MICHAEL SAYLOR - Satoshi Opened A Portal Into Cyberspace

I'm about halfway through it but it's actually been quite quite inspirational in a way I found it to be really catalytic to my thinking because you see hundreds and hundreds of political economic experiments and you see them getting corrupted and then the people struggling to fix them and and the impact of that and and you and you can see the but uh germination or the seeds of the American psyche and and the drivers that created the Declaration institution of Independence and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and and uh the the 150 or 200 years of History before the founding fathers formed America right that's what they were living with and they were remembering all of that it's not something that's taught in in high school or Junior High it's not even taught in college it's it's the buried part of history that goes something like yeah a bunch of Europeans showed up in North America the English ended up doing the best jobs the Indians kind of receded out of the way and then we fought a revolutionary war against the British and started our own country well it's funny how the narrative always gets paired down and simplified and like in that process like almost everything gets lost and it's so amazing to me just like how deep and how many of the corollaries between right now and those times are going on like include like the Continental inflation the way that uh the speculators would come out in front of like essentially horse horses would ride out in front of uh not the debt collectors but people that would like redeem the bonds for those who participated in the Revolutionary War they got like paid with I forgot what it was but essentially Bankers would come in front of them like two days being like hey the bank it's all going to be worth nothing but I'll buy it for you like for two cents on the dollar and it was you know this rampant speculative thing that really harmed the economy and that that's why not we have the phrase not worth a continental is because of the hyperinflation that the Continental paper currency went through there's also this idea that like uh the American experiment ended in 1776 which I'm not sure I agree with that idea but it's an interesting provocative idea can you put some meat on that yeah just basically I mean that was when we started to lose all our freedoms you know I mean once things got codified that like you know you had uh you had the you know I'm not gonna I'm not gonna use the bad word but you had the agarist uh Utopia before uh you know things got codified well Murray kind of shows that the American Revolution was just one of the revolutions right the colonists were rebelling against Central Authority multiple times there were other revolutions lots of them and and uh they all succeeded or failed to a certain degree but from the from the point that well before the Europeans set foot on the continent there were thousands of Indian tribes struggling with each other right the strong tribes displacing the weak tribes yeah and um and after the European set foot on the continent they simply engaged in the same kind of tribal struggle and the some Europeans displaced others but it wasn't even one European tribe the Puritans had their view the Catholics had their view the Quakers had their view the anglicans had their View and then you had uh you had representative governments where the assemblies had power and then you had proprietary governments where they in essence brought the feudal Lord system to the United States and you actually could see the difference between them a capitalist system and a feudal system for example in New York um they chopped up the land amongst a bunch of Rich families and the settling no one else could own any land you couldn't subdivide it so one family might have 200 000 acres and if you showed up in New York you would be a a tenant farmer indentured servant you could work yourself to death but you could never own property right and then if you went to Pennsylvania or certain other colonies they would let you buy or claim land and you could get your own property so of course there were struggles between the colonies and when the New Yorkers struggled with the pennsylvanians or those in New Jersey the New Yorkers were at a disadvantage because they didn't have as many people as much Manpower because their system was to disenfranchise and give no property rights to the people so no one in their right mind would want to go to New York right and so like my family came they were palentines and they came from Rotterdam to Philadelphia and I always wondered why they go to Philadelphia in 1730 and the answer is you wouldn't have gone to New York because you had no opportunity there was no hope for you in New York you would be working for a feudal Overlord in New York so I mean the fascinating thing about the American experiment is you can you can ask the question what happens if we don't let people own property and what happens if we do let people own property and the economy and and the culture and the political system and the people that do own the property gets 10x bigger and then you lose and they win and so then you have a a similar dynamic between the English settlers and the French the anguish embraced Agriculture and they Embrace Manufacturing and they want to create things whatever you know and ship it back to Europe the French wanted to trade with the Indians for furs so the French came in and they settled in an inner part of the continent they traded for Furs but that's not a very labor-intensive activity just trading for Furs so when the French started vying with the British the British had 20 people 20 uh 20 men for everyone French and so how are you going to stand up against uh against a counterparty or a competitor that's got 20x the Manpower you have so their economic choices um whether it was to give property rights or whether it was to engage in agriculture or engage in manufacturing those resulted in the accretion of power Manpower eventually military power and so the most powerful system the system that was most organized and most efficient in uh creating and channeling energy and capturing energy that was the one that won and and the the stupid ideas like 10 families are going to own everything in New York not a very bright idea that eventually doesn't win right because you probably do it for so long and so I guess the beauty of the experiment was you had um irrational behavior in every colony and um in Georgia it was almost a prison Colony they brought in a bunch of people they were indentured servants almost and they were forced to work nobody wanted to work the economy collapsed everybody fled the you know the colony the colonial effort wasn't that successful in Massachusetts the Puritans came and they were literally puritanical so you're not allowed to do things on Sunday you can't smile you know yeah you can't you can't yeah there are all these things that were just against the rules and so people fled and uh and then the more permissive cultures either permissive in a religious sense or in an economic sense they attracted all of the entrepreneurs and all of the energy and they grew and and the problem if you have a federal government that controls everybody is there's no experiment right that's a centralized government and you could argue that the U.S success was because of the decentralized nature of the colonies there was so much distance between them and there are so many uh so many competing authorities that you couldn't impose an unfair rule on everybody right simultaneously you know it's funny because as the American experiment has gone on you know things have gotten so large and so centralized and we think of the US government as this Behemoth you know and I think we often forget that like uh you know the United States of America is a you know is an experiment in decentralization that's that's the core of it right and when you compete best idea wins this is part of the novel emergence of Bitcoin which you know for all of human history you have these Dynamics and it's like what creates the most Prosperity which leads to the most power and so you would say an element to that is freedom and property rights as Michael was just saying but at some point it becomes corruptive or corruptable and so yes you have the freedom at first and you have the checks and balances and you have the property rights but that becomes so successful that it's a growing honey pot to co-opt and then it becomes corrupted and then the whole thing goes to hell and then you start over again somewhere else and much of that as far as I can tell is because of the nature of property because up until 2008 property had to concentrate somewhere physically and it could be you know the Returns on violence so-called were very high and so that Honeypot just grew and grew and grew and if you were the one to establish order in the land then you were the one that could easily co-opt that wealth and now of course we have a money that is strictly informational so as we often say you can hold it in your mind if you like and so to me it's interesting and Michael we've been talking a lot this week about you know don't try to see beyond the Paradigm of the jurisdiction that you're in because it's basically about who who has the power in that jurisdiction and what narrative do they create and what laws do they create and all that kind of stuff and so if you could how can you see beyond that and you if you're going to see beyond that you have to have an open mind and that allows you to assess things properly but when we have something now that seemingly is Distributing power so substantially I.E and Bitcoin so it doesn't concentrate in one central place anymore to become a Honeypot but that power is being distributed what does that mean for the nature of governance for the nature of political or individual organization like how and also you know the question here is Michael you've been talking a lot lately about basically like a Will To Power right if you have the more guys if you have the better machines if you can make the more drones you win right who can bear the most resources in that game but when something causes the distribution of power like Bitcoin seems to have the capacity or potential to do how does that influence if at all the kind of just Eternal dynamics of power that auto always settle disputes between the Indians and the Puritans or between the French and the English or between the the cons and the Chinese or what you know the the Mongols and the Chinese how does that emergence of Bitcoin in that type of property influence the Eternal balance of power game that's been playing out since time immemorial I mean I think it's useful to have a model with two extremes two polar extremes one would be a country where all the property was in the land or in the physical assets or in the companies within the country and uh The Other Extreme would be a country where substantially all the property let's say 95 percent was in cyberspace stored uh in the heads of the people they say in the form of Bitcoin and cyberspace so in the one extreme where all the property is in the land there's uh there's an encouragement to to war because the country right next to you can invade your borders and take all the property right especially if the property is something which can't be destroyed like gold let's say the most extreme we've got all of our money in gold and a volt indestructible and you live next door you can come in the country Kill Everybody firebomb everything take the gold leave right so gold is an encouragement to violence from outside encouragement to war um if if the property is buildings and and factories and forms maybe I want to use a neutron bomb right like I want to use something which doesn't necessarily destroy the structures you have to be a little bit more careful and surgical in your War right not to destroy something um and but so let's say uh we know that war is encouraged by immobile property or indestructible property in the Physical Realm um and uh the encouragement to corruption I'll call politics right if I want to seize your property via Politics the way I do it is you have a building I see the building I tax the building two percent a year I reassess the value of the building up seven percent a year and in about 20 years I've taken your building right so taxation is a way for me to seize your property expropriation is a quicker way I just seizure oil company or I just seizure land we need your land for an airport we need your land for you know for a school we're going to pay you whatever we're going to pay you right so when the property is immobile uh there's a tendency for a foreign politician or foreign government to cross your border with violence and take it all and if they do cross-border with violence they get it all depending upon how indestructible it is right and how how surgical they are and then when your property is immobile there's a tendency for the authority of the federal government or the provincial government simply to tax it or expropriate it or I can get it by regulating it right I can just say that oh you operate a bakery and it is now illegal to bake bread that that happened in New York the governor of New York made it illegal to bake bread so your bakery is worthless I can make it illegal to make hats they did that too the Hat Act is illegal to make hats I can make it you have a ranch and you export beef I make it illegal to export beef you know I make it illegal to sell right and then if I can't make a legal I could put a price control on it it's illegal to sell it for more than a dollar it cost you two dollars I bankrupt you then I buy your uh your factory or your Ranch out of receivership and then I changed that law and I make it illegal but but not for the government or not for a person with a license and then it's legal again so in that environment you have a high return on corruption and you have a high return on violence and War and the Other Extreme all the property is digital so the Hostile nation state crosses the border and kills everybody and there's no property left there's nothing to seize because the property's gone because it was in cyberspace and they cross the border and they jail everybody and then they're like in a negotiate if they don't kill everybody but they just jail you there's this negotiation where I want your property and you say you're not going to give it to me and I tell you I'm going to shoot you and you tell me shoot me but you're not getting it and people you know the entire history of the world it's the history of the world is this and this is what you learn humans have had courage for thousands hundreds of thousands of years the history books are full of examples of people that died for their beliefs you read Livy the Romans attack a city the people in the city didn't want to give in the Romans they got so angry they took all of their goods they piled them in a bonfire they burned everything they even burned all their their jewelry down and then they threw themselves in the bon fire you know if you read the the sack of Carthage the famous example and Carthage is is the prince of Carthage was was going to surrender to the Romans and his wife went up to the roof of the of the Citadel with the children and she said you're not a carthaginian you're no husband of mine anymore and she