metaphorically if you just look at a crypto exchange and you look at the trading of Bitcoin and it’s working while you’re sleeping. And if you try to watch it you get exhausted. All traditional assets are constructed to trade from 9:30 in the morning till 4 in the evening because human beings need to watch over them and that’s about the maximum endurance of a human being. And Bitcoin — when you go beyond that, you’re going from 35 hours a week to 168 hours a week — it’s 5x as much! People think, Oh it’s just a little bit more! It’s not a little bit more — it’s 5x the bandwidth, just the trading. And then when you consider that it’s trading every hour in every currency pair —

Robert Breedlove: Everywhere, yeah.

Michael Saylor [07:59]: Everywhere, on a host of exchanges. This is extremely high bandwidth price discovery and transparency, right? The highest bandwidth price discovery, the highest bandwidth market of any security, of any asset ever! I mean, Bitcoin really is the perfected asset, or at least the apex asset in the financial jungle, because it’s the creature that never sleeps, that’s an octopus that’s working everywhere all the time. The metaphor — Kraken — it’s a pretty good metaphor because it’s always going and it’s never stopping. And remember back to our previous discussion, I was saying in Jurassic Park the guy picks a fight with the little dinosaur and then he realizes that there’s a hundred of those little dinosaurs and they don’t sleep. And when you pick a fight with a swarm and the swarm doesn’t sleep and you sleep, you realize you’re gonna lose! You’re doomed! There’s that point you’re gonna realize you’re doomed because you can’t keep up with a software creature with a million heads that is continuously working everywhere all the time. And here’s the thing you know: the thing that’s working that’s dominating the market in Bitcoin all the time — it’s the strongest version of the creature in that domain, not the weakest! The weak parts of the herd get culled out, they’re being deprived of their capital, they’re being squeezed out. You see it with the Mt. Gox disaster — anything that doesn’t quite work. And so this asset class is a living asset class. And it’s strength comes from the fact that it’s being developed — it’s not constrained by the lowest common denominator, it’s strengthened by the highest common denominator! If there’s somebody in the world, if there’s an exchange in the world that can actually do this better, faster, stronger and it comes onto the Bitcoin network, they will set the price. Even if you’re just HODLing, if you’re just sitting there holding an asset — let’s say I’m HODLing $100 Million of Bitcoin and I’m wishing it would go up in value. And then let’s say there’s a million kazillion laws in the United States that prevent people from trading index futures on Bitcoin. But somebody in Malta is able to do it, or somebody in Singapore is able to launch that exchange. So Singapore launches an exchange that matches billions of dollars of forward index buyers or option buyers to billions of dollars of call buyers, and that attracts tens of billions of dollars of capital in the market because it solves the yield curve problem. Let’s say hypothetically somebody on a centralized or decentralized or Lightning Network exchange solves the yield curve problem. If I could give you 8% risk-free yield on 10-year money, presumably you can take $100 Billion and you can take that money and you can short fiat. Short the dollar, go long the Bitcoin, squeeze the 8% yield on $100 Billion, make yourself $8 Billion a year. If you can figure out how to do that in Singapore, you set up in Singapore, you do it in Singapore — what happens to the price of Bitcoin? Goes up! What happens to the HODLer sitting in Schenectady, New York — that never did anything, that didn’t touch it, that doesn’t know about it, that doesn’t understand it — with their little 1 Bitcoin?

Robert Breedlove: It’s been strengthened!

Michael Saylor [11:59]: The network is getting stronger based on the highest common denominator! Anybody in the world with a better idea that plugs into the network is lifting everybody! And that’s totally different than a conventional centralized traditional structure where one regulator might create one set of rules that constrain and hobble. [Inaudible 12:25], buddy!

Robert Breedlove: Right! The asymmetry has been inverted from the Great Wall of China! If there’s one failure at any point the whole thing is compromised, but now you’ve inverted that asymmetry such that if there’s one benefit it benefits everyone.

Michael Saylor [12:40]: And that’s what it’s like when you’ve got this swarm. If the herd is attacked by a predator and one of the creatures figures out how to kill the predator then the ones that couldn’t figure it out die, the ones that do figure it out live, they procreate, pretty soon they can all kill the predator. They all have that immunity. That’s herd immunity, whatever that might be. And that’s the beauty of Bitcoin. I had this Tweet—I put it out there, I said, You know, lions get tired of chasing the antelope. Lions complain to the ranger. The ranger hobbles the antelope. Lions get fat, dumb, and happy. Antelope all die. Lions all die. Ranger blames it on the weather! And that is a metaphor for a lot of stuff. Generally it’s a metaphor for how you destroy a crypto network by trying to make transaction fees lower. It’s like, Someone complained about transaction fees so we tried to change everything to drive the transaction fees down because somehow it’s an abomination in the eyes of God that people get charged for transactions! The antelope ran too fast! Not fair! Slow them down! The transaction fees were too high! Not fair! Make them lower! We’ll hobble them for you. Okay? It’s also a metaphor for interest rates. Interest rates are too high! I can’t afford a loan! Make them go down! It’s also a metaphor for competition. My competitor goes too fast! They’re making it too difficult! Slow them down! Make the foreigners stop that! Make somebody do something! Right? It’s somebody trying to regulate or manage something because they think it’s a problem. But at the end of the day, you’re messing with Mother Nature. You’re in a war with Nature—it’s not gonna end well. At the end of the day lazy lions should die, and slow antelope get eaten, and fast, strong, healthy antelope procreate, and fast, strong, healthy lions feed, and the lions get better, and the antelope get better, and they live in an ecosystem. And if you remove the predator, all sorts of crazy, bad things happen.

Robert Breedlove: Right. You throw off the balance! This goes all the way back to your original point that there’s no fair fight in the world. And that when human intervention tries to make that fight more fair, the intervention into a complex system throws off all these unintended consequences. That is one of the things that’s gotten us into the situation that we’re in today with low and negative interest rates. We’ve constantly tried to introduce an economic analgesic to paper over the business cycle or paper over losses. And we’ve distorted the natural price discovery function of the market, and so now we’re in these totally asinine times with stock market at an all-time high and 40 Million people unemployed. And this is one of Taleb’s main theses is: Human beings have to strive to not intervene with Mother Nature. Mother Nature has been executing a certain strategy for a long time — we have to assume that it’s being done for a reason, no matter what Science tells us!

