Larry Lepard (35:55)
Yeah, right. Well, in all technology. And that's all of it. Yeah, that's the really amazing thing is that the technology world has actually shown us how great deflation is and how wonderful deflation could be. I mean, I think about, you know, I mean, I remember, I remember as an example, you know, buying my first, you know, stereo or buying my first Sony Walkman and how much it cost and how shitty it was. Do you know what I mean? And now, you know, you can get the same thing for 20 bucks. I mean, it's just. And computers, I mean, all of it. And so, given all these technical developments, we all should be living like kings. I mean, we really should. I mean, you know, the world is so much better as a place. I mean, that's the one thing today that is better than the 70s. I'm talking to you, we're in different parts of the country. It's real time. It's virtually free. I mean, we both pay for an Internet subscription. But it's modest. You know, I can call you anywhere in the world, real time. I mean, hell, I was in college and I had to, I had 10 minutes on every weekend when I could afford to call, make a long distance call to my parents to tell them I was alive and doing okay and tell them what my grades were. You know, I mean, that's really the way it was. And so, you know, there's so many things that have gone right in the world. And the technology, and by the way, it's that technology that's going to save us. Because the microprocessor led to the distribution of information, led to the Internet, led to the breaking down of the sclerotic big organizations, and has now led to Bitcoin. Really. Because, you know, without technology and the microprocessor and, you know, distributed networks and everything else, you know, bitcoin sound money in a digital form would not exist. And so, you know, thankfully, technology is going to save us. But you know, and it's a good, it's a beacon of where we need to be going, you know, as a society. And just the notion that we have to have this, you know, asset based debt to grow is just, it's so flawed and, and it's, you know, how did it get that way, right? How do we ever get to a place where we had 12 people setting the cost of money? You know, it's, it's barbaric, right? It should be the free market, should be the balance of interest or balance of savings against the need for capital. Set the interest rate, right? Free market pricing. But we got there because we had two parties in the country that were very, very interested in not having that system. One of them was the financiers and the banks and wealthy people. And the other was the government. And so what happened is they kind of figured out a way to make a deal between themselves where they would both benefit and the average person would suffer inflation. And so it started with the Fed in 1913. They immediately broke their charter and, and helped finance World War I. So the government got its war paid for and you know, the Fed and the banks made a ton of money on war profiteering. And the effect of World War I was the price of everything doubled, right? So we paid for World War I. We just didn't pay for it through taxation. They paid for it by, you know, the price level went up. 100%. So, and. And that, you know, wash, rinse, repeat that story since 1916 to present with a lot of interim bumps and developments, probably the biggest of which, which I heavily talk about in the book, was abandoning gold in 1971. I mean, pre bitcoin, gold was sound money. It was your only choice. It was your soundest choice. And obviously bitcoin is sound money too. It's digital sound money. It's in so many ways superior to gold. But, you know, I always remind bitcoin people, you got to remember what got us here, you know, and you got to remember how good things were on the gold standard. They weren't perfect, but they were better than they were on a fiat standard. And. Yep. And when we got off the gold standard, that started the slide. And of course, it's that slide that then led Satoshi to develop bitcoin, because as we know, in block one, he said, you know, chancellor on the brink. And, you know, and he. In a lot of his writings, he talked about how the, you know, the abuse of the money printing privilege was a big reason for the invention of bitcoin because central banks will always and have always abused that privilege. And the thing I think is so unique and interesting about bitcoin, I think it makes it very hard for most people to understand, is this is the first form of money. And this is why Jesse Meyer, who I love, says this is once in a millennium or once in a species kind of event. Is every form of money used by mankind. And we've used tons of things. We use beads and salt and grain and livestock. There are lots of forms of money, yap, stones, whatever. But every one of them had some, you know, you could create more of it. There was a. There was an additional supply somehow available. And we all know that any commodity like gold or oil or anything else, the price goes high enough, we'll find more of it, because somebody will be rewarded to do so. Here you are with bitcoin, okay, so turn that on its head. And this is why it's going up forever. Laura, turn