threw herself and her kids off the top of the building before they would surrender to the Romans right and so there's plenty of examples of people dying for their beliefs but the problem is the property was seized anyway and that makes me believe that in fact when your property is in your head when they invade your country and they put you in a jail sale and they sweat you for 90 days they're not going to get more than half right you know you might get half I'll I'll do a deal with you I'll give you 25 I'll give you 50 50 turns out to be like the tax rate that stale like when the government gets strong enough that they're going to take as much money as they can they generally take like 50 of everything and they kind of can get away with taking half but when you get to the point where you're taking 90 percent of everything people just think I'm just not going to work anymore I'm leaving if I can get out and I'm not you know this is not worth the trouble right and the famous example in the Beatles song is it's 19 parts for you and one for me because the tax rate in in Britain was 95 at one point so I think on the right side of the axis when all property is substantially Bitcoin and digital then there's no point in uh in invading that country because you're not getting anything I mean but because first of all if you did invade the country unless you did it in an hour or less and no one knew all the Bitcoin will be gone from the country right it's going to be wired off into cyberspace put into some time lock multi-seg or it's going to another country the Bitcoin can move faster than the Army can move so there's not it's not really that productive to engage in war to get it and then the corruption doesn't make a lot of sense because if I run a country country a and I pass a law taxing Bitcoin five percent a year or 50 percent the Bitcoin leaves the country right and like Bitcoin is mobile property and the Cyber domain the the example of this in the real domain is you know there was an island in the Mediterranean that I won't name that came up with the idea of taxing yachts it had a bunch of super Yachts there and they decided that all these super yacht owners had a lot of money and it was unfair that they should be there even though the Yachts are spending millions of dollars a year on dockage and and buying food and buying drink and and paying for services but their thought was we just want more it's not enough so they passed the law taxing the super Yachts thinking that they were they were such a great place and all the Yachts were in the port until the day before the law went in and then the day the law went into action the entire Port was empty and the Yachts never came back and the entire economy crashed all the shop owners you know all were going bankrupt they went back to the politicians and said you know that was a pretty stupid law can we like reverse that one and they reversed that and then the Yachts came back Yachts are mobile property right but of course Bitcoin is a lot better than a yacht you know if you're going to store your value for a hundred years I recommend the Bitcoin not the yeah but I would say when you have a building and it's in the middle of town and you're the richest person in town everybody walks by the building and they think it's really unfair that that rich person doesn't pay more taxes and they just start thinking about a way to put a progressive tax on that building and all you can and the problem with that coming back to corruption is if you actually are a rich person with a building in the middle of town and they haven't stolen all your money it's because you're the one backing the politicians and so you're basically encouraging the corruption of the political process because to have wealth that is visible and stationary it requires that you elect the politicians so that they don't steal your wealth and you have two classes of people those that don't engage in politics with stationary visible wealth and they are their wealth is stolen within one generation they are all impoverished and then you have people that have visible stationary wealth that do engage in politics that contribute to the political process that corrupt the political process they get to keep their wealth but in so doing they corrupt themselves and once they realize that they can influence a politician to not steal their wealth they basically influence the politician to steal some competitor's wealth and you engage in this never-ending cycle of political corruption where we weaponize the political system because you just can't have wealth in a virtuous fashion that is visible and stationary in uh in a political jurisdiction because all the political systems all tend toward power and they all tend toward corruption and so in the absence of freedom to to leave and take your property with you the system is doomed to an endless cycle of ever greater corruption until eventually it reaches this entropic Frontier where it collapses under its own weight this is what makes Rob's I mean all the stuff we always talk about Eric your work so fascinating because basically the premise here is that imperfect property creates an incentive structure that exacerbates human imperfections let's say so to flip that on its end what does perfect property now I don't know if we can say perfect but Bitcoin is damn close to a perfect property how does that create an incentive structure that instead of exacerbating the aspects of ourselves that we might deem deem imperfect how does it draw out the aspects of ourselves cells that are more virtuous more truthful more if you want to be dramatic Divine and this is what we you know this is why this is so mind-blowing because once you realize that that incentive structure that is going to draw those things out of people almost inescapably as Michael just said like if you're that property owner in New York you're going to respond to your incentives do you want your property taken away or do you want to play the political game and when you start playing that game you start doing things that you don't like that you know are kind of wrong but you do them to to survive and now that the property has shifted we have a different form of property it's bringing out these elements of ourselves that I think we would deem good and you know that's so on display in this environment we've been in the last week we meet all these people and they're so you can tell that their eyes are open they're looking toward the future with hope they're invigorated they're enthusiastic and there's a strong ethical Dimension to all the stuff that's going on here and Eric you talk about it all the time so why don't you well so the ethical dimension thing is really important and what I'd point out is that the idea of imperfect property doesn't exist property itself is a an idea and a concept legally and the problem is is that it's not that we don't have imperative property it's that we have imperfect law and so that the Sovereign exception that always allows for the state of emergency so that expropriation can happen or even the taxation structure made so that you can eventually siphon everybody else else's wealth goes to show that this exception and the idea of property property in itself fundamentally collapses under that so Bitcoin with the ethical assertion of a a property that fundamentally does not have any sort of sovereign exception that can ever be triggered inside of it now means that we have true property which also reinforces the that essentially property itself is fundamentally an idea and so we took this idea and transposed it onto physical stuff whatever it may be yacht house car whatever's physical but because of its actual physical qualities and violence that the state has and the ability to use the Sovereign exception it turns out like we actually don't have property at all we have this thing where governments give us permission to some limited amount of access to I.E the property up until the limits that they choose within that Sovereign exception and so so to me a lot of what we're seeing here together as people is essentially the overcoming of this exception idea with a true form of law that also gives us ethics which is in my opinion why we're also lit up about being here and participating one of these extremes to kind of take a page at a Sailors book if you use the thought experiment of a hypothetical world where everyone's invincible and no one can take anyone else's stuff right so you can't be killed and you can't be stolen from in that world you actually have perfect property right like your stuff cannot be taken and your your most personal property your body cannot be harmed or killed and in that world there's basically zero relevance for a state or government you don't need physical security to maintain the Integrity of your relationship to your stuff because no one can take it and no one can hurt you so there's this weird like obviously that's an ideal that's an impossibility you can never achieve that we're not Invincible we're mortal our stuff can be taken but we're when I look at property it's basically taking this I guess it's a biological darwinian impulse for territoriality all right like the original property was families living on land and they would they would burn the flame that reflected their ancestors and if the flame ever went out it was like a very bad omen and the family was the primary social unit so it was very much like this emergent thing about territoriality that we then when we invented the individual we started assigning that to individual things like you now can own individual things rather than just land that's purely immobile so we've been kind of working away from this immobile property that's very seasonable and then invites violence towards things that are more abstract I guess and more personalized and more individualized and so to the extent you can create a world that's closer to that ideal where you can't steal people's stuff there's repercussions for it you're actually inhibiting or disincentivizing violence as a wealth acquisition strategy and I always boil it down to making versus taking right there's two ways to acquire wealth you can take someone's stuff you can seize your farm or steal your business or steal your gold or I can build the business construct the farm mine the Gold all right I can make it or engage and trade with with other people that have engaged in making so the the way I see Bitcoin is like just giving people recourse to this form of property that is hypermobile unseasonable uh lets people opt out of those games when the political environment degenerates into corruption and chaos and theft so it's it just it's a check right so if if Human Action is like emerging from the incentive structures we inhabit we've just been inhabiting weird incentives by virtue of being you know Apes with plans and sticks and rocks trying to build a better world but that temptation to steal your [ __ ] was always there so people always always give into it and you get as much as we get the Austrian boom and bust business cycle from the base and currency and violating property I think we also get this civilizational boom and bust cycle and so I don't know Bitcoin just gives you this portal to another dimension unless you kind of opt out of the game when the game's disfavorable for you and then you can go to a place where a jurisdiction that treats you better and uh that more respects private property and that seems like a much better world I think that it's a useful model to think that on one one extreme of the axis if you have physical property uh there's a vicious cycle of corruption and violence and when you have digital property there's a virtuous cycle toward Civility and cooperation one extreme is the economically the economically powerful but physically weak versus the uh the physically powerful economically weak when you have that situation that is um a poor person with a gun in the room with a multi-billionaire then what you have is the physically powerful hold the economically wealthy and contempt and uh and so that's in very that's happened throughout history right it's always like Genghis Khan rides across the plain and sacks all of the all of the Nations that are physically weak or militarily weaker but economically stronger why did he bother to conquer them right you don't bother you don't go to war with someone militarily stronger that has nothing right it's like we don't go out and pick a fight with a volcano that offers us nothing right basically it was the the powerful praying on the weak because they hold the weak in contempt but if on the other hand you're economically invulnerable when you meet someone to Robert's point of view you meet someone that is economically powerful but you know that it is absolutely impossible for you we'll just say for for the sake of discussion it's impossible for you to seize their economic wealth like forgetting about the physical component if if that person has a hundred billion dollars and there's no law and no gun and there's no way for me to get the hundred billion dollars through force or through trickery or through law then I actually hold them in respect right so if you're weak I hold you in contempt if you're invulnerable I hold you with respect and of course the only rational action if I know I can't take it is I have to trade with you what is it that you want that I have that you might that you might uh trade me some of your economic energy for so so ultimately if um that the world has been doomed to an endless cycle of violence and Corruption uh because of this uh because of this physical property and and these physical assets and I think the world is being tipped into a virtuous cycle of of Civility and cooperation because of the formation of a digital property you can hold and right now Bitcoin is just this very flickering Ember it's 0.1 percent uh maybe it's less than 0.1 percent of the economic wealth of the world maybe it's five basis points of economic wealth of the world but it is the first time in human history where you had something that approached that that perfected uh property right now I'll say one more point on the on the pre-colonial or the colonial American experiment to the extent that virtue came out of the colonies one of the reason that virtue emerged that created the Constitution the Bill of Rights The American Nation and a nation that to a greater degree than any other we know of has supported economic freedom and political freedom that virtue came because if I oppressed you in one Colony you could flee and cross the border they didn't have sealed borders you could literally walk from Massachusetts to Rhode Island in fact there are lots of examples of Quakers walking from Massachusetts to Rhode Island on the road right and there's no one stopping you and of course the borders weren't sealed to the West so if you lived in a in Virginia and you felt like the Virginia governor was oppressive you could just keep going west and there were Indian tribes but the tribes weren't that organized and if you could make if you brought the tribe something they wanted you could make friends with them right and so there there was uh freedom of mobility and to the extent that the New York Governor made it illegal to make hats or or actually the making the legal hat thing was applied to all the colonies by the British it wasn't even a New York thing it was a it