Michael Saylor [16:30]: You know, interest rate is the time-value of money, but if interest rate’s the time-value of money, it’s the time-value of energy. And if it’s the time-value of energy, interest rate is the value of time. And maybe if we come back to thermodynamics — the rule of thermodynamics is: time cannot go backwards. Entropy is at [work]— time must move forward. Trying to drive interest rates to zero or negative is a war on time. You’re trying to make time go backwards! You’re trying to make water flow uphill. You’re trying to reverse gravity. You’re trying to reverse the laws of thermodynamics. It’s me saying to you, Robert, will you give me everything that you own — give it to me — you go without, I’m going to keep it, and when you die I’m going to give a third of it back to your heirs! And so the only way you would do that is if you thought the future of your life had negative value! If you knew you were gonna be serial axe-murderer killer and you knew it in advance and you thought, You know, I should be deprived of the future of my life because I’m really a liability to humanity. Maybe! But if you actually thought that the future had any value, you couldn’t make that trade. No rational person would say, I’m gonna give you everything I have in return for half of it back when I’m dead. It’s so moronic it’s just insane! And so when I’m trying to drive the interest rate to zero or negative, I’m actually trying to reverse time and make it run backwards. I’m first trying to stop it, and then trying to make it run backwards. I’m trying to reverse entropy. I’m trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Thermodynamics, the laws of physics, the laws of humanity, they all say: It can’t be done, and only something catastrophic will ensue!

Robert Breedlove [18:52]: Let me ask you. So — this is interesting — we have a legacy financial system that’s trying to grind against or move countervailing to the laws of thermodynamics or the thermodynamic arrow of time, and here we have this new system introduced in the form of Bitcoin that nearly perfectly mirrors the laws of thermodynamics. It aligns itself with the thermodynamic arrow of time. It seems almost serendipitous that Bitcoin is released at this time when the system is starting to come apart in this decade. Do you think that this is almost like an autoimmune response by the global human hive mind?

Michael Saylor [19:41]: Yeah! I do! Because look at what Satoshi put in the Genesis Block. It’s pretty clear that Satoshi was troubled, was inspired, antagonized, irritated enough to do this! Humans solve problems, and so if I introduce a pathogen into your body, your body reacts. Living creatures react to protect themself. So if someone is sensitive to a given issue — and Satoshi was sensitive to financial integrity, and obviously had some decent sensitivity and awareness of Austrian economics and the perils of inflation and the moral hazard of bank bailouts — so that was a sensitive individual that tapped into a bunch of other sensitive nodes — individuals — who shared that. And it’s almost like: I pricked you with a needle and I introduced this little pathogen and then you swelled up with some inflammation. And the inflammation grew and festered and some antibodies build and the organism builds and the organism got bigger, and it got bigger, and it got bigger. And then it got fed. If we had zero inflation — if the US Dollar monetary supply expanded by 0% for the past decade — how much passion would there be in the Bitcoin community compared to the amount of passion there is today?

Robert Breedlove: It’d be much less!

Michael Saylor [21:42]: So we’re back to this issue: It’s a great technology, and it’s inevitable. We’re back to this issue of: Zoom was inevitable. YouTube was inevitable. Virtual business models were inevitable. Bitcoin was inevitable. But it sure did get accelerated by certain things that happened! Bitcoin had 10 years of I would say a 7% forcing function with the dollar, and it got goosed a bit harder with Argentina and other developing world countries and, you know, the anxieties of Syria and the anxieties of Iraq and the anxiety in Africa and the anxiety in South America and the like, so those stressors — that goosed it. And the currency wars pushed it a bit harder. And then I think the pandemic crisis lit it on fire! I could say Robert, like, there’s no way I’m talking to you if there’s no pandemic! But I don’t think for a second that Bitcoin wouldn’t be successful without me, and I don’t think anybody’s gonna stop it, but I do think there is an avalanche of energy — individuals and corporations — that got inspired and driven into this ecosystem because of the pandemic. Again, back to war: Wars cause paradigm shifts. And this year there’s a currency war, and that’s a war on money as a store of value, right? And that war on money as a store of value creates massive dislocations in the bond market and the equity market, and there are consequences to everything. Ultimately, Bitcoin is an antifragile but scalable platform serving as a store of value. And so the best possible circumstance would be if the entire world plunged into a war where value was dissipating in every currency everywhere at a rapid rate. And I think it describes what we have today!

Robert Breedlove: I think that’s exactly correct, and it’s almost as if the Mongols breached the Great Wall of China. The Mongols being central banks that are basically robbing value from currency, and it’s giving people more of an impetus to evaluate alternatives and — for those that see it — to retreat behind the wall of encrypted energy. You have to defend your life force, your energy, your money, from confiscation. And the most prevalent form of confiscation in the world today is inflation.

Michael Saylor [24:57]: I guess that takes us to our next subject: it’s that Bitcoin is a store of value. Bitcoin is an incredible store of value. I think that’s its primary use case, or its killer value proposition now and probably for the next decade — maybe forever! The entire world is looking for a store of value right now, and you have to look across $250 Trillion of assets. If we think that asset inflation is running north of 10% — and I think it is, I think it’s pretty clear it is — and if you have capital, you have to choose between bonds, $80 Trillion in sovereign debt or corporate debt or municipal debt, or mortgage-backed securities, or you gotta choose equities, tech equity, conventional equity, or you gotta go to precious metals, or you go to real property, real estate property. And when you look at all of those things, the problem is half of all real estate is impaired because of the political response to COVID, and it’s not likely that’s gonna change in the next 10 years. We’ve probably got 10 years of uncertainty about real estate assets, especially commercial real estate assets. The other challenge with real estate is the taxes on it. It’s illiquid, immobile, and highly taxed. Generally real estate is taxed annually everywhere, it’s just a question of whether it’s 20 basis points or 200 basis points. So that makes real estate a challenging store of value. And that takes you to bonds: Bonds have worked as a store of value when the interest rates keep going lower. You can see that everybody that’s been on the bond train and benefiting from it, they’re screaming as loud as they can: They want negative interest rates! Because they’re like — The secret to success is lower the interest rates 50 basis points a year or 100 basis points a year and it’s a no-lose proposition — for them. But at this point it’s getting kind of ridiculous silly because when interest rates go negative everybody takes their money out of the bank, it creates bank runs, all the bank systems break. It’s kind of a morally bankrupt — I mean a lot of people, they don’t really understand that they’re being abused at 2% instead of 5%. But pretty much everybody can figure out that when you’re being billed 1% of the money you have at a bank, you’re being abused!

