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The "What is Money?" Show
WiM001 - The Saylor Series | Episode 1 | The Rise of Man through The Stone and Iron Ages
02:15:22
Michael Saylor joins me to discuss anthropology, energy, and technology from first principles as we build an intellectual foundation for grasping the significance of Bitcoin in the grand arc of history.
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- [00:03]
Michael Saylor
Technologies that are dominating today. They're dominating because they're able to deliver force faster, harder, stronger, smarter. So if we ask the question, what is money? Money is the highest form of energy that human beings can channel. Bitcoin is channeling human ingenuity into making it better. And every commodity is channeling human energy into making it worse. The lowbrow, or the historic colloquial term is hodl, right, hold on for dear life or just hodl or save, whatever. And the highbrow term would be adopt as a treasury reserve asset.
- [01:10]
Robert Breedlove
Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode one of the what is Money? Show. I'm your host, Robert Breedlove. And our purpose in this show in general is the pursuit of truth. We're going to explore many topics in depth and many of them will take us down the proverbial Bitcoin rabbit hole by pursuing what I call is the rabbit. And the rabbit is that question, that all important question, what is money? And this question is a seemingly inexhaustible generator of answers that have continuously reshaped my perspectives on the world. And I think they will for you as well. And our first episode is part of a long series with Michael Saylor, who is the CEO of MicroStrategy. Michael is the latest and arguably the greatest proponent of Bitcoin and an ally for the space in its battle for truth and freedom in the world. And Michael is, as I said, he's the leader of MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy is a NASDAQ listed business intelligence firm. So Michael has very deep experience in the fields of technology, network architecture, things like this. And in fact, he was actually educated in the domain of scientific paradigm shifts and the impact of technology on civilization. And 10 years ago, Michael actually wrote a book called the Mobile Wave that depicted many of the impacts that he saw, say, fang stocks would have on the world. So Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, he had laid out a case, an investment case largely for these companies and their dominance in the global marketplace. And clearly over the past 10 years, as we sit down in 2020, those stocks have been standout performers and have become in many ways the new dominant monopolies in the world today. So Michael has a very deep understanding of these topics that I think actually predisposed him to gaining a rapid understanding of Bitcoin. And as you'll see, or as you may have heard in other interviews, he really entered the bitcoin space in 2020 and got very deep into the rabbit hole very quickly in the wake of the COVID global lockdown situation. So Michael's a very intelligent guy, very high energy, very hard working, and I think his acceleration into the bitcoin rabbit hole also demonstrates that a lot of this trail has been blazed before him. So a lot of bitcoin maximalists have laid the foundation for others to gain a more rapid and clear understanding of the impact of bitcoin in the wake of that. As you all probably know, but you may have not heard, Michaels firm Microstrategy actually named bitcoin as its primary treasury reserve asset. They initially invested $425 million into Bitcoin. And then Michael personally publicly disclosed that he holds about 17,000 bitcoin himself. So he's got a lot of skin in the game, to say the least. And I think you'll see why as we go through some of this. So in this, what we're calling the Saylor series, we're going to start from the first principles of energy, of anthropology, of technology, and really build a solid foundation for gaining a deep understanding of bitcoin potential impact on the world. And Michael and I, to craft this series, we iterated on a discussion framework and we finally arrived at his overarching thesis, which he was kind enough to lay out in a very sophisticated form. And he goes very deep on the topics we've laid out here, which starts kind of very early, like Stone age. And we built all the way into modernity. So this is a long, long narrative arc, but super fascinating, very interesting stuff. And clearly it takes us some time to build up to bitcoin, but the journey itself, it's purposeful and it's well worth it. So we've divided the content itself into timestamped chapters and subchapters. We've chopped it into a bunch of episodes. Each episode is comprised of chapters, and then to those chapters there are sub chapters. We'll have timestamps available both in the video bar and in the description to the video. And the early episodes will include a lot of Michael talking, so a lot of him kind of speaking solo about his bedrock thesis on energy and anthropology and technology, things like this. And then as we build into modernity, into bitcoin, it will become much more of a dialogue and conversation as we go back and forth about bitcoin and things of that nature. So I realize this is really long form content, but I assure you, and promise you, you're going to find it deeply meaningful. I myself found the feeling of chills at times. You know, there were various epiphanies I had going through this, which I'll articulate in some of the outros to the episodes. But this is dynamite content, and I think it's a great view into the mind of Michael Saylor, and it makes a very powerful case for Bitcoin and how much it's going to reshape the world. So I promise you that you'll find, despite the time it may take you, you're going to find this extremely intellectually satisfying, perhaps even philosophically satisfying. We go really deep on a lot of topics, so hope you, hope you enjoy it. And, you know, I firmly believe the insights that come out of this will actually reshape your worldview. So if this is the kind of content you're interested in and you're really interested at going deep and getting to truth, I think you're in the right place today. So with that, let's jump into episode one of the Saylor series here on the what Is Money Show.