was exciting when when the British came up with a silly rule in London and you lived 500 miles out in the wilderness in the Appalachians maybe you just ignored that rule so to a certain degree a lot of the ridiculous laws that were put on the books were ignored because it was so difficult to enforce them and so that's another they and there was a period of what they call benign neglect where where a Walpole didn't he would agree to pass a stupid rule but he wouldn't enforce the rule and everybody lived halfway right so it was difficult to enforce oppressive rules it was difficult to Jail the people in a jurisdiction and in New York if the New York Governor wouldn't let you own land or buy land you had the opportunity to row across the Hudson River or or go to New Jersey or go to Pennsylvania and get a better deal so it's not that they didn't have those corrupting Tendencies but it was much more difficult to enforce the corrupt rules and although they didn't have physical they didn't have perfect property they didn't have digital property what you did have is you had the possibility if you were oppressed in Europe you had the possibility to get on a ship travel for six to 12 weeks and get off on the other side of the world where maybe you could have some property it was a 12-week dangerous Journey from no Pro no rights to rights and if you were in Massachusetts and it was oppressive you had the ability to go west or go south and because people had optionality there were consequences to irrationality you you pass a ridiculous Rule people just don't abide by it and you and you declare an irrational edict then people flee your jurisdiction and when a politician or authoritarian finds that um that people won't do what they want and the history of America is the long the long-running history of people not doing what they're told not doing what they're told and being you know it's like eventually at the end of the day why do I go west it's because I want to get away from the mayor and the governor and the politician and the lawyers right and and you could say we were pretty virtuous as long as we could keep going west yeah and when we ran out of a place to go right and we got trapped with ourself things started to get worse and worse and worse so the story of human history is people striving to find a place where they can have property and it's always imperfect but now we've kind of run out of places and of course the ultimate corrupt regime is you're in a country you can't flee through the airport you can't get out you can't take your property with you you can't get away and in that country whether it's a Zimbabwe or a Cuba or North Korea it's one percent of the people with the guns end up proving that they can literally starve everybody else and you wonder well how long can this go on until they lose power and the answer is they can pretty much starve 95 percent of the country and squeeze the country down to a GDP of three percent of previous and they'll probably still have power as long as they keep the guns and until and the only way that uh that uh that falls or that stops is when someone next their next door neighbor says I want that and so the next door neighbor comes in and they find a bunch of starred population and they're able to topple the regime that kind of might work or you get the Easter Island situation where the authoritarians just decide that you must cut down all the trees to make large statues to worship my gods and if you don't I will murder you and someone says well you know eventually chop down all the trees we won't be able to fish and we're going to starve to death to the lake murder him your heretic essentially you and you end up with a lot of stone statues and everybody starves to death and like 100 years later or a thousand years later people come along and they say who built these statues and why are they all dead and then and then someone goes it seems kind of stupid to waste all of your economic Energy building statues in an island in the middle of the Pacific and it's like yeah you don't know the half of it but you know let me show you other religious and authoritarian societies and let me show you what they build and I just make one last point every great city on earth London Paris Venice New York Moscow Tokyo Beijing every great city on Earth was the center of an Empire that used violence and force in order to impose taxes and customs duties in order to seize the wealth of everybody else in the Empire and they form the city they passed the law they create the monopolies they Seize Your wealth Rome when someone doesn't want to pay half of when they don't want to give half of everything they've got to the Empire they're to court a Smuggler a pirate a barbarian a heretic we raise our army we raise our Navy we go and we kill them we sink their ships right that's why Carthage had to die so Rome could rise that's why the phonations were dispersed so the carthaginians could rise that's why every Venetian Fortress was previously a phonation Fortress was previously a Greek Fortress was previously a uh a Roman Fortress eventually became a British a French Fortress then a British Fortress right because you just have to have these Island fortresses and the Mediterranean so that you can murder people that wished across from point A to point B without giving you half their stuff and all of that plunder you know the Navigation Acts were what caused the Revolutionary War and that was the British saying you have to ship everything in a British ship and you have to pay a tariff and the Tariff is two to three times the value of the thing that you're shipping like they're literally taking 50 to 75 percent of the economic value and there's always that issue of just how much can I get with a barrel of a gun and when it got to be 90 people just said screw it we're just not going to produce this thing and ship it it's just too hard right so the number is like half normally half to two-thirds but then we evade it so at the end of the day you you see the rise of these Empires throughout human history one after the other after the other after the other enforced by a military enforced by a Navy enforced by physical power the money goes to London and you have beautiful castles and beautiful buildings until it goes to New York and you have beautiful buildings and if you see a big building it's because somebody had an Empire and when you go to Venice and you look around you realize that the venetians that inherited that stuff they can't even afford to fix the leaks they can't even afford to maintain and paint the building they're all sinking into the ocean and you think how did they ever have the money to build this stuff and it's they didn't it's just that they stole half of what everybody else had in the Mediterranean for a while as long as they could and then when that stops you know the the city ossifies you know and you either go to Venice or you go to Rome or eventually in Rome they had to steal all the marble and the Coliseum because they couldn't afford to to Quarry their own marble anymore and that's how far they'd sunk and uh every time you go through a big city today you look around and what you see is an edifice to a Empire and uh you want to fix the problem right you you fix the ability uh to impose your will through physical Force on everyone creating something you basically disenfranchise the parasite class and you enfranchise the producer class when that happens then all of all of this Prosperity will spread evenly more evenly around the globe until you won't be able to identify the seat of the Empire and you won't need a Navy or an army to defend it I think going back to the concept of like going west and you know how we ran out of room eventually like then you know when we did run out of room we had to go digital right but you know you talk about uh how America's culture has always been a culture of like sort of being an unruly people who don't really do what the [ __ ] we're told which I think is the beautiful thing about being an American it's like maybe I'll do that maybe I won't I don't know um you know I I think that because of the new digital you know panopticon that we have like because of the surveillance Society we're actually in this very precarious place where the state you know the state didn't used to win that much they would pass a rule like you can't make hats and people would be like that rule is [ __ ] stupid I'm not following that and so basically we're now approaching this this place where the state has like a near 100 win rate because of the surveillance society and so you got to jump ship and you got to go digital and I I don't think that people realize that there are basically two boats and one is leading them into bondage and the other boat is full of encryption-powered individuals who are heading towards sovereignty and to me it's like ver I feel like I'm standing at the shore and screaming at people get on the right boat and people are going nah this other boat's just as good it's faster it's taking us to America and and you know I just want to tell them like that's the wrong boat you have no power the powerful are going to be contemptuous of you because of how weak you are and they're gonna you know shackle you put you in bondage and tell you what to do you're going to become chattel I think that's a great analogy that cyberspace is like an infinite West conceptually right so Michael you've talked about dematerialization before software's eating the world has been with us for a long time and yes like there will be forces within cyberspace that attempt to exact the same type of control but it seems like that place is much more impervious to that control and what I'm really interested in is not just first of all we have all these protocols for Freedom emerging we have a money protocol in Bitcoin we have a speech protocol in Noster let's say and so Step One is leveraging those protocols bring more freedom into your life before you try to do anything else but what I find interesting is in that environment where it can't be so easily control can't be exerted let's take the issue of 3D Guns too right the gun debate always rages what happens when it's just information everything is becoming information and when any like 13 year old in their basement can make us you know an automatic weapon what then and so I'm we have we're at this point in history with the Confluence of like massive forces AI robotics Bitcoin and the dematerialization of everything and so you know to bring it back to kind of an ethical question in that space let's assume people take more and more responsibility they leverage these Technologies when things can't be as controlled as they have in the past and when that control system served as a surrogate for ethics for a lot of people or at least it it transmitted a time a type of ethic to people what happens when people have that such a greater degree of freedom in terms of their ethical choices for Behavior you know and I'm hopeful that it means we spend more time thinking about those things like virtue and truth and freedom and the other ethical considerations and those become elevated as conversation points and we try to embody them more than we did in the past and we have the freedom to do so but it could go another Direction you know and because there's competing forces there so you know I'd love to hear you guys thoughts on how you think Mike's overarching view of history there it's what's that old saying that people don't follow laws they follow incentives and if anything kind of painting a picture that people have been running from laws to a large extent right one group comes into power they seek to establish dominion over another such that they can extract purchasing power from them or plunder them often legally and then those people get fed up at some point and they move west right West West and the other thing that so I guess the connection there is like to the extent that someone's private property is being violated is the same extent to which we are rewarding the non-productive class so the parasite class so we're actually incentivizing non-productive political action violence Etc and that I mean that that's a problem right we want to do the opposite of that we should try to disincentivize the non-productive class which is to say make property really strong such that the productive people the competent people that are solving problems for people in the world building businesses innovating increasing human productivity are actually the ones rewarded to do that right they have the largest carrot to engage in that activity and they face the least stick of having their the fruits of their labor stolen and this when we talk about property a lot on the show and obviously amongst ourselves but it's it's such an abstract thing and I to try and simplify it I think it's just Justice right if Justice is just people getting what they deserve all right that you could look at a situation between people with a non-biased lens and you know kind of determine oh this guy planted the crops and he figured out when to plant them and how to fertilize them so when the the harvest comes he should kind of own all of that right it's just a just assessment if Justice is people getting what they deserve I mean property is basically just you keeping what you earn you're keeping the value that you create so we've been struggling to implement that principle of Justice into society and I mean this goes all the way back to Plato right where he's arguing about the the nature of justice and is it is it better to actually be just and appear unjust as opposed to being unjust and a pure just and um it just seems like we have to embrace this idea of a symmetry that applies to each individual and it's independent of any specific individual it's just a principle on which we organize ourselves and it happens to be the thing that also creates the most wealth and the most ethical flourishing and highest morality Etc so I don't know I just don't I don't think humans could ever get to that level without Bitcoin it seems like bitcoin's indispensable to the human Enterprise I have to point out that uh this this question of justice that that Plato brought up was brought up in Republic at the very beginning when the stranger from another land asked the question about like oh you don't have the need for Gods here and it starts the whole dialogue and I think that's very interesting because we can only have this notion of Justice if we have a notion of ethics and the problem is is that you know 150 years after the Declaration of the death of God like we're fundamentally in an unethical world where when most people who go yeah like if you produce stuff you should probably own that but people are so deep within the propaganda that we literally live inside of this nightmare like Venezuela where people have been so convinced that no actually people who want to create wealth and prosperity these are the greedy people who want to take more for themselves and and the most amazing thing is that inside of that comes the f argument of actual direct harm of saying we have a right to hurt people because they have things that we want and it's terrifying because like that is part of the world that we fundamentally live in today and to me what Bitcoin is it is an ethical assertion saying not only no longer am I not going to live in this world I'm going to choose to put