that on its head. Turn that on its head. We actually have a form of money with a fixed supply. And it's like, boom. I mean, just mind blown. That just did not exist. So forget all your, you know, this is why sales is. Your models are broken. Forget all your models. Forget the past. Try to think outside the box and ask yourself, you know, if something really like that changed, it's that significant, what are all the implications? I mean, it would be similar to, you know, The Wright brothers fly. I mean, did anyone see that we'd go to the moon or that we'd have a conquered, that could go across the, you know, the ocean in three hours or all the kinds of stuff that would happen as a result, and that's the same kind of a thing. Or, or, you know, Berners Lee and, and you know, TCPIP and the Internet. Right. Did anyone foresee in those early days of linking computers together that you and I would be speaking real time, halfway around the country and able to broadcast it out to millions, you know, for free? I mean, for essentially, essentially for. I mean, it's like, wow, so, so we now have a form of money that is fixed in supply. It solves mankind's largest running issue, which is monetary debasement. It killed the Romans and it's killed hundreds of societies since then. And so. But we fixed it. Right now the entire world doesn't know that we fixed it. And actually that's the opportunity because, you know, it's one of these first mover advantage kinds of things. I mean, you can wait until everybody knows about it and then it'll be pretty fairly priced and it won't have nearly the kind of the growth potential versus other currencies that it now has. But right now, as we all know, there's $900 billion trillion dollars of assets and $2 trillion of Bitcoin. And this is a superior asset. And guess what? Some of that 900 is coming for the two. And just for comparison, gold is 20 trillion, you know, of value. So Bitcoin's two. So just if bitcoin were to equal gold in market value size, we'd be at a million dollars a coin, which I actually fully, and I'm sure you agree with me, I fully expect in the early 2000 and 30s we'll see that. And then sometime in the 2000 40s or 50s, we're going to see Tana coin. And so, you know, this is how Saylor gets to his going, it's going up forever, Laura. And I agree with him. And, and it's just, it comes back to that basic understanding that a monetary unit of fixed supply did not exist before Bitcoin. That's the key. That's the insight I think people need to get their heads around. And once you accept that and say to yourself, okay, given that, what does that mean in terms of the difference? Then, you know, you can kind of start to say, all right, well, I got to think differently about this stuff. I mean, in the book I talked about How I really effed up. I missed investing in Amazon, I missed investing in Google, I missed investing in a lot of the things. I invested in the Internet early on, made a lot of money. But some of the big Internet apps, I missed them because when I look at them, they were just too damn expensive. And I thought, I can't, you know, because I had the old investment model, I was like, well, you got to price earnings and price to revenue and price to book value. And you know, all this, you know all this stuff I've been taught, right? And I didn't think that, no, this is really actually a Metcalfe's Law deal where these things grow at the square of the value of the number of users. And so, you know, although they seem pricey, guess what, they're about to get more pricey. And they just kept growing. And so, you know, the Internet took over the world. Amazon took over the world, Facebook took over the world, Google took over the world. And, and these, these networking businesses became a new model because there had never been a World Wide Web kind of network before they existed. And Saylor was brilliant enough to see that that's how he made a lot of his money before he actually got into Microstrategy. I mean, he owned enormous pieces of Apple and, and all these other companies that he could see were going to benefit from that trend, Google, etc, And I missed it. I mean, I thought they were too expensive. I didn't buy them. But guess what? I'm not going to make that mistake again because that, it's deja vu to me. That exact same model is going into this monetary network called Bitcoin. And the exact same thing is going to happen. You know, we're at under 10% of the world uses it, or really much, much smaller than 10% of the total world. But under 10% of the Western world or developed world uses it today. But that's going to go to 90% in my view. And you know, Apollo and my kids and your. And their kids are going to be. Things are going to be priced in satoshis and the dollar is going to be something you look at in a museum. You know, that's, that's gonna, that's gonna be the old currency that they used back when we were, you know, back when, before we, before we realized that Keynes was a fraud. So, you know, it's, it's a, it's a bright future coming. And I'm so excited about all that. And that's why I'm so crazy about all this fitness Shit. Because I want to be around to see as much of it as I can. Yeah, yeah.