- [07:33]
Unknown
Michael Saylor, thank you for joining me.
- [07:36]
Michael Saylor
Happy to be here, Robert, thanks for inviting me.
- [07:40]
Unknown
So, for a man that runs a company named MicroStrategy, you may have just executed the most brilliant macroeconomic strategy there has ever been. How does it feel?
- [07:53]
Michael Saylor
It's been a busy quarter. I would say really busy. It's been a busy year. You know, January 1st of this year, the year started out one way and then it became something altogether different in March, and it became something altogether different again by June. And now we're in September. And I, you know, I look back on it and certainly there's a lot of things I didn't expect. And I joke with people, you know, if I'd gotten what I wanted, I wouldn't have gotten what I needed. I wouldn't have been nearly as successful if at any point in time I got what I wanted. I'm sure this is not what I wanted when I started the year. And for a while I thought it wasn't terribly a good thing. But now, as we move toward the end of the year, you know, I see the silver lining here and I'm glad these things happened. Which is, which is fascinating.
- [09:06]
Unknown
Yeah. So it sounds like the world in a lot of ways got a wake up call this year. Right. On a lot of different levels. And for you particularly, it was the melting ice you were sitting on that maybe started to melt a little bit faster.
- [09:22]
Michael Saylor
Yeah. You know, there's two quotes from Lenin's Error. There's Trotsky's quote, you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. And this year we launched one war on Covid and another war on currency. And so we were caught up in kind of two wars in two dimensions. And then there's Lennon's quote, there are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen. This was that year. In both of those ways, I'm grateful that our company is an enterprise software company. Our value proposition is we ship software to large enterprises to help them think better. And the value proposition is intact, if not even improved by all of the changes this year. And our cost structure and our operational systems, the way we operate were dramatically impacted and we had to adjust. But I would say this was the year that digital transformation went from being a bromide or dalliance to be in something that you really had to internalize. This was the year that digital transformation really did transform you, the core of your being. I mean, it transformed my ideas about money. It transformed my ideas about sales, marketing and services. It transformed my ideas about what product offering we should deliver to the market. It transformed my ideas about the marketplace and the future in general. And it's been thrown around as a buzzword for a decade, maybe for two or three decades, but this is the year when you kind of got it viscerally in your bones if you had been dragging your feet the least amount.
- [11:34]
Unknown
Yeah, I think it's a great point there. And as if the world wasn't changing quickly enough, as we progress further into this digital age, it's as if Covid was just a massive accelerant on the entire process. Not only are things transforming much more quickly now, moving to digital much more quickly, but are likely to change even more quickly, exponentially, so into the future.
- [12:02]
Robert Breedlove
You know, with that.
- [12:03]
Unknown
The theme of this conversation today is deep conversations. And I know you're a deep thinker, and I've really appreciated the media work you've been doing and the voice you've brought to the bitcoin community. And I'd like to jump in as kind of like first principles. Look at history and what got us to today, what got us to this digital age that's changing so quickly, and where do we see it going? And I know you've thought deeply about this and, you know, maybe we could start just at the beginning, so to speak, with historic technology.