allocate my wealth into this digital Realm and if you choose to come and bring that violence to me so be it however I want to let you know you will never ever get my money and to me like that's in this crazy world that seems to be the primary ethical assertion that we have to actually recover ethics on a total so that we can create Justice and allow for True property in the rights that are enshrined and then the flourish yeah it stops that uh competition for gaining more relative position within the wealth hierarchy like people fighting tooth and nail to kind of scramble up the economic hierarchy by hook or by crook because that whole relative struggle between people comes at the expense of the absolute potential of humanity right if we all have really strong property and we're all equal in the eyes of the law then all of a sudden we can actually create massive abundance we don't even know what we're capable of creating so we've been Humanity's been cutting off his own nose despite his face in a way in a world where property was not super strong and um it's Justice right if you don't have strong property you don't have Justice implemented in society so I I think um pursuant to your thought you know there's there's deep seated human aspiration for Liberty and so well you know Liberty freedom Pursuit of Happiness and we can call Advocates Libertarians and if we look at the if Chase the history of the Libertarians it was it was always I have to go to the Undiscovered Country and after the Undiscovered Country and make make a life for myself my family my friends a better life and then uh it became go to the New World and when we had the technology to go to the new world right and we didn't have it in 880 like you know you aren't going to get there in a tri ream but at some point you know in the in the 14 1500s we had it and so 12 a 12-week journey or a six-week Journey could get you to the new world and people can invest about anywhere it turns out the human can go without food for 90 days before they die right typical human uh somewhere in the in the 30 60 90 day time frame you know you can make about a a two three month arduous Journey so people went to the new world and then when they got to the new world and they didn't have Liberty they went to the next Colony or they went West Go West Young Man and then uh when we got into um the 20th century and we'd gone all the way west a new set of libertarian dreamers arose and many of them were science fiction authors and they imagined uh they imagined space travel and Interstellar travel and like one of my uh one of my uh you know more influential authors I read as Robert Heinlein you know and Highland is a great science fiction author and he was also a libertarian and most of his writings the theme is you know life has become insufferable on this planet and I have to get off planet and I have to go to a new planet a new world we're going to start again without a lot of uh politicians and lawyers telling me how to live my life and it was very much a western ethos right a frontier ethos and and for a long time the human Spirit was captivated by uh the um you know by the the imagination and the ideals of the science fiction authors in fact my entire generation right the Elon musks of the world we all read this and we all thought we ought to get off planet the problem is you can't take a 12-week trip and get to another star system right the technology stopped developing at an exponential rate and about 1970 and we've been kind of stuck and maybe at some point someone will invent an uh an engine that'll get us off planet and uh and when they get to the point where we get a near faster than a light drive then we'll get back to that and you'll see The Human Condition driving to go to space but I've said before we go to outer space we go to cyberspace and it turns out that what got invented in the meantime while all our science fiction freaks were focused upon going to outer space and colonizing the Stars right is we invented cyberspace and Satoshi Nakamoto combined proof of work and cryptography in order to create a physical reality in order in order to create digital energy digital matter digital power in cyberspace and we're just coming to grips with what it means to have to have manifested cyberspace in a way that's tangible in the past few years but it is now possible for a human being that is economically vulnerable that is that is insecure in 12 weeks to migrate their wealth to cyberspace just like it was once possible to go from from Virginia to Kentucky in 12 weeks or from Kentucky to Nebraska in 12 weeks the 12-week jump is kind of like the most that a typical family or a typical human can do you don't get there you know when you orange pill someone you get on the rabbit hole you don't get there in 12 hours you don't you know you don't get there in 12 minutes but if it took you 12 years nobody would go right and so all of the ideology and the aspiration in the world is not getting us to Alpha Centauri or Proxima Centauri in 12 weeks that is not a solution cyberspace is a solution and pursuant to Robert's Point what if we were all indestructible and immortal okay well it is now possible to make yourself economically indestructible and economically immortal in 12 weeks you you have to have the conviction to do it but you know people risked their life and their livelihood they're the people that got on that boat from Rotterdam to Philadelphia there was going to be a five or ten percent mortality rate sometimes there's a 20 mortality rate or 30 mortality rate they risked their life because it was just so awful where they were coming from and they made a very arduous journey and I would argue that getting on a sailing ship or a wooden ship and floating around in the Atlantic Ocean for 12 weeks is a little more difficult than figuring out how to store your private keys and how to convert your you know sell your property and convert it to bitcoin and get it on the base chain and do whatever you're going to do so not only is it possible to make yourself economically indestructible and economically immortal it is now possible and and this is the just the development of recent time that you could record this one hour podcast and make it a hundred dollars a podcast and in a world where you store it on a big Tech Network that is uh that is subject to censorship it may be ripped off the network if you upload it to a certain company's website and a certain government doesn't agree with what you said anything that you said Robert or anything that you might have said Eric um they will rip and shred your uh your intellectual body of knowledge your intellect out of cyberspace for all of eternity and Eternity and censor you but you can now hash this video you could take your body of knowledge you could take your book you could take your video you could take your intellect and you can burn it onto the Bitcoin base layer and you can become intellectually indestructible and intellectually Immortal and so I haven't quite figured out how to make you physically your closest person we know to be physically indestructible and physically you know physically Immortal we haven't figured that out but but inventions in cyberspace offer the promise of intellectual and economic immortality and indestructibility and in that world where we have a migration a mass migration of people Libertarians that want a better life for themselves their family their children their children's children you can now go to cyberspace you can now take your ideas with you you can now take your money with you and the more people that go to to that Undiscovered Country right that new world the stronger it gets the stronger cyberspace gets right every Bitcoin miner is a digital Fortress defending sovereignty in cyberspace the the more we support them the more indestructible we all get and so Bitcoin is it's uh it's a cyber world that was once defended by one exahash an Amazon computer or Amazon or Google or Facebook or a government could have shut it down and today it's defended by 350 extra hash and if you took over every computer on Earth you couldn't stop it right it is it has crossed this Frontier where now it is its own country it is its own place and we are only beginning to figure out what aspects of our self our intellect our economic being our political being our physical being can be migrated I believe it started economically it will go to intellectually but at some point you'll be able to migrate your business your you know your vocation and your politics into cyberspace where they degree they achieve a degree of indestructible immortality and that will take us to that virtuous cycle of cooperation and civility because now people with guns and people with lawyers and people with laws are not going to be able to steal corrupt and destroy you you know what that go ahead you sure yeah all right Mike I I absolutely love that because I also love the idea of that like these people in Europe they're like there's this terrifying Journey some people are gonna die don't go it's still like stay here it's much better and so the people that don't overcome that fear and tear though all right I'm going to stay European stay here and suffer but those who made the choice to make that arduous and difficult Journey very much like rocking Bitcoin and actually Crossing the Rubicon to doing it putting your wealth in it through challenge ourselves to overcome that fear and go explore this new territory we actually transform ourselves from these old oppressed Europeans into the becoming of the Americans who lead through these ideals because they were able to overcome their fears and come and colonize this new territory of Freedom that was reserved only for them by challenging the fear and Terror that they were told overcoming it and coming to the United States and to me that's exactly what's happening is that now we have this totally new territory of Freedom where we'll like come with us it could be dangerous but if you get here and you secure yourself correctly there's much more freedom than there's been in any territory within the last century you know what all this makes me think about because obviously we talk about freedom and Bitcoin all the time and that's been the subject of this conversation and part of that impulse you know perhaps it's one of the highest ideals is saying I want to determine for myself I want to be you know I want to control my will I want to be fully I want to be an agent unto myself and so anything that tries to impose a restriction on that I characterize as tyranny and Rob I've heard you discuss before how potentially I think it's a theory not perhaps not the you know closed argument but the Christianity helped further distill the conception of the self in individuals so perhaps we evolved in a more group notion of the self and Christianity perhaps distilled that down to the individual and then of course you would think that two things one that would inspire a value or you would ascribe more value on freedom for that reason because you are a more self-contained idea now and it's more easy to you know discern or observe when that's being imposed upon or restricted uh and you would and as a result that would become elevated as a type of ethic and so you wind the clock forward and we're discussing all these examples of people pursuing greater autonomy people pursuing greater freedom and then we're saying well yes cyberspace we're we're reconstructing the world based on information and so we're the process over the last 50 years has been moving into that world but it's been moving you know perhaps ideas and texts and numbers and that kind of stuff but it occurs me that I think what Bitcoin represents actually is the beginning of the self in cyberspace and prior to that you didn't have that you had loose associations of who you are in Meet space with who you are in cyberspace but basically and to Michael's point about how far will we take this upon you know based on what both of you just said I'm thinking this is the construction of the notion of the self this is the construction of your body this is the beginning of that process in cyberspace I have private Keys therefore I am and that's a pretty wild notion because that just we talk about freedom and Liberation then you know the all bets are off because we're living in a infinite sort of space of infinite possibility and the critical piece of leveraging that to the max was actually having something that could almost reflect our corporate corporeal existence here in cyberspace yeah I mean you asked like how far do you take it when you find a new frontier you take it all the [ __ ] way I mean you take it all the way until you run out of space you just run as fast and hard as you can until there's nowhere no more room to run I think about like you're talking about the Europeans and the Americans and the people that came over on the boats and it's like necessity is the mother of invention right and the people that came or the people that had to come I think one of the interesting things about Bitcoin is there's this uh this push-pull because you know bitcoin's a monetary Network you've talked about this plenty and you know rich people need to Port their wealth into Bitcoin for Bitcoin to continue becoming successful right but because we live in this political system and a lot of these rich people are Political Animals they don't see anything really wrong with the current order because it's working for them right and so I think like like Michael when you joined Bitcoin a lot of us were very excited about you because we had prophesied you we were like one day there will be a man who puts a billion dollars of net worth into Bitcoin and you know because we used to say this to each other you know when we were buying Bitcoin at 200 we would say well what about when who are the people who are going to buy it for ten thousand dollars and we're like people that are a lot richer than you man you know and guys like Michael came in and I think what was exciting about uh you coming into Bitcoin was that we thought there'd be many more Michael Sailors right behind you you know and then I think we found out what a unique and special individual you are and how thoughtful you are about this and I I think the question I have for you is like where where when are these Political Animals you know these billionaires who operate in the current system when are they going to get the message is it going to be like are they going to be forced via necessity or you know is it a ongoing conversation education like where are the next thousand Michael sailors I think I think they'll pop up when you least expect them and in volume that's greater than you expect um I think um you know pursuant to the to this point right it makes sense that you can't have wealth without being part of the status quo and without respecting the existing political system because anyone with wealth that didn't understand how to work the political system loses it all right so it's almost like by definition of course the people with all the money in a stable Society are invested in this Society because everyone that disagreed with the premise of the society if you don't know how to work the legal system and political system then it was just taken away from you by someone that did so it shouldn't surprise us that that uh there that the corporations and and uh the extremely wealthy