Robert Breedlove: Yeah! And again if you look at money as an insurance policy on uncertainty and all of a sudden that policy has negative value — it’s just asinine! It doesn’t make any economic sense!

Michael Saylor [28:02]: Yeah so that doesn’t work, and so where does that take us? It takes us to equity. We’ve got an equity bubble that’s a very crowded trade, but the real issue with equity as a store of value is that the revenue gets taxed as sales tax, the cash flows get taxed as income tax, the expenses — the cost structure gets taxed as employee and payroll tax. Then the trade gets taxed — there’s a tariff. Then you have the existential threat or regulatory risk of onerous regulations. Pick up the paper and see maybe Australia’s gonna bill Google every time they link to a newspaper article, and then if Google doesn’t link the newspaper articles they’re gonna get fined for not linking the newspaper articles! And as these things become more powerful, they become regulated utilities and politicians start to think that they can and should be regulated — and maybe with good cause! If there’s only one provider of information anywhere in the country then it definitely becomes a political issue. So that’s the challenge with equities: they might work for 2, 3, 4 years, but they’re valued as a multiple of cash flows. So if all of the liquidity of the civilization gets squeezed out of debt — when interest gets to zero — the government and the Fed owns all the debt. Okay, they bought me out — now I gotta put it in something else so I jump on equities so now equities double. But now the P/Es double or triple, and the revenue multiples triple. What’s the value of an equity? The value of equity should in theory be tangible assets on the balance sheet plus the sum of the discounted cash flows. And so people are using equities as store of value today. In fact you could make the argument that equities are the most popular store of value for the majority with their Robinhood trading — they’re all buying Apple, Amazon, Facebook, NASDAQ, SPDRs — everybody! Even though nobody thinks revenues are going up this year, nobody thinks earnings are going up this year, but equity values have doubled this year. Well that means that they’re getting riskier! So if you contrast Bitcoin to equity, the problem is: if the price of an equity goes up by a factor of 10, you’ve got more risk because it’s delaminating from its underlying cash flows and its fundamentals. Because it is a centralized, regulated entity, and the only way that the cash flows are going to grow into that value is they keep raising the price. And if they’re a monopoly and the raise the price, the regulators will react. If they don’t raise the price, they can’t grow into the multiple! And so you kind of have a chicken and the egg thing, right? And if there’s any competition and their cash flows deteriorate, eventually you’re trading at 200:1 or 200 P/E, and then any degree of disappointment causes massive volatility. And how are they different than Bitcoin? Well, Bitcoin’s value proposition is the liquidity, it is the store of value — that is it! If you’re going to function as money, you want to be a single-celled organism — like the algae of the ecosystem. The base layer of the ecosystem that’s plankton or bacteria or single cells. You don’t want to be a vertebrate! And these companies are vertebrates with a brain and a backbone, and that means — for example, WeChat or TikTok has a headquarters — and if it’s in the wrong country, it gets its head chopped off. And Apple and Facebook, they’re subject to a certain court, a certain country’s jurisdiction. So that means they’re foreigners somewhere else! They’re vertebrate. If you’re a vertebrate, I can kill you with a needle. A human being I can figure out how to kill: there’s a heart, I take a needle, I poke there — you’re gone. You’re very fragile. Hard to do that with a swarm of hornets. Hard to do that with all the plankton in the ocean. It’s very difficult to do it with an amorphous decentralized invertebrate of some sort. So if you want a store of value, you don’t want a company that’s valued based upon the ability to engineer hyper-complicated products that have to keep getting upgraded. You want something which is simple, that can just keep things simple. This is again where some of the crypto-enthusiasts, they keep wanting to tinker with a better blockchain, a better crypto. You know, they never saw an upgrade they didn’t like so they just wanna keep revving it every year. Like it’s the iPhone version 37. There’s a fundamental difference, which is: if there’s a bug in the iPhone version 37, everybody in the world’s heart doesn’t stop!

Robert Breedlove: Right! I think this analogy you’re using with the simplicity of plankton being the base layer for the ecosystem is apt. I want to say plankton makes up the majority of the biomass on the planet by a pretty substantial margin because it’s so simple and it’s so efficient at converting solar energy into biological energy. And then it is the base layer for this multiplicity of layered ecosystem that we have in the world. And another thing I think is interesting is that you make a great point that equities are becoming more risky as they increase in price, because they’re delaminating from their valuation fundamentals as you said. And Bitcoin’s the opposite. Actually the more valuable Bitcoin is, the more secure it’s network, the greater the liquidity, the more resistant it is to attack. So it’s a very interesting counter-trade to equities as a store of value.

Michael Saylor [34:24]: And of course, if you have an individual entity with an individual headquarters and a CEO, as it gets bigger it becomes a bigger target. But maybe everybody in your home country loves you! But what about everybody in every other country? So you don’t want a head, and you don’t want to be a target, and you don’t want to be valued based on cash flows if you’re going to be money. They’re the right creature to be building a device or maybe creating an exchange or creating an application, because — there — I want the software to run a billion times faster, and so it’s okay to have one company write software! The question is: I want it to run a billion times faster, but do I need it to last for a thousand years? And the answer is: I could throw my phone away and Western Civilization will not end if I lose my phone or if you screw up my phone, right? It will not end! If I put all the energy of civilization into a crypto network, I can’t afford for someone to, like, ship a buggy release! And again, what people forget is: if I put $1 Billion into Bitcoin on January 1st, 2021 and I don’t touch it for 100 years, the thing is working! Truly insanely great technology is — okay we’re back to Nicholas Taleb haunting our thoughts — via negativa, right? Add by taking away. Insanely great technology is when it does a thing without you doing a thing! You know, a junior technologist, they create gadgets. I have a mobile application that has 150 features and 150 buttons and then you click and there’s a billion different things it can do depending upon the combination of the buttons and the features you click on—okay that’s one thing. How about another mobile app? You download a mobile app and everywhere you walk on Earth it kills all your enemies and gives you infinite food and water and protection and plays whatever music you wanted to hear around you without you touching it — hands-free. If I walk around and someone walks behind me and they do everything I want before I ask them to do it — without me opening my mouth — isn’t that a heck of a lot better than a gadgety thing with features?

Robert Breedlove: Yeah! It’s higher utility!