- [12:43]
Michael Saylor
Okay, well, I mean, the phrase that runs through my head is there's never been such a thing as a fair fight. Humans have been struggling for millions of years, right, in order to rise first to become the, you know, the apex predator in nature. But if you look at our struggle against nature, there's never Such thing as a fair fight. I remember seeing eagles fly along a mountainside. It'll home in on a goat. Or it focuses on a baby goat, not the. Not the parent goat, catches it from behind, grabs its foot and drags it off a cliff and then backs off and waits while the goat goes bang, bang, bang and hits rocks every 50ft and is smashed to death 500ft below where the eagle circles down, lands on the goat, eats it leisurely. Nothing fair about it. You know, you feel sorry for the goat and then you realize this is not a human being, this is nature. It's not fair. Then you see lions. And it's not like one lion chases down one gazelle. It's eight lions chase 67 gazelle into a channel with three other lines waiting. And one gazelle is forced to take the right side because it gets crowded out by the other 16 gazelle. And that one, Bam, is dead for no other reason other than it just happened to be on the right side of the herd. And there's nothing fair about it. You know, nature's not fair. And when you think about the plight of man, the amazing thing is we actually evolved, right, to be the apex creature on this planet because a single individual on their own has almost no chance. There's that scene in Jurassic park and there's the bully and he just is mean to the little, whatever, the little dinosaur creature, like some kind of small raptor and it's like the size of a little dog and he kind of kicks it around and he's a bully and a sadist. And then there's a point where he gets trapped in the park and he's walking and he sees that little creature and it nips at his legs and he kicks it and then he turns around and he sees it's got a friend. And there's two of them. And he looks around again and there's four of them. And then they jump on him and he knocks him off. And then there's 16 of them. And then there's this overarch and then they all jump on him and he fights them off and he gets up and he runs. And now there's 32 of them. And then you, you know the human being, right, the modern American that lives in their world of shopping centers and cars and air conditioned houses and locked doors and 911 and policemen they can call and a feeling of safety. And they look at nature through a zoo, right? And they look through the bars and that's nature. Or it's in paintings and it's all just so romantic, right? They don't have this view of nature, the view when there's 64 of those things and the horrifying realization that that guy is as sure as dead. He's dead man walking. He's gonna die. There's not a damn thing he can do. It doesn't matter if he has a bazooka, it doesn't matter if he has a machine gun. It doesn't matter. He's going to die. At some point in the next 48 hours, he's going to fall asleep and they're going to eat him. And that's the human condition. So when you think about that 3 million years ago, and your first question is, how do we even make it here? It's pretty obvious that in that circumstance, if you're alone, you're dead. You're going to have to have someone to guard your back. And, you know, my heart goes out to the, you know, the. Adam and Eve right, wherever they were. You needed 2, 3, 4, you needed a tribe. You needed someone to watch. Because when you fall asleep, something is going to eat you. Watch a pack of wolves hunt. The one that kills you isn't attacking from the front. You're not going to get to fight it off. It's going to be an asymmetric attack from the rear while you're asleep. And so the importance of human beings using their brains and thinking is incredibly important. And you start to figure out, how do we survive in a hostile universe? We have to figure out how we can get harder, smarter, faster, and stronger. And that takes us to the beginning of man. So if I look back at Stone Age technology and you ask, how do we even emerge from this incredible, terrifying scrum? And there's just key technologies that you decide you kind of like in a hurry. One of them is fire, one of them is missiles, one of them is hydraulics. And so there's a lot more we could talk about. But if we start with fire, fire is like the prime energy network of the human race. It all started for us with channeling energy. And when you start a fire, and fire is a chain reaction, right, where we're releasing the latent energy in matter, we're converting matter into energy, right, which.
- [18:52]
Unknown
Is like stored sunlight. We're releasing stores.