are very comfortable and and they're not quick to to uh challenge the status quo but I do think yeah the the key to um uh to rational behavior is a decentralized world where there is a separation of power and a set of checks and balances and so in uh in governments where there's simply one Central Federal Authority you tend to have the most extreme terrifying authoritarian Behavior in the U.S we have States and states have some rights to a certain degree and the states tend to put some check on each other and and that's a source of virtue um we have a lot of wealthy people outside the U.S and so so to the extent that you have people in the Middle East and South America I think you actually find there are um there are a lot of um wealthy people in South America and various countries right that uh that aren't necessarily um they're not necessarily uh embedded to their knees in concrete in the U.S system and so they see the benefit of Bitcoin but it's not it's not politically and it's not it's not uh wise for them to uh to announce their commitment to bitcoin because they would be Targets in their local country right if you think about everyone in China South America and Africa right to a certain extent right The Virtuous aspect of Bitcoin is the fact that it is both mobile but also it is invisible wealth right so You could argue that you know that I uh I undermined half of the value of my Bitcoin by making it visible yeah I I I did it for a reason and the reason is someone needed to do it but I but I wouldn't say everyone needs to do it if if you for example had as much Bitcoin as me and you lived in Venezuela right now or or any country on earth right I wouldn't I wouldn't necessarily unless you were quite secure in your own situation or unless you're willing you know to uh to take the brunt of the pushback for standing up in favor of Bitcoin for some other reason I would say I would not encourage most people in an unstable political situation to announce they have Bitcoin I'm quite sure for example there are there are substantial Bitcoin holders that have made massive investments in Bitcoin in China well you win if you live in a corrupt Society where they seize the wealth of anybody that has it then there's two types of people those that announce they have it that lose it in short order and those that don't announce they have it and that you're not seeing so so I actually think there are a lot of people that I'm not the only one that's bought a billion dollars of Bitcoin I'm the I'm the only one that's been in a position to announce it and I've had a lot of reasons to announce it right um I think that uh over the next four years you'll see more I I actually think there's a huge amount of money in the crypto ecosystem right now trading on crypto exchanges trading in crypto tokens trading in cryptocurrencies like stable coins and I think that over time a lot of that Capital will flow into Bitcoin because because there's no other place for it to flow so as people lose faith and crypto exchanges and they lose faith in other crypto networks and they lose faith in other cryptocurrencies they're not going to go back to the Fiat system they're going they're going to flow into Bitcoin and the Meltdown of crypto will be a melt up of Bitcoin and so that'll be an interesting time period and I I think that'll be the next wave it'll be a melt up a Bitcoin and a meltdown of crypto and then the wave after that will be an emergence of um of Bitcoin as the highest form of property right and and and I I would say the first investable commodity yeah like I I don't want to beat up on Commodities but but I really think that if you're an investor there is no rational argument for investing and and soybeans corn oil raw natural gas silver copper gold Platinum Palladium or diamonds like whatever it is it's a commodity I think that any I don't but I don't I know people may be offended by this I don't think there's any intelligent investor who believes that you should invest in any of those Commodities I and I don't think you can create a theoretical argument for investing in any of them and the reason why is in the beginning of my business career we had a dirty I worked for Dupont uh for a while and we built models and we built models to predict the profitability of every Dupont business you know Nitro Lycra and nylon and titanium dioxide and all the polymers and the freons and and the chemicals and there was one dirty word at DuPont and you know what the dirtiest word was commodity like we do not want to be commoditized or commodified we don't want to sell come on specialty differentiated specialty was the good word because like this was good that was awful yeah and the reason that was awful was anybody can make a commodity you see anybody can make a commodity that's the definition of commodity right right and so there aren't any mainstream investors that are intelligent invested in Commodities they might invest in they might invest in uh the company that produces the oil in the country and then it only works so they form a cartel right OPEC yeah if you have a car yeah it only works when I form a cartel or I get a monopoly on producing the Commodities another one yeah is that this one if I have a diamond cartel and oil cartel or I I produce natural gas but you know how it works I'm the only one with the pipeline and then I pay someone to protest the other pipeline because I don't want two pipelines because of those two pipelines my price is going to zero or my profits going to zero so the commodity business is in essence a political business that revolves around creating cartels and creating tariffs and creating restraints of trade and if you're fortunate enough to do that maybe you make money in the business of producing it but if I offered you a billion dollars of soybeans or a billion dollars of natural gas or a billion dollars of gold or a billion dollars of silver in that warehouse and said do you want to hold it for a hundred years if you thought about it you'd realize it's the dumbest thing you could possibly imagine so Along Comes Bitcoin and what do people think right in the mainstream I'm talking about the people with hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars that actually got rich by being intelligent investors they all learned that you get poor by investing in Commodities yeah okay so so the fir first of all they're not gonna they're not investing in Bitcoin because uh they're deniers it's tulip bulbs and it's a scam and uh and if it the Peter shifts of the world if they think that they're not going to invest so then they migrate to Skeptics it's really good something but it's too good and the government will ban it blockchain not Bitcoin so they're not going to invest in that because the because it's too good to be true and the government will ban it and their and they don't invest in they didn't get rich investing in things the government was against so then it has to go to version to stage three they're they're Traders or they're investors and it's an asset yeah well if it's a commodity Bitcoin is a digital commodity like well wait a minute did anybody ever get rich buying a bunch of commodities no right so it's not I'm not buying a commodity and you have to actually get I trade a commodity like I I will trade soybeans I will trade cotton I will trade pork bellies I will short and go long natural gas I'm a Trader but I'm not long-term to that right so maybe we get there you have to get beyond that to this Epiphany it's the first commodity you can't make more of yeah and now it's not a commodity anymore it's a scarcity but scarcity is a paradigm shift yeah because scarcity has never been created in the history of the human race so nobody who's rich got rich investing in scarcity no one inherited scarcity right now no one no one actually discovered another one so you're asking people to invest in something that at best looks like a commodity which is an awful idea right like the truth is if you find any find me a billionaire or a multi-billionaire that got rich by by buying and holding gold right there isn't one right that all they remember is Bunky hunt and the Hunt Brothers tried to Corner silver and lost billions I can show you billionaires that that aren't anymore because they bought Commodities but I can't just show you one that held it so what you've got is something that no one ever got rich on and so they have to actually cross this this um threshold where they say hey this is a big Tech dominant network but there's no company behind it did anybody ever get rich investing in a network without a company behind it no did anybody ever get rich investing in scarcity no and so these people that you're looking for they actually have to discover an utterly new paradigm and a new paradigm gets discovered by someone that has a need right you have to be fleeing yeah if you're fleeing Syria if you're fleeing a war zone if you're fleeing a dictatorship if you're fleeing an authoritarian Society where you're going to lose everything if you're in Africa and you're going to lose everything then you can Discover it but the challenge with the refugees is is they have a lot of incentive a lot of motive and their minds are open but they don't have a lot of money you see right oh and if they do have a lot of money okay you're the billionaire fleeing uh a dictatorship where people have guns and they'll shoot you yeah you don't have a lot of how many billionaires stood up in an airport in Zimbabwe and said I have a billion dollars I'm Leaving on a Jet Plane right now and I'm proud that I have it you see so you're not going to get a rational person with a lot of money with a motive to announce it you're going to have people that don't have that much money with a motive that will say they've got it but they'll be afraid then you're gonna have people with a lot of money in the Western World right and and their challenges that you know they have a minor motive but they're not looking at losing everything yet yeah and so on the periphery um you you have a fire that's burning but you don't have an avalanche of adoption because even though it's rational it's rational that everyone with any amount of money should just go out and sell a third of their stuff or a 10 10 of their stuff they should all sell a 10 of their stuff and they should buy Bitcoin tomorrow that's rational but be careful what you wish for right because you don't really want them to do it that fast right now Bitcoin is you can make an argument there there's I'm flying an airplane when I fly through the speed of sound I rip the Wings off the airplane right the speed of sound is the rate at which the air here is able to communicate with the air here so when you pass the speed of sound you slam into the air without it knowing that you're coming it's like slamming into a brick wall as hard as you can that's why no commercial travel to this day is faster than the speed of sound well there's a rate at which a new paradigm can blow through the world and there's the equivalent of the sound wave this political economic barrier people can adjust to it at a certain rate and that rate over the past three years has been Bitcoin growing 50 percent a year right you know through that and maybe it can grow a 500 billion dollar entity that kind of can grow at that rate if it went any faster you start you start shredding reality and tearing the fabric of reality yeah and you can argue that you know a lot of big Winners who wish for that by the way they want that to happen Bitcoin at 27 000 today after the crypto meltdown is probably good because if Bitcoin was 250 000 right now after the crypto meltdown instead of all the regulators and all the politicians in the world attacking every crypto exchange every other cryptocurrency other every other crypto token and leaving Bitcoin alone maybe people would be worried about Bitcoin so the one the one word conspicuously absent from all of the regulatory attacks in the crypto industry is Bitcoin okay we're not we're not a geopolitical threat we're not a status quo threat right and so I I think um you know it's it's it's good for us to wait and allow that to form on its own right even though you're impatient sometime everyone that's actually done the work to understand Bitcoin is able to buy Bitcoin right now for 27 000 instead of 270 000 and if the world was rational it's it's like like I said when the bat when the FDIC Embraces Bitcoin and lets Banks hold Bitcoin everybody will want it no one will want to sell it you won't be able to afford it right right and so you don't want them to get too rational too soon because Bitcoin let's play a little thought experiment people with a lot more money than you listen this podcast and tomorrow they actually figure it out and they buy Bitcoin and Bitcoin goes to 10 million a coin now how are you feeling what are you thinking I I'm the honest truth is I would feel scared the day that Bitcoin went up eight thousand dollars in a single day uh I was kind of despondent and I told my wife she goes what's wrong with you and I said if it kept doing this every day for like 30 days we now live in an entirely different world and that's kind of now it didn't do that but it was that thought was terrifying to me it's like and it's like you if you already if you're already all in on bitcoin right and by the way I'm going to tell you a dirty secret I there are actually bitcoiners that aren't all in there are bitcoiners that aren't no there are some bitcoiners that have some of their wealth and in other places they're somewhat Diversified so if if you're all in on bitcoin and it's and people get rational and it goes to the moon good for you yeah but what about everybody else that you've been talking to and everyone you hope to help and it's too late for them and you've created uh uh you know you don't want one percent of the world to have everything and everyone else disenfranchised and now they're your friends and your family is looking for a handout from you yeah and and I already set aside 10 for them I figured that would happen and so ultimately like microstrategy bought Bitcoin at ten thousand you know and then we bought it at 15 and 20 and 25 and 30 and 40 and 50 and 60 000 and we'll keep buying I'm just totally fine with it going up the forty thousand fifty thousand sixty thousand I want to keep acquiring and I'm hoping that I have a hundred more Bitcoin buys between here and a million yeah because otherwise it's just like Okay Google just bought a hundred billion dollars worth of bitcoin and you're all priced out of the market and Google has it there you like it so you don't on one hand you know we lament that there aren't more on the other hand it's like too much speed you know and you're just gonna rip the Wings off the airplane and and the most morally sound politically sound economically sound way for this to evolve is for it to continue to grow at a Brisk Pace with some volatility back and forth and just let the message get out and give us time you know Satoshi said we don't want Wikileaks to think Bitcoin we're not ready for that yeah we're not ready for that degree of success yet give us a bit of time yeah Mike you said earlier and thank you for answering that because I've been curious for a long time I was like why is this man standing up and painting the largest Target on himself and you said it you were like well there's nobody else it's me and and