Michael Saylor [37:30]: Well, it’s Saint-Exupéry — the design’s not done, it’s not a perfect design until there’s nothing left to remove. And so if I told you: Take all your money, put it into Bitcoin, and then you’ll be rich and happy and prosperous for all of eternity without doing a single transaction — that’s a lot better idea!

Robert Breedlove: Yeah, that’s a great point.

Michael Saylor: I don’t need more features and more gadgety things. I just need it to always work. And all that work is vapor around me.

Robert Breedlove [38:13]: You’re right, absolutely! Just to give the listeners a little bit of context for via negativa — for those who haven’t read Taleb: His canonical example in his book The Black Swan where you can see as many white swans as you want, but you can never prove by virtue of that evidence that all swans are white, but with a single sighting of a black swan you have disproven that all swans are white. So the moral of the story is that disconfirmation is more rigorous than confirmation. And I think that’s getting to your point here is that it’s getting stronger by taking away. Your factual base on which you’re building your premise and strategy in the world is strengthened by disconfirmation moreso than it is by confirmation.

Michael Saylor [39:08]: And I’ll give you another example that we see all the time with Google: You go into Google, you ask the wrong question and misspell it and it gives you the right answer! That’s a truly great piece of software: You ask the wrong question and it gives you the right answer because it knows which question you should’ve asked and it knows how you should’ve spelled it and said, We’re gonna answer this question for you instead because the odds that you really wanted to know this question answered is 99,000,000:1! The odds that you really were asking a unique question that seems foolish and misspelling a popular name while you’re asking it—that’s 1 in a billion! So if you really wanted to ask the wrong question the wrong way you try it twice, but 99.999% of the time they give you the right answer to the wrong question and they do it because they built this very fault-tolerant, common-sense, rational interface. So back to store of value, right? Bitcoin is an ideal store of value because it’s got the ability to convey your energy not across 10,000 miles but across 10,000 days. 30 years into the future. 100 years into the future. Most people when they’re investing in assets, they’re taking this very short term view of like the next month, the next year, the next two years, and I find that if you’re looking at a 3-year time frame, everything gets very very noisy and complicated and there’s all these debates. But if you really want to end the debates, go out to 100 years and just take $100 Million and go through the exercise of giving it to someone — your heir’s heir’s heir in 100 years. And then all of a sudden, all this noise drops away. Can I put it into real estate? No, it’ll be taxed out of existence in 100 years. Can I put it in gold? No, 98% of it will be gone if 100% of it isn’t gone in 100 years because we mine it to death. Can I put it into fiat? No it’s gonna be inflated to death. Can I invest it in a company? No, name one company that’s around today that was around 100 years ago that hasn’t been diluted, recapitalized, etc. Can I put it in a stock index? Well, you’re trusting a human being to rebalance the index over and over again. What stock index do you trust for the next 100 years? And by the way it’s got counterparty risk at the nation state level. The nation might not be there, and 90% didn’t make it! So what are you left with? And the truth is, when you just do that thought experiment it’s pretty obvious: You would put it in a crypto network, in a decentralized proof of work network if the adherents — the maximalists — were fanatic zealots about protecting the integrity of the network against meddlers who would screw it up. If the network is supported by those with a religious conviction to the network such that you could imagine 100 years from now there will still be people protecting the network — the phrase is, Keepers of the flame. Every great religion, every great institution has keepers of the flame, and there must be passion. Do you believe in your religion? Do you believe strong enough that you’ll flee persecution to continue to practice it? The United States was built on the foundation of separation of church and state, and it’s a pretty important and interesting metaphor: People came here because they could practice their religion! That’s why they came here! And they came here because their religion was above their government. They would not sacrifice whatever it is they believed in. If you look at every institution that lasts more than 100 years — name them: Harvard University, Cambridge, Oxford, the Catholic Church, Islamic sects, the Jewish faith — there’s not that many! There’s churches or religious sects and then there’s some educational institutions — and I see the educational institutions being shaken at their core this year! I mean literally you could’ve said for 500 years — Ivy Leagues, the elite universities — they’re stalwart institutions. They have lost a huge amount of credibility this year! When you send all of your students home and you close the campus and people are studying virtually, people’s affiliation to the bricks and mortar of the institution has been dramatically weakened unless they morph into a virtual institution. The virtual institutions by the way have dramatically strengthened, right? Your affiliation with YouTube and Facebook and Apple TV and Bitcoin and Square Cash has dramatically strengthened. If it’s virtual. And your affiliation with the bricks and mortar physical institution has been weakened. And those that will survive have dematerialized and virtualized and they’ve learned how to project their ethos in cyberspace. So yeah, back to the store of value: You need people — human beings, flesh and blood people — that are going to keep the flame. And the flame of Bitcoin is the node and the mining rig. We’re getting into Bitcoin as religion or as faith now, but imagine 1,000 years ago, I want to keep a religion alive — I have an altar in my home. Every wealthy person had a chapel in their home. If you look at religions, go to the Far East, there are altars in Buddhist, Shinto, other faiths. So the idea of an altar or a shrine or a cathedral or a church — these are structures where people go to worship, and the worshiping is the feeding of the flame. And oftentimes during the worshiping they’re tithing and they’re channeling 10% of their money as energy into these religions in order to keep them relevant! If you look at fantasy fiction, in fantasy where they have gods, the strength of the god is a function of the devoutness of the worshipers, of the followers. Such and such was worshiped as the god of the forest, and they are worshiped as the god of the forest and all of their adherents — all their acolytes — are feeding energy to the god of the forest. And when they’re no longer worshiped, their energy goes away! If you lose your faithful, if they won’t feed you with the fire of truth, with the energy that you need, your efficacy falls and you die. And so how do you feed a fire, right? If it’s a physical fire you have to throw wood on the fire. How do you feed a religion? You have to tithe — the Catholic Church, or any church — you have to give it money, and maybe you have to give it your life service. Onward Christian soldiers! I will fight for the cause. I will donate to the cause. That’s how you feed a religious institution. How do you feed a crypto network? You gotta spin up facilities of encrypted energy that adhere to the protocol. Every time a miner comes onboard it’s feeding the fire. Every time a node comes onboard it’s gonna certify and validate. It’s protecting. It’s creating one more chain in the fault-tolerance structure. And that’s why a smaller crypto — a crypto that’s a technical experiment, that’s an application — isn’t the good store of value. Because if the people are willing to fork it, if they’re willing to fork it and abandon it in order to [move to 48:44] a new technology, then the flame dies. And so it’s pretty clear that Bitcoin maximalists, they have a lot of the faith and the conviction of true believers in any religious faith for the past 2,000 years. And why wouldn’t they? Because they share the same values. Their values are: Truth, Nature, Natural Laws, Laws of Physics, Laws of Thermodynamics, Math, Austrian Economics, No such thing as a free lunch, Self-Reliance, Honesty, Fairness, Technology Advances. They share those values. They’re taking their monetary energy and tokenizing it on a Bitcoin network with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is that single shared store of value. If money is energy and energy begets life and a crypto decentralized network gives you sovereignty, that’s a path to immortality, and that means that everybody in the Bitcoin community that believes in this for the long term is engaged in the pursuit of immortal life. And pursuit of immortal life sounds like a religious mantra, I think! And I grew up in the Southern Baptist faith so I’m very familiar with the ideology of Christianity and pursuit of immortal life is pretty paramount there.