first of all like thank you like that's extraordinary that you would make that risk but through that leadership I'd point out like that's all of us in our own personal lives like we see it you look around there's nobody else and it's not the answer to callow down it's to stand up and speak your truth passionately and the Greeks actually had a word for this it was called paracia it was truth it was truth speaking so powerfully in your courage that you actually put yourself at risk and that was what accessed Glory that you were willing to speak truth in such a way that you risked yourself so I've always been really curious about that and I really appreciate that because I also feel as Americans who you know led the last revolutionary cycle I think that we have an obligation to lead this revolutionary cycle as well and say hey there's a new form of property that actualizes law in a way where there cannot be a sovereign exception or a state of emergency where I can bludgeon you and take your money yeah I can still bludgeon you and I probably will in this situation but I'm not going to get your money it sounds very much like soul in the game but we talk a lot about skin in the game right having direct exposure to the consequences of your actions that's what maintains a healthy functioning Society healthy natural systems Etc but soul in the game is that taking downside risk on behalf of others you know investigative journalists um certain philosophers revolutionaries Etc and that's been very important for for human advancement there's got to be those pioneers um sticking their neck out there so well it's like the lowest time preference thing to put your soul in it because like that that's how we achieve mortality right is like people two thousand years ago look before like that dude was so badass that he did this thing that he lives on in human thought well look at how think about it no one will remember your name well look at how we think about like Socrates right you know I mean that the the standing up on principle for something like that right yeah sure no it's just the ultimate expression of that sort of principle and just to before you go on Eric like the reason why I think it's why what Michael's done is so inspirational important what we all do and we've all talked to a bunch of politicians over the course of the last week and for them I think they're just getting a taste for the aspirational component of this and that's what I've been talking to them all about because people get like separating money and stayed and yes everyone's over taxed and you need to be you know circumvent Capital controls the hardcore like necessity pragmatic reason why Bitcoin is valuable people are really starting to get that because everything's so messed up but what people are that aren't kind of in the space don't get and which I think all of us to varying degrees and a lot of other bitcoiners are helping to exhibit is that ultimately this is an aspirational movement this is a matter of Hope and this is why we discuss things like values and ethics and morality all the time in this stuff in this in this space because this has kind of freed us up to do that and we've begun to recognize back to our earlier point as people get more and more Sovereign these sorts of considerations about what we Elevate in terms of principles and how we can store our behavior and who we want to interact with and what the results of those things acting in accord with those principles are in the world is kind of the most important thing and what you look around when you see the space is you see people standing up courageously as you know on principle a hopeful vision for the future strong family strong body like in every area of the life the recapitulating it around a CL a greater Clarity around what seemingly is the most fruitful or productive principles that one might hold in their mind to orient their perspective in their life and I think it's in the actions of you know these sorts of conversations all of us in our lives to be emblematic of that you know to be the change to be cliche that actually will will cause a lot of people to perk up their ears and pay attention especially in against the backdrop of all this nihilism and depression and anxiety and diseases of Despair and that the degrading structure of society that's causing so much pain and angst to see something that's actually aspirational not just to be like it's a solution to a shitty problem and maybe it helps but it's like I can actually Ascend to become something greater than I thought I could because of this tool it's an upward spiral right yeah yeah and you're thinking about um being public with your Bitcoin like and you're right you did decrease the potency of your Bitcoin position by half by being so public and that makes sense and we've all done the same thing we're all super public but I think what we've actually done is it shows us I don't own Bitcoin it shows the belief and it shows a belief in Bitcoin because if you believe that Bitcoin is going to succeed to the degree I think we all believe it's going to succeed you are jumping to the final conclusion which is we're going to live in a world where everyone's gonna have Bitcoin so it will be just you know uh point of fact like that you assume that every single person you know who owns anything nice has a nice house or a yacht or whatever will have a Bitcoin position and we'll be a Bitcoin or just a meaningful life you know you don't need the yeah right like there'll be other ways to there are others you could have a schooner or yeah well I want to point out this like this upward spiral is extremely important because like it's ontological like it's fundamentally about the identity of who we are as beings and it's the transformation from like I just have to live in this terrible world where I can't make a difference to Rising ourselves to become to say we're going to strive and work together to become the new people through this new ethical assertion where we not only we say but we fundamentally demand no more am I going to tolerate living in a world where my property can be unilaterally extracted from me by the threat of violence and to me like that is such an extraordinary position in humanity that we haven't seen before we've been stuck in the oscillation between law creating violence and law constituting violence and there's never been an opportunity to stop it until now oh sorry no no please I have a just like general question for the group um because there's some point in my life in getting into Bitcoin I also became a father around the same time that I felt like my perspective shifted from being an observer of history or a student of History like reading books about all these great things great men had done uh that shifted into being a participant in history actually there's a book too uh I think it's the role of the individual in history and he talks about the Paradox of Freedom where freedom is like this openness to go out into the world and explore it and figure out what you're good at and you know pursue your passions and develop autonomy and self-mastery and all these things but there comes a point in all that freedom where you end up finding the one thing that you must do like you can't not do that one thing so there's a paradox because you you become kind of self-limiting enslaved in a way but it's a self-selected enslavement to this purpose or passion or whatever the thing is and I just wonder if you guys have had a similar experience I mean maybe less applicable to Mike you probably already recognize that you're a participant in history before Bitcoin but for some of us plebs it felt like I don't know if it was fatherhood and or Bitcoin but there was a transition that occurred at some point like to go from a passive Observer to an active participant and in fact me and Eric were talking about it and we were saying like man do we really have to show up to the Bitcoin conference again and like talk to people about Bitcoin again is aren't there like other guys that can do it like why is it us we just want to stay at home and I think that reluctance is you know on the hero's journey when I went to film School the way you showed the hero feeling reluctance is he's about to walk out the door to take the first step on the hero's journey and he turns and he can't walk out the door right and then eventually you must go through that door and because that's you're destined your fate is on the other side of that and uh you know I I think that probably you you have that same feeling as well don't you I mean that's the sense I get from uh from your interviews and things that you feel very called to this yeah I think the phrase religious conviction pops into my head and I and if we come back to the you know the essence of religious conviction there's a place called heaven and there is joy and there is no pain in heaven and there's a place for you and and I've gone ahead to make a place for you and that's such a powerful powerful idea that's the Cornerstone Christianity it's the Cornerstone of every religion I our most religion I imagine all successful religions we all want to go to heaven and um you know Satoshi started this chain reaction that that in essence created a place called cyberspace and there is a place called cyberspace and it is forming and in cyberspace you have rights you are recognized you have freedom you have sovereignty there is a place for you um you know uh Aurelia said soon you will have forgotten all and all will have forgotten you and as an adult you're forced to ask what is your legacy right and and clearly the answer throughout all of human history was a religious answer my legacy is to is to show people the way to a better place in this life or and the afterlife and I think um after Satoshi we we now have uh a cyberspace which doesn't replace Heaven it's orthogonal to it it's a different thing but um anything you do in your life whether it's you create a statue or create a house or create a company or write a book you have to assume that it could be crushed destroyed censored burned you know will your well your house Outlast you while you're painting out last you well your company outlasts you I don't I don't think that any company will be around in a thousand years or a hundred years even um if you're an individual and you're asking yourself what's your legacy right sometimes people's answer is a religious one sometimes their answer is a biological one my children and now you have an intellectual ideological Legacy and even a technical Legacy maybe maybe people don't remember me maybe they don't remember anything that I owned anything I ever did anything I ever said maybe my company disappears maybe every customer and every technical application my company disappears I I happen to believe that Bitcoin will Outlast us all I think the Bitcoin will last every company every government it'll Outlast the English language it'll Outlast our current mathematical protocols I think Bitcoin you know will go on for not hundreds of years but thousands of years or tens of thousands of years I think Bitcoin should reasonably migrate to the Stars should the human beings be fortunate enough to migrate to the Stars When The Human Experience ends right or the universe suffers from its heat death maybe bitcoin's gone nothing I can do about that when there's no more human beings when there's no more Universe I can't fix that but I do have you know two possible obser two observations one if you have any degree of influence on this Earth and you wish to leave anything in your in your wake that is categorically good I think putting all of your political energy your influence your intellectual energy or your monetary energy or your physical power behind Bitcoin to make it successful is a categorical good I wouldn't be here if people had not fought Wars and struggled for all of those years between 2000 January 3rd 2009 you know and whatever really uh late May June of 2020 when I started to get materially involved so I you know I relied upon the people that fought the block size Wars and I relied upon the cryptographers and I relied upon all the early Pro bitcoiners and you know they were promoting Bitcoin at ten dollars a coin and a hundred dollars a coin and a thousand dollars a coin and it wasn't clear whether it would be banned or attacked and and so the risk they took were much greater so I'm grateful to that to them They Carried the torch my view is I will carry the torch as one of all of us this big team here I will I will be one of the torch barriers as long as I can until I can't anymore someone else will take the torch and then we'll carry and of course hopefully hundreds of thousands and hundreds of millions and then billions of people will be carrying the torch by the time I am no longer carrying the torsion and I I think a very simple idea is to the extent you you strive for any ethical Legacy to upgrade the world or make it a better place make Bitcoin more successful and then uh and then a more selfish idea is um take all your economic energy and all your economic power and to the extent that you disagree with any other institution or distrust any other actor in the world you always have this one opportunity that Bitcoin promises you that no one else on Earth can offer you no charity will give you this no government will give you this no religion will give you this this one thing I'm going to offer you right now which is you can take the sum total of everything you accomplished economically in this life you can buy Bitcoin with it and then you can take your private keys with you to the Grave and you will have contributed your life energy into a network which is thermodynamically sound conservative should reasonably go on for thousands of years and you will have been contr you will have contributed your life force to everyone at every one of your comrades compatriots everyone that believe what you believe everyone that comes after you you will have made the ultimate Legacy bequest to your errors your errors will be it won't be you know your batshit crazy great grandkids you know who are derelict degens right it will be your intellectual errors that that appreciate the same Principle as you appreciate that are going to defend the network the same way you defended it to believe in Freedom sovereignty Liberty someone a thousand years from now will benefit from what you've done you did maybe they won't know your name but they'll benefit from it and it's not like we came there are people that came to America and they gave their entire lives in order to in order to create this country and hundreds of years later I was able to have a decent life and there's no doubt that my life is a lot better because someone gave their life either on the frontier they gave a life fighting a war to defend the country and I am grateful for all their sacrifice you get a chance to make a contribution of your life force the ultimate charitable contribution the ultimate ideological contribution you know to the most uncorruptible institution that we have yet to find and uh and uh who else is going to offer you that right if you're actually looking for a meaning you know you don't need to find a charity to give your money to and you don't need to bury all of your wealth in a pyramid that will be looted by gravediggers after your death you know so I actually think the I mean the ultimate humanitarian Act put all your money in Bitcoin die with your keys because you know for sure you have actually made a proretta distribution to the virtuous in a completely egalitarian ethical fashion with no Prejudice no corruption is that something you would consider doing haven't I just considered it well this is breaking news well like what we're talking about is so extraordinary because we recognize that there's this institution that's established that will probably last longer than anything throughout human history and I can't help but feel like this is truly the most extraordinary development that we've ever seen in human history because now we get to graciously bow to the Future ones that come a millennia after us and say I love you and respect you enough that we helped rescue us from the darkness of the insept authoritarianism that was fundamentally divorced from logic and truth and we return that to the world in such a way that we allowed to reserve a spot only for you people that will come long after us and say we love you and respect you enough that we'll do that yeah and I can't help but think earlier Mike you said uh you know like that bitcoin's just this tiny little Ember right now but it's because things are so absolutely dark that that tiny Ember shines so bright that those of us who are in this world of Darkness trying to seek meaning as you said earlier we see that light and we go there's meaning there and if I go towards that light and encourage others with me we can start to brighten the world in a way so that being stuck in this Plato's Cave that seemed inescapable there's now potentiality to have True Light so that we can make our way just to put a cherry on the top of what Michael just said because Michael one of the things I was going to ask you which I'm sure everyone you know thinks about at some point is when someone has as much optionality let's say as you've been able to acquire in your life you know where does the motivation come from to you know how does a hundred sat reward on microstrategy's forthcoming rewards platform motivates someone like you why are we all so just you know stacking stats is is regardless of our circumstance it still has that kind of pull and if I'm hearing you correctly your motivation to continue acquiring Bitcoin as much as you can is to enhance the size of the gift that you will leave Humanity or at least those people who value have a similar set of values as you have when you leave is it is that the motivation to be you know to never stop stacking if I had you know in heinlein's novels the richest man in the world develops space travel and spaceships and if you had a spaceship with a faster than light drive and there was a universe of of inhabitable planets out there I would be on the first one and and my and all my wealth you know here's the way it works the richest man on earth spends every dime he has in order to get off planet and he's going to be the first guy on that ship and he'd rather start with nothing you know in a new star system with a fresh start so that the human race can prosper right that's and and there's no question right I would be on that uh Bitcoin is a portal into cyberspace right and and to the extent that Bitcoin is successful cyberspace is successful I go to make a better place for you come later right I go I make a better place my family comes after that is the story of every immigrant in the history of the world someone leads people follow F to a better life so Bitcoin needs to be successful and so that cyberspace can come to life so that we all can go to a better place and there's a certain uh you know there's a certain meaning to knowing that you're going to give Humanity a better a better uh place to be whether it's off Planet off-world off solar system or whether it's in cyberspace but I think there's another particular I know there's a there's a certain satisfaction that comes at knowing should you put all your wealth on the blockchain and take your private keys with you no parasite will ever loot your wealth no parasite will ever loot your life's work right and that's a promise that Bitcoin can offer nobody else can offer right you know a certain joy in that like absolutely everything you did your entire life how do you feel when the person that you Mo you most dislike gets it all unfairly right and so if I said to you I give you an option you don't have to give it to them it doesn't I mean bring you a little bit of a smile to your face a huge smile and it's it's obviously very satoshi-esque you know we talk about all the time that how satoshi's actions have very much set the tone a type of ethical or moral tone for the the way people first you know perceive Bitcoin how they've used it how they've engaged it you know and that's why it's so interesting look back at his example and the last question I have on that particular topic is kind of touched on it already but from where do you think you in particular derive not so much on the second point because we all don't want the parasites to get at access our wealth and do bad things with it but on the first point like when you're saying that I'm thinking okay where does this ethical or moral motivation come from because we discussed earlier the the parasite class don't typically have that it's far more self-serving and as I hear you speak I'm thinking like well can it come from anywhere other than a love for Humanity effectively or a love for Humanity that are pursuing the same sort of values ideals and principles that you might be holding in your mind but the question is which we all often discuss and why philosophy and Theology and all this stuff has kind of become becoming more prominent in our discussions and in the space generally is where do you think that the the elevation of those principles or values ultimately comes from in you like why why is that a motivation it's a core Western value engineer a better world full of prosperity and Liberty is this a core value right I mean you see that and you know build the bridge build a ship build an airplane build a nuclear reactor build a spaceship build the internet build a computer engineer a better world end of an invent antibiotics upgrade the world and then find a way for people to realize their Pursuit of Happiness freedom Liberty empowerment right I think just I think that's in our nature in the western it's a value maybe it's a human value everywhere so I could point to hundreds and hundreds of philosophers right and hundreds you know all of the all of the literature so I think this is just consistent with the engineering ethos which is why do you want a car you know that flies on a reaction drive you know at the speed of sound and why do you want to give it to everybody why do you want to teleporter because because you can because life is better with it than without it engineer a better world sounds like a manifestation sort of of Agape which is like that Selfless Love and Christianity too is this your Marcus Aurelius said something like were designed to work together to cooperate with like the hands the left and right hand or the rows of upper and lower teeth like human beings are purpose built or purpose evolved to cooperate and it sounds like engineering Innovation these things are like the highest they're like the Apex of that Pursuit um and you know got Agape right you can experience it just being a parent just having a child like you have Selfless Love for this this creature you've created but there's other ways to express it there's and it just sounds like that to me when you say the engineering pursuit to upgrade the world it sounds like an Agape Drive I mean that that Agape in many ways I I think it's part of uh the response to the extraordinary pain that we're all in in this world that like we feel we live in this nihilistic world with you know you look out into the hellscape of all the stuff going on in addition to the narratives that are going on that is just constant gaslighting and so like I'm always so amazed in the Bitcoin Community when we meet people and they're like and I've heard this story dozens of times for guys like yeah everything is so messed up I was like crushingly depressed I was giving up on anything everything and then I like found Bitcoin and it gave me this reasoning and this hope and this ability to like go back into that nihilistic world and like not like nothing's actually different for me but like now I have a drive like stack to participate to like read philosophy to like really understand what's going on and so like for me what I'm watching is like this is the bloom of like the digital Enlightenment that Satoshi inspired and having watched all the this development over the last decade it's been amazing to watch it go from you know four people to eight to 16 to 32 to 64 to 120 and like on and on and now are the massive conventions I'm like wait we're just at a financial convention we didn't talk about the price the entire time and like I raft about the deepest philosophical subjects with some of the coolest and the most esoteric individuals that I've ever met and like [ __ ] the money man like the the culture is incredible and we're building something together that is going to fundamentally transform the world and inspire people in such a way that when people see us winning and not just winning but winning so [ __ ] hard that they're like [ __ ] this system entirely like let's go let's get out of here and like God damn it I just love all of you and that we get to do this together like it's so [ __ ] great you know on Michael's point about engineering you know this is I think and part of the motivation for us discussing things like philosophy esoteric stuff theology because you keep peeling back the onion and you wonder like where are those ethic and moral groundings and you could say like well I believe it's in engineering so that people have a better life but it's still you have you're confronted with matter and how you can increasingly manipulate matter as a knowledge base it you know grows but it's still about how do you engage that to what end basically it's a question I feel like ethics whether they've been explored in philosophy or theology or elsewhere notwithstanding both of those domains have a lot of baggage which is why I think we discuss them so much because we're trying to distill the actual insights from all those domains and apply it to bitcoin and I think part of that is because we're all coming to a recognition that we're we have more agency in the world as we've been discussing and that makes us more capable of creating and the process of creation is basically matter and your knowledge about matter and how you can manipulate it and meaning what are the things that you should try to conform matter to right and I would say satoshi's brilliant revolutionary Messianic Act is that he's taken matter and he's taken the fundamental ethics of meaning that we've capitulated over the last five thousand years and fuse them together in a manner that is potentially more beneficial than anything else that's preceded that in this new world that is cyberspace you know and how can that I mean how can you not praise that how can you not participate in that how can you not be inspired by that all of those things you know if I may just add some color on the term meaning because this was something we talked about a lot in preparing for the keynote we throw that word around a lot and I think we typically use it to invoke uh the meaning of significance or purpose or Worth right contained within questions like what is the meaning of life right what is the purpose of all of this what is the worth what is the significance of life um but there's two other meanings of meaning that I think are interesting too one is intention like the degree to which intention is reflected in action so if I you know accidentally bump into you I might say I didn't mean to do that or you might say she always means well you know that they they have good intentions they try to marry their intentions and their actions or I did something unintentionally and then there's the third meaning of the word meaning which is just orderly information so information in sequence uh you could think about this like as definitions right the definition of praxeology is the The Science Of Human Action right there's that specific sequence of words defines gives you the meaning of the word praxeology you could also think like a tracking number right it's a long alphanumeric string you change one letter that has no meaning but if it's perfectly sequenced then you can find out where your package is in the world so it's this is an on as an open mystery to me I don't understand it necessarily but it's interesting that Bitcoin is like perfect meaning in the sense of orderly information like it's an incontrovertible record of transactions and yet it's somehow contributing to this discovery of deeper meaning in our lives in terms of significance worth purpose Etc I don't know that's just very mysterious oh man so okay so what else in life where are we trying to like map this meaning and matter together to communicate something it's art and so like this is the reason that I insist that Satoshi Nakamoto is the greatest artist who ever lived and probably ever will live because the way that he brought together Bitcoin in such a way to present his artistry like fundamentally fulfills and realigns these ideas of giving meaning to it and through his perfect assembly of these things like we can follow the entire Concourse of human historicism to arrive at why Bitcoin was done this way why is it that it had to have cryptography why did he have to have his anonymity and it's all part of a greater tale of human existence that to me through his combining these things in such a perfect way he creates an art that tells a story of a Humanity that has suffered under the oscillations of violence forever and that he finally has a tool that shatters that relationship which is why I have that essay about Bitcoin is Messianic because this opens Humanity up from something that is that before Bitcoin was fundamentally impossible to now the possibility of a Humanity that reduces violence in this Wrath radicalized way becomes real and tangible and possible but only if we can Inspire that and give it to the world as intended you know this this brings me back to that you know saying we are all Satoshi right and again I think you in reality if you go deep enough perhaps you see the same patterns nestled within themselves you know all the way up and all the way down maybe you want to call that kind of a fractal thing the macrocosm is a microcosm whatever but I do think it's the case you know and you you might construe God that way too right you're taking whatever the essence of God real or just in the imaginal you know realm of ideas and you're trying to distill down what are the things that should be imbued into matter to Foster the most fruitful creation let's say and so of course I already said the Satoshi you know ostensibly did that in one of the most powerful ways ever in taking matter infusing it with these Eternal principles perhaps and we're seeing the result of that and I think that's what our task all is to do is to imitate Satoshi in that way and possibly you know the big man upstairs if that's your persuasion is to confront the material world the action that the matter that you have capacity to manipulate with your agency and