Robert Breedlove: I did as well! That’s interesting.

Michael Saylor [50:41]: And if Bitcoin is a store of value for 100 years, then it is a technique through which you can project your values through time. So if you’re not actually providing for a better life for yourself, you’re providing for a better life for your family or your loved ones of your friends. Or perhaps your values are you want to support a dog park and you want to endow the dog park for 100 years. Or what if you want to endow an environment cause or Save the Seals or Save the Whales. It doesn’t really matter what the cause is — cure cancer, do this, go to the stars — when I die I want all of my wealth to be used to make education free for everyone forever! That actually is one of my values and I have a foundation, the Saylor Foundation, which gives away free education to hundreds of thousands of people. That’s a value! Other people want to go to outer space. If I can channel my energy and put it into a network and that network can be used to fund and power an endowment that will do that thing, then that Bitcoin network or that crypto network is going to be my mechanism for achieving all of my hopes and aspirations from now to eternity.

Robert Breedlove [52:18]: That’s an amazing point! And I would even conceive of that as a mechanism almost of the afterlife. It’s a way to carry your will beyond your own life. And the American mythologist Joseph Campbell, he described religion as a story that points toward the transcendental mystery that we all experience but cannot articulate. And so all religious traditions, mythological traditions, are stories pointing toward a higher truth. And I find it interesting that Bitcoin has higher truth embedded in code! This 21 Million number is quite literally transcendental: We can’t touch it, we can’t change it, we can’t do anything about it. Every 10 minutes it’s promulgating the most indisputable truth that we’ve ever had. It’s true global consensus. So it’s not just a metaphor I think to call Bitcoin religious, it quite actually is religious!

Michael Saylor [53:32]: If you worshiped Science, if you worshiped the Laws of Physics and the Laws of Thermodynamics and Mathematical clarity, then Bitcoin’s your religion! And that’s what takes us out of the range of simple asset debates. If your time horizon is 10 years we can debate Bitcoin this versus Apple stock that versus Amazon versus bonds versus whatever. And when your time horizon is 3 years, by the way, it all is just in the domain of macro traders and cute arbitragers and everyone wants to tell you about the Fibonacci this, triangle thing, and that’s over-bought and this is over-sold and my head kind of explodes trying to figure that out, but the truth is I just don’t care! Being right in the next 2 years strikes me as being a bad idea because in order to be right as a trader in the near-term, I have to turn off the part of my brain that thinks about what’s true and honest and morally hazardous or rational. You literally have to be like, I know it’s stupid to go this way but since everybody else is gonna go this way I’m gonna do something stupid now because I think I’m less stupid but more stupid than they are stupid — it’s just not a way to live.

Robert Breedlove: The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, right?

Michael Saylor [55:10]: Yeah and the problem is if I lose trying to act stupid then I really was stupid! And if I win acting kind of irrational, crazy, then I don’t respect myself. And meanwhile a much simpler idea is just figure out what’s gonna go up by a factor of 100 or 1,000 and just go stand there and wait for entropy to take its course, and wait for gravity to take its effect, and let the water flow downhill, and let the fire burn, and don’t dash around while the fire’s burning everything — stand up and watch it! So the solution there is: You move from 3 years to 10 years, and then you move from 10 years to 100 years. And at the 100-year time frame it’s pretty clear what’s an asset and what’s a store of value! And it’s just very obvious: (A) Bitcoin is a store of value if its believers have religious conviction in it. It becomes very simple. Now, if you step out to a 1,000-year time frame and you say, What’s this thing gotta be in order to last 1,000 years? It better be the worship of Math and the Laws of Thermodynamics and the Laws of Physics and Einstein and Newton! That might make it! And if we just focus upon that and don’t let all this other stuff get mired — I mean, that’s reasonable! People have been studying and honoring Math and Algebra for 2,000 years, they’ve been honoring Calculus for 400 years. You could say this is truly the adoption of economics as a science. It’s that critical inflection point where economics went from being a political preference to being a science, and if you adopt it as a science then you actually get massive advantages technically. And if you reject it, I guess it’s kind of like the guys in the Dark Ages and they could accept Calculus or they could reject Calculus.

Robert Breedlove: Right.

Michael Saylor [57:39]: No bridges. If you reject Calculus — make a bridge, see what happens, have at it! There’s a lot of stuff in life — if you look back at the guy that did more than anything — probably Isaac Newton is responsible for 90% of just about everything we have around us, and if you rejected Principia Mathematica because you just thought it was inconvenient, you probably rejected 90% of everything that we have today that we hold near and dear.

Robert Breedlove: And natural selection takes care of the rest! If you reject these truths that are uncovered, it’s the end of your legacy in the long run.

[END]

Commentary:

Robert Breedlove [58:24]: Alright guys! That was Episode 7 with Michael Saylor here on the Saylor Series. And wow what an episode! We have gone really deep into the topic of Bitcoin and I think we had a really strong finish today. So I’m just gonna run through a few of the things we talked about. We started out with this concept of Bitcoin as a monetary missile, and this took me back to Episode 1 when we were talking about fire, missiles, and hydraulics being these primary Stone Age technologies that allowed mankind to come into dominance in the world. And I thought the analogy was very interesting that, using Bitcoin we have this ultimate high ground behind a wall of encrypted energy, but we can also accelerate our monetary energy and deploy it anywhere in the world across any domain nearly instantly with virtually no frictions at all. And so not only does it give us this advantage of asymmetric terrain, but we also get maximal force with how we deploy that monetary energy in the generation of capital. So I thought that was a super-apt analogy. And then we talked about how that effectively makes Bitcoin the highest bandwidth price discovery, transparency, and security asset in the world. So we have this pure money that propagates pure price signals so it would allow for pure price discovery — all of that is premised on the open source ethos, which is essentially just absolute transparency — and that gives it the ultimate security. So there’s a bit of a paradox there, it’s that: By being totally open to inspection, Bitcoin actually resists manipulation or emulation even, in that everything about it is out in the open. So it’s more a quality of its network effects, its liquidity, its first-mover advantage, even actually the disappearance of Satoshi which we’ll get into a little bit later — all of these things sort of wrap this open technology in an apparently disruption-proof casing. So I thought that was a really powerful discussion point. And Saylor calls Bitcoin, The creature that never sleeps. We have this swarm intelligence, if you will, that never stops growing, changing, adapting, trading — it is just a fully autonomous and perpetual monetary network competing against these other monetary networks that are rigidly controlled in certain time windows. And to his point, an individual organism has to sleep, but a swarm creature does not! So the swarm creature necessarily out-competes the individual organism because it doesn’t need to sleep. It just keeps adapting, growing, becoming more fit. And as we know from Darwin, it’s the most fit competitor that wins out in an ecosystem. And I thought this was a great point too and I never thought of it this way, that: In a swarm, the weakest elements are actually weeded out. So it’s constantly sacrificing its weaker elements to natural selection and thereby strengthening the ensemble. Whereas the individual organism is subject to any singular attack vector. If its defense is penetrated, the whole entity or organism is lost. [1:02:17] So in that way centralized entities are only as strong as their weakest link, or as Saylor says, Are constrained by their lowest common denominator. Whereas a decentralized entity like the swarm is gonna be strengthened by its highest common denominator. So we can think about this as kind of like something that learns at the edges. So if one member of the swarm figures out how to effectively deal with a predator or a threat, then it will tend to reproduce and its genes will be replicated into the rest of the swarm. So the entire decentralized entity or organism is actually learning at the edges and incorporating those lessons into its whole body. Whereas the centralized entity, if it encounters a predator it doesn’t know how to deal with or even figures out how to defeat, it doesn’t spread that adaptivity to the rest of its body, essentially. It’s just a one-to-one relationship versus the one-to-many. So the one-to-many gives it just much more intelligence and adaptivity in the long run. And tying this back to Bitcoin, it’s as if — to Saylor’s point — any market participant in the Bitcoin network figures out a way to deliver a solution smarter, faster, stronger, better, that’s where the capital will flow! Because again, the capital is unrestricted. It is not siloed to any particular jurisdiction or institution — individuals have maximal sovereignty over their Bitcoin capital so they can move it anywhere in the world. So in his example of: Say someone is setting up a centralized or decentralized institution in Singapore for instance that solves the yield curve problem — so matching lenders and borrowers of Bitcoin in a way that establishes a long term yield curve for Bitcoin — that this would create all of a sudden this risk-free rate on Bitcoin which is the one thing that it lacks, as we discussed in earlier episodes, to make it a truly pristine collateral that would be competitive to say US Treasuries. So Bitcoin currently just doesn’t have a yield. But if you could match borrowers and lenders you could actually create that curve. So his point was, Say we create this 8% risk-free rate on Bitcoin on 10-year money which could be used—and you have fiat deprecating at say 2% a year best-case — then all of a sudden this opens up an attack vector on fiat where you could actually go long Bitcoin and short the Dollar and squeeze the difference in yield. This is called a speculative attack. And this would have the effect of strengthening the speculative attacker himself, but it would also strengthen the HODLer in Schenectady or in whatever town that doesn’t know anything about this, just by virtue of more price appreciation pressure being applied to Bitcoin. So more energy being drawn into the network actually benefits all network participants! And this is contrary to a centralized entity. And if you flip this back to the Great Wall of China example, it’s like you’ve inverted that security model. So whereas the Great Wall of China — it’s just a perimeter defense, it doesn’t adapt, and if you can penetrate at any point of it the whole defensible area is lost, that’s actually what happened when the Mongols penetrated the gate—whereas Bitcoin is effectively this swarm intelligence. So any network participant that can figure something out is benefiting the entire network, and then you’ve also further capitalized or further energized those network participants to go out and solve other problems on behalf of other network participants. So there’s this virtuous cycle built right into it that just does not exist with any other form of money. [1:06:33] Then we take a bit of a pivot and we got into how human intervention negatively and adversely impacts complex systems. And Saylor gave the example of the lions complaining that the antelopes are too fast so the hunter hobbles the antelope. The lions kill all of the antelope, get lazy because they aren’t being pushed to their limits, so then after all the antelope are eliminated, the lions starve to death and then the hunter blames it on the weather! This is a core concept in Talebs’ books where he says that human intervention moves us from what he calls Mediocristan to Extremistan. Meaning essentially that the non-linearity of effects goes through the roof once we try to intervene in natural systems, because there are all these dynamic equilibria that we’re unaware of. And when we offset, when we try and press one lever to cause one result, there’s a cascade of unintended consequences surrounding that. One common example here is called the Cobra problem. And you can look this up on, say, Wikipedia, but the gist of it is that — I forget what country — but they had a problem with an overpopulation of cobras, so they passed a law that offered a ransom for every dead cobra brought to the government — they’d give you $10 — whatever it was. And this had the unintended consequence of incentivizing people to actually start breeding cobras and killing them and then to take them into the government and get this reward! So it actually further exacerbated the overpopulation problem and financially compromised the local government. So that’s just one example where good intentions go awry, and history is just full of these! So tying that back into money: I guess you could say the central bank or interest rate manipulation — intentionality aside — we could possibly argue that it was done with the attempt to make things better. You can argue both sides of that. Let’s just say for instance that it was done with good and wholesome intentions to benefit the economy or stimulate demand or keep