Infuse it with those ethical ideas that you deem to be the most important and that is how you participate in to use somewhat dramatic and religious language that's you how how you participate in the creation of God basically because you're fusing those two Realms and you're help you're orienting your action by them and by doing that you are once again I think performing the same act that Satoshi played performed albeit perhaps in a less impactful way for you know us uh you know and that's why I say art is because it's about the inspiration that it leaves you with that gives you the divine revelation of the inspiration to go oh my God like this is the truth like the truth the capital truth and art is the only object that we have well an art is supposed to communicate that the artistry's Muse that is supposed to be that divine revelation hmm so what are we saying so essentially I'm saying that what Satoshi did is as the artist and the greatest artist ever it's a masterpiece it's yeah it is the greatest Masterpiece of economic Financial wealth District distribution and storage because of the way that he unveils that truth to us in such a way where we follow the whole Concourse of logic through our own proof of work to go like this is it this is that moment I think that's the same moment that we all have where we lost our mind we're like like bitcoin's it you know you know one of the Michael's question for you because I already know it's true for all of us is that trying to understand Bitcoin trying to conceptualize it trying to understand the full implications how it works all that kind of stuff necessarily causes you to reach out into all your existing domains and knowledge and pursue even New Horizons of knowledge to you know facilitate that Enterprise and one it's incredibly intellectually stimulating and I think we've all been kind of invigorated intellectually by that Pursuit but it also just it kind of lights up the world because it makes all that knowledge relevant perhaps for the first time because as we're saying I don't know who said it before but you feel it was I think it was you rob you didn't feel like a participant in history you're just kind of an observer and I think this is part of like the world Awakening because of the relevance of this thing that you're now trying to understand and do your best to engage in body use as a tool has made because of its profoundness has made so much of the other information latent in the world that you might use relevant to bring to bear on that understanding the actions that might follow from it so I know you've always been a very you know studious person uh interested in history and technology and all that of stuff has your foray into Bitcoin your attempts to understand it and leverage it has that cause that type of intellectual invigoration in you and if so what are some domains whether they be philosophy or theology or whatever else has been the more pronounced kind of uh focus in that invigoration well I think um you find that when you go back and read the books of your teenage years with some wisdom you you interpret them differently and when you watch the movies of your teenage years when you've got some maturity you interpret them differently and my observation with Bitcoin is before Robert asked me on his show what is money I had never questioned what is money and then we explored it together for many many hours and and when I finish that expiration my conclusion was money is economic energy and uh and there has never been a perfect vessel for the transfer a perfect asset for the transference of money in the history of humanity therefore every other academic before Bitcoin never understood what money was not really because at best uh all they could do was conceptualize a theoretical a theoretical money and no one in the history of the world ever actually implemented a monetary system with it with a proper money they were always defective and because they were always defective whether they're seashells or glass beads or the like that meant that all economics was in essence mysticism and uh and art and politics but none of it was engineering you could you could never engineer a proper economic system until you had a proper understanding of money but even if I had a if I had a proper understanding of money like it's like asking the question what is steel um four thousand years ago and then you say well I conceptualize a mineral that's so hard that it won't deflect even if I pile up a hundred story building I conceptualize that and you say I can't imagine that I can imagine as magic but now you build one and of course no one could ever build a skyscraper in 2000 BC the closest thing to a skyscraper in 2000 BC looks like a pyramid right because you can you might pause it but you didn't have it so there was no construction civil engineering industry because we'd never seen a proper material to build with so before Bitcoin I didn't know what money was therefore I didn't really understand economics and therefore I was never I was never encouraged to think deeply about banking about politics about Securities theory about Commodities theory about investment theory about wealth about you know about uh the relationship of wealth to politics to culture you didn't really have a practical application of religion didn't really think much about politics and uh and political parties and you know what is politics other than it's uh the Practical group application of ideology right and uh and after Bitcoin what happens in Rapid succession is you say Okay Bitcoin what is money what is a commodity what is you know you invent you know two perfect ideas one is perfect money and the second is perfect scarcity or scarcity and that leads to property and then from from there you realize you know and monetizing any security is an is an imperfect idea it's defective because there's always counterparty risk and there's always other risks and then you realize that all your Commodities are defective money because they're not scarcities and a commodity is inflationary asset and scarcity is not an inflationary asset and then what happens next is you realize that most economics is pseudoscience right it's all pretty much just uh people you know gaslighting each other and then you realize that there's a school that's missing in every University and it's the school of monetary engineering you know or even cyber engineering and these uh you know the school of Aeronautical Engineering didn't exist before the Wright brothers why would it you know nautical engineering there would be no school of civil engineering or there wouldn't be a very big one if we didn't have steel and glass and you know civil engineering with stone work is you know yeah it existed but you don't get so far it's much much simpler and so I would say that I mean the impact of Bitcoin was it caused me to rethink politics you know we talked about charity every charity is defective right I said how do you avoid having parasites loot your legacy well before Bitcoin the answer is you don't write the entire history of Charities like I see people today they go on Twitter and they complain about how Rockefeller wrecked the world okay well and then they say because Rockefeller was against this and that and the other thing well the truth is Rockefeller had a lot of money left at the charity and three generations after Rockefeller is gone and he's dead and he's buried someone that's a bureaucrat that took over is redirected some money that he left to do something which may or may not be ethical Rockefeller didn't do it right if Rockefeller you know had lived today Rockefeller would be buying Bitcoin as a treasury asset you can you can be sure Rock You Know Rockefeller is very interested in I think a lot of virtuous things and in fact another great example people say Rockefeller gave us all this medical industrial complex and all that you know and all the over doctoring and all the all the corrupt medical programs wrong the truth of the matter is Rockefeller didn't didn't believe in most medicine he believed in homeopathic medicine he didn't believe in prescription drugs he didn't believe in surgeries he didn't smoke he didn't drink he didn't trust doctors and he lived to be 99 and three quarters and all the doctors that he endowed with all of the billions to create all the medical schools and all the medical centers and engage in all the iatrogenic treatments and all the drugs you don't need and on the surgery you don't need they all died before him much earlier ages right and and but yet a hundred years later people say well Rockefeller made did this to us he did if he was here alive today he would say the opposite of what 99 of the people think he said and so bringing it back to bitcoin Bitcoin causes you to rethink charity you rethink religion you rethink politics you rethink economics you rethink investment Theory then the entire money manager market right if you got rid of every mutual fund and every money manager and every news organization that covers every one of those financial interests instruments and you just took your money bought Bitcoin right you would get a better result and you would basically dematerialize the entire thing so I never really thought about you know how important it was to obsess over financial news every minute of the day and Bitcoin suggests that maybe is not as important as you thought it was and so I I I would say you know Bitcoin is is pretty profound because it in essence introduces the entire cybernetic theory of truth right you know a cybernetic theory that transcends all of our Arts all of our Sciences all of our politics and you know when Robert Highland he has his book tunnel in the sky and they figure out how to open a star gate and to start you know if you look right there and you said okay there's a portal right there I'm going to open it up and it punches through 500 light years to a g-type Planet you know and you can go live there and it's a new Earth and it's unspoiled it's Undiscovered Country and it's not corrupted you know maybe there's a few creatures living in the jungle you can clear some but start again and if I change the coordinates it'll go 15 000 light years in the other direction and there's another beautiful planet a bit more water on it and we'll go 25 000 light years in that direction and there's a third beautiful planet that one's a little a little bit warmer and you go this way there's a fourth beautiful planet there's a lot of sanded sand worms on it they produce something called spice I don't know whatever it must flow right and now instead of being stuck on this Earth You know with the legacy of all of our thousands of years of our petty political fights and religious fights and every other authoritarian flight fight you can go through that portal and now I invite you to consider how does that impact all of your values and all of your hopes and all of your aspirations and everything you've been taught and everything you were led to believe that you had to live with and it is is it at all going to change the way you live the rest of your life is it fair to say to put a Capstone on that that Bitcoin represents a type of intellectual and even dare I say Spiritual Awakening for you yeah basically invites you to rethink everything you've learned in your entire life Satoshi opened a portal into cyberspace and when you go through it potentially in fact when you go through it it offers the promise that you can remake and perfect your property rights your political rights your intellectual you know self you know there's just like not your keys not your coin and you talked about not your keys and I'm saying not your keys not yourself you know and and uh and so I guess the portal invites you to reimagine yourself and reimagine everything you ever learned and once your eyes are opened you see it all differently and you you interpret all of human history differently right the reason I enjoy reading Murray rothbard is he's telling me a thousand stories of The Human Condition of struggle and what people wanted and how they achieved it partially until they had it taken away from them and how they reacted and how they then how then they struck out again to re-achieve it and it's the history of the world is the flickering of the flame of Liberty and hope and aspiration and virtue continually being stomped on by a parasite snuffed out someone sneaks away the little flame to another jurisdiction they restart the flame they grow again until it collapses under its own weight of corruption and chaos and entropy and then the flame keeps flickering and it's running from place to place until Satoshi lit a flame in cyberspace he started a fire in cyberspace and that fire was just a little flicker 10 15 years 14 years ago and now it's a decent sized fire and and there's no reason to think it wouldn't burn for thousands of years across the universe and you were in and that is the fire of freedom and truth and Justice and virtue right and and how can that not cause you to reinterpret The Human Condition and everything that you believe to be true before the Advent of Bitcoin hey [ __ ] men yeah yeah uh gentlemen any last words before we bring this one home I'm just grateful for the fellowship guys I you know life has been um quite the adventure but Bitcoin has definitely brought a lot of meaning so it's nice to have met you all through Bitcoin but likewise and I would also say not only did Satoshi open that portal in the space for us but he opened a new portal both into our hearts entering into our mind for us to explore the same idea of what does it mean for the soul of man to have that and what does it mean for the an elective man to have that and to finally be dignified with what the truth can truly deliver to man yeah I think for me I'd just say uh I've been here eight and a half years now and you know the same people who told me Bitcoin would never go from 200 to 50 000 or now telling me it'll never go from fifty thousand to a million and uh they're not anymore right than they were eight years ago so I'm still feeling incredibly bullish on where we're headed and it's all happening you know more or less exactly how we thought it would happen when when the greatest engineer in the human race creates that Stargate and they open that portal to the universe what defines us all is who's going to choose to go through the gate and Satoshi opened a gate into cyberspace and what defines us all is will you go through the gate yeah well I think we've all answered resoundingly for ourselves and Michael uh well first of all I love all you guys and you guys I love doing this stuff and it's an extreme privilege to be able to do it Michael fits right in with the huddlehead right yeah yeah but also we've said thank you for what you've done you know regarding Bitcoin but also just thanks for the hospitality and bringing so many people together so we can meet each other you know develop relationships cross-pollinate ideas all that kind of stuff you've been tremendously hospitable generous and uh appreciate the time again today Chateau sailor Is Amazing by the way yeah uh an awesome time was had by all yes absolutely

Channel: Portal Orange

Views: 76,191

Keywords: Michael Saylor, Portal Orange, Satoshi, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Renaissance

Id: J38-PQ6X8HI

Length: 136min 42sec (8202 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 12 2023