prices stable and unemployment low and predictable and all these things. That still — when you’re talking about suppressing interest rates to induce money creation and borrowing — you’re going to war with the temporal and energetic principles of thermodynamics, because again the price of money—the interest rate — is the price of time! I’m gonna give you money now that you’re gonna give me back later. There’s a price associated with that which you’re paying me—it’s called the interest rate. If a centralized body is artificially suppressing that, you’re actually trying to — and what Saylor said — was to reverse the flow of time. You’re discounting the price of time! And this has just so many disastrous unintended consequences around it! Which we went into. You’re pushing back against thermodynamics, which is the inviolable rule set of the universe. And I would argue that, actually, trying to suppress the price of time causes us to discount the value of our own time and the time of others. You could say time or energy, actually. And I think that is kind of the culprit at the heart of this moral hazard related to fiat currencies, is that we’re discounting time and energy, which is the intrinsic value of human beings, effectively. And that’s the one case by the way where I use the term intrinsic value, because I do think humans are the only intrinsically valued — you could probably expand that to life more generally — but there’s no objects that have intrinsic value, value is subjective, but life itself as living beings, that seems to be an absolute is that we should have value for life! Anyways, bit of a philosophical aside. And in that way this organism aspect — actually discounting the value of life — we see all the moral hazard that central banking has created, all the warfare its funded, it’s as if Bitcoin is an autoimmune response, somehow, from society to central banking. As Saylor said, clearly the message in the Genesis Block solidifies that. And he goes a little bit deeper actually to say that Satoshi was clearly an individual sensitive to these negative socioeconomic consequences of central banking, and his own sensitivity was a response to the sensitivity of others: People who had been marginalized or victimized by the system throughout the ages. You could call that a form of inflammation, basically, in the socioeconomic super-organism. And then Satoshi was just the cell of the organism that figured it out! He figured out the correct response, launched it into the world in the right way at the right time. So I thought that was just really interesting. And Brandon Quittem — I talked to him about the Fourth Turning. He made the point — and I haven’t actually read this book yet — but he made the point that in these long cycles, there’s First, Second, Third, Fourth Turnings, there tends to come a kind of pivotal moment or innovation or something that comes just at the right time to reverse course. And it feels and seems like Bitcoin is definitely becoming that in the modern age! The world is just going in one direction on central banking and we needed some autoimmune response and it appears Bitcoin is that! Then we got into Bitcoin as a store of value. I think he made very strong arguments — especially when you zoom out to a 100+ year time frame — that Bitcoin is basically the sole 21st Century store of value. It just is incomparable to anything else. And this 2020 war on currency and escalating government overreach, this has just pushed an awareness of Bitcoin on people and sort of accelerated that autoimmune response in a way. And to just compare it real quick, because we went through alternative stores of value, you have bonds, but they’re not bumping up against the zero-bound, and to Saylor’s point, it’s harder to discern when you’re being taken advantage of when the natural interest rate is 5% and you’re getting 2%, but it’s much easier for market participants to understand that they’re getting screwed when there’s a negative yield. There’s something very special about crossing that zero barrier and that’s where bonds are at today. And they are getting quickly decimated as a viable store of value because there’s no yield. Equities, they’re way overvalued across all fundamentals and valuation metrics — historic all-time highs, P/E ratios, multiples on EBITDA or enterprise value, etc. And that is—what I would argue as a Bitcoiner — is a function of: we’ve compromised the store of value function of fiat currency, so that function is now — the market’s figuring out it needs to assign that function to any other asset! And equities are somewhat reliably scarce at least. But this has a perverse effect in that—as Saylor says — the price of equities are delaminating from their fundamentals. So they’re overvalued in the marketplace. And they’re actually becoming more and more risky. There’s this perverse effect of: the more we use an equity as a store of value, the less effective it is as a store of value in the long run, which is really strange. And Bitcoin is the opposite of that! Bitcoin is actually becoming more secure as a store of value as its price increases, and therefore more attractive. And this is an economic concept called a Veblen good, which you could look up, but basically there are certain assets that the demand tends to increase as the price increases, which is contrary to most other assets. But I think Bitcoin fits that category. Commodities are another alternative — we destroyed those in earlier episodes as Saylor checked those out. And finally real estate, which has been a really popular one for the past 50 years especially in the US — real estate cannot be hidden and it’s being taxed every year. It’s the easiest thing in the world to tax because you can’t hide it, and that is the dominion on which the government projects its power. So I think there’s really high valuations there, plus there’s no concealability so that sort of compromises real estate as a good store of value. He makes the point that, to be a good store of value, you really want to have a technology that’s focused on that function. Equities, you’re creating all kinds of other value in the economy, granted albeit riskily — they’re taking on risk and trying new ventures and figuring things out and innovating. Property would be probably be a little more stable but it still has other uses — there’s actually a utility use there. So the point being: You want the pure store of value. That’s what gold effectively was — it was the purest store of value we had historically. [1:17:03] And now that’s what Bitcoin is today. And we could say it’s kind of like being a single-celled organism. As Saylor said, You don’t want to be a vertebrate with all these complex features, because the additional features open you up to more risk and attack surface. What you want is something very unidimensional, single-cell, just holds value in a trust-minimized way across time and space. And that’s what Bitcoin is! That is the big breakthrough! And that led us into via negativa, which is another Talebian concept that I really like. And in a way this ties back to a quote that Saylor Tweeted once. He said, A designer knows he has achieved perfection when there is nothing left to take away. And as we discussed previously, money has 5 properties: divisibility, durability, recognizability, portability, scarcity. So what did Satoshi do in the creation of Bitcoin? The reason it’s so genius, and the reason Satoshi’s an artist, and the reason Bitcoin is effectively a perfected money is because Satoshi took away all of the indivisibility, all of the decomposability, all of the unrecognizability, all of the immovability, and all of the unpredictability from money! Right? He maximally removed all of these negative aspects of money to deliver us the quasi-perfection that is Bitcoin. And that speaks again to this minimization of attack surface. You’ve reduced all of the features of money to strip it down to its bare bones. Just its bare monetary properties. And you’ve taken away all the negative aspects from those properties, so you’ve effectively perfected those properties. And this speaks again to Bitcoin’s resistance to disruption! We’ve achieved attack surface minimization via monetary property optimization. So this is via negativa! The more you take away, what you have left becomes more valuable, essentially. And another way to say that is: We commonly hear that, Oh, this new crypto-asset can do this or that that Bitcoin can’t do! But the lesser feature set of Bitcoin is a feature itself, not a bug! Because it’s whole value prop is survivability. It cannot be stopped. It is just perfected store of value that adheres to 21 Million and no one can shut down the network. No political or military action can shut down the network. That is the core value prop of Bitcoin. That is what it optimizes for. [1:20:05] And as Saylor puts this — again in one of his Tweets — he says, Bitcoin has no country, has no company, has no competitor. So that’s what makes it so special, is that it’s something that actually exists beyond us, which turns out to be really important! And I would add to that too that Bitcoin has no identified creator. We know it’s Satoshi but no one knows who Satoshi is. We don’t have his person to point toward. And the absence of that personality — the creator —I would say actually gives Bitcoin mythological bedrock, which really underpins its decentralization. If we knew who Satoshi was and he was in the news every day, he was out getting drunk at the bar or something and everyone knew he had a million coins, it would just open him up to a lot of attacks and call a lot of things into question that his disappearance basically nullified. So this godhead of Bitcoin we call Satoshi I think really reinforces the value proposition of survivability and decentralization. And that gets us into what I thought was the most interesting part of the discussion today! And that was when Saylor pointed to the fanaticism of Bitcoin maximalists as an asset, as a contributing factor to the value of the Bitcoin network. And I love the analogy where the defenders of 21 Million effectively — the network participants themselves — we are the keepers of the flame. We are the mythological keepers of the flame. The point being there: to preserve an institution adequately over time, you need adherents or fanatics if you will that are so convicted in their belief that they’re willing to flee persecution to preserve the institution. And he drew the analogy to people coming to the US. People came to the US largely to practice religious freedom. People wanted a refuge that they could freely put their spiritual preferences above politics, and the US provided that. Then to bring it forward a bit, we’re seeing the faith shaken in existing institutions worldwide, whether it’s your government, your bank—all these legacy institutions —faith has been severely shaken, especially in the wake of COVID. Saylor made a great point: even at the universities where no one’s going to campus anymore and they’re taking their classes online, you’re reducing the affiliation with a brick and mortar university, and you’re strengthening the affiliation with the digital university. So the institutions and companies and brands that adapt to the digital age more quickly will actually benefit more at the expense of legacy institutions. So that’s a mega-political trend that’s under way. And the flame for Bitcoin, if you will, is kept between the nodes, the miners, and the HODLers, which are basically preserving this dynamic equilibrium centered on 21 Million. And I love this analogy of worshiping at the altar, where people in the past all worshiped at the altar, they would actually feed the flame even by tithing say 10% of their income. So they’re funding this religious institution — they’re also preaching these values to their contemporaries or their kids, so they’re passing these values forward in time using both money and language, which I thought was very interesting. And ritual — I would add to that! So in the Bitcoin world we’ve gotten miners energizing the fire. They’re adding additional energy to the network that is its security budget, effectively. You have nodes protecting the fire, which are basically selecting the rule set that the miners are enforcing. And then we have the HODLers themselves which are the fire! They’re the living flame that’s centered around 21 Million, so it’s like this group of people, this social layer, that’s all oriented to preserving 21 Million which benefits everyone and intertwines everyone’s fate. And each one of those is just another element in this composite fault-tolerant structure that we call Bitcoin. So it’s this radically new way to think about it as more of a religious-like institution. And maybe you could even say that nodes, miners, and HODLers are kind of like the Holy Trinity of Bitcoin. Maybe 21 Million is the God or something that they’re oriented around. Might be a stretch, but I thought I’d mention that nonetheless. So Bitcoin as religion — the question comes naturally: What are its values? And Saylor declares: Truth, Natural Law, Thermodynamics, Self-Reliance, Honesty, Fairness, Technology, Self-Sovereignty — all of these things are embedded in the value system of true Bitcoiners, and they carry that into the world in their word, in their deed, in their investments. And I just can’t think of a more robust, powerful, effective, well-organized group of people in the world than the Bitcoiners I’ve interacted with! I’ve said it before: There’s nothing in the world that makes me more bullish on Bitcoin than Bitcoiners. And again, if we go back to the purpose of Man or at least what distinguishes him and what makes him superior to the other animals, it’s our ability to channel energy across space and time. And I love Saylor’s point: Energy begets life. So Bitcoin is being this tool for immortalizing the channeling of energy. We can channel it across space and time in any direction we want with essentially no loss. That 21 Million — or Bitcoin itself — it’s actually in a way kind of the pursuit of immortal life. We’re pursuing a medium that maximally preserves energy across space and time. So it’s like, Pfft, well of course it’s a religious institution—we’re pursuing immortal life! Not immortal life in the sense that you live forever, but a network or institution that lives forever for the betterment of all, and one in which you can project your own wills and values beyond your own life. The example there was the Saylor Foundation, which is: his value — Saylor’s own personal value system — is free education for all. He thinks that is something that’s really important for the human race, and now with Bitcoin he has a way to finance and project those values beyond his own life. He can now do something to fund and strengthen this institution beyond his own life in a way that was not possible before Bitcoin, and you could say that this is a way of him projecting values and willpower and intentions and preferences into his own afterlife, if you will. It doesn’t mean Heaven, but just beyond his own life. And then we touched on another religious aspect of this: it’s that 21 Million is truly transcendent. It is something no one can do anything about. And I think that speaks to its religious qualities in a way as well. He had this great quote, it said: If you worship Science, the Laws of Physics, Thermodynamics, and Mathematical Clarity, then Bitcoin is your religion! I thought that was beautifully said. It points back to us. The strength of Bitcoin as a store of value, as money, is rooted in the faithfulness of its adherents, of its believers, if you will. So it is up to all of us to preserve the principles embodied in those fields of study. And that’s what Bitcoin is. We concluded with: Perhaps economics through all of history was just more of a political preference or much more just a social science. Even in Austrian Economics, there’s a very low use of objective measurements because there are no constants in human action, effectively. But it seems like with Bitcoin we do have this collision of computer science and everything underpinning that with the softer social science of economics. So maybe this is the emergence of something really different and unique, like a more objective economic science. These things like Value, Supply & Demand — supply is the objective side, demand is the subjective side — these things are still gonna hold the same qualities, but the introduction of absolute scarcity and a money that cannot be monopolized and resists corruption certainly changes the game, right? I don’t know that it will cause us to rewrite the history books per se, but we will move more towards this engineering-like mindset in the field of economics. So yeah! That was it, man! A monster episode. I hope you guys enjoyed that. Episodes 1, 2, 3 built a lot of foundation. I think 4, 5, 6 really started to build some crescendo here, and 7 was a big peak for me personally, especially the later stages of this discussion. I definitely think we’re routing around the bottom of the Bitcoin rabbit hole! I hope you guys enjoyed this and I’ll see you back here soon for the next one!