- [18:56]
Michael Saylor
Yeah, stored sunlight. You're that human being, and you want to rise above the tigers and the packs of wolves and the other creatures and the snakes, the jungle. How are you going to do that? You're going to have to tap into and channel Energy. And that's why Prometheus has such a incredible mythic place. Prometheus is to satoshi as fire is to bitcoin. Bitcoin's a fire. It's a fire in cyberspace. And most people don't realize it, but it has its antecedents. And fire came along first. And when you think about what it means, and most people, they don't necessarily think very hard about it. You always had it. If you're an individual, what can you do with fire? Well, you can start by starting a fire so you don't freeze to death. That's pretty useful. The fire will scare away the animal. So I start the fire. I can sleep around it and I cannot freeze. I can also put it around my camp and then maybe something that other, like a snake that would have slithered in and eaten me will go away. I can scare away insects and smoke away insects with it. That's useful. I can hunt with it. I can start a fire and I can drive the prey away from the fire. You know, and if I'm smart, I drive the prey from the fire off the cliff. I wait for them to trip. I go to the bottom of the cliff, I find one that broke its neck. You ever get in a fight with a horse or a fight with hippopotamus or an elephant, it's not going to end well. This idea of heroic hand to hand combat is a great idea in the movies, it's an awful idea in reality. And if you went back a million years, you would find that your great, great, great, great, great, whatever grandparent thought you're pretty freaking stupid to fight hand on hand with anything or anyone. So I hunt with it, I cook with it. There's a, you know, there's a lot of biologists that make, and the paleo theorists that make a very compelling argument that, that human anatomy actually evolved because we mastered fire. And when you're cooking something, you're pre digesting it. And if you pre digest something, not only do you increase the scope of the foods that you can consume, you also accelerate and you increase the efficiency with which you convert that food into calories maybe by a factor of 10 to 1 or 20 to 1. And if you can actually metabolize the food 10 times more efficiently, your digestive tract shortens and the energy that your body expends in order to digest food can be redirected probably to your brain. Right. Animals don't cook food have small brains. Animals that a human being can cook food can have a very short Digestive tract can eat anything. We're omnivores, we can go anywhere. We can metabolize calories that are very efficient. We can eat only takes us 10 or 15 minutes a day to get all the calories we need. There are animals have to graze all day to get the calories they need. So fire is critical for that. It's critical for seeing. Right. You channel your fire and you can light up a cave, you can light up a camp, you can light up a tent, you can line up any area. And with the seeing comes communicating. You ever travel through the ancient world? You see, they'd have all these watchtowers. The Romans built watchtowers. You put a fire in the tower, you can see it from miles and miles away. You create a signal system. A certain presumptive arrogance or ignorance amongst modern men. We think that kind of everything worth doing was done in the past 2,000 years or 3,000 years. I kind of figure 100,000 years ago people were doing all this stuff. We might not have the writings of it, but they were pretty smart. So I'm going to use the fire for all those things and eventually for communicating. But once I figure that out, I can use it for hardening, Right. I can cook things. Right. I could harden the tip of a spear. Right. I can use it to work metals. And eventually we used it to work metals. And that ushered us into, you know, from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, you know, fire is intrinsic to manufacturing processes, all sorts of manufacturing processes. And of course, I give you a thousand acres of forest. Robert, how are you going to clear it?
- [24:04]
Unknown
Sounds like fire would be the easiest way.
- [24:07]
Michael Saylor
Tractor. In 100,000 BC fire, you're going to burn it.
- [24:12]
Unknown
Yeah, yeah.
- [24:13]
Michael Saylor
Right. So I mean, every, you know, everybody talks about or I see these, these discussions. Oh, yeah, well, paleo man, they're all hunter gatherers and they're just like walking around chasing after things that are running away from them. I doubt it.
- [24:28]
Unknown
Yeah.
- [24:29]
Michael Saylor
Like if I dropped you into 100,000 BC, I don't think you would unsolo chase after a bunch of stuff with four legs. I think you would start by finding a canyon and start a fire on one end and dig a trench on the other end and let something, a mastodon trip on it and break its neck.
- [24:52]
Unknown
It's sort of life's way to take the most energy efficient strategy. Right. That's why the eagle would drop the goat off the cliff and let gravity do its work. Right. Instead of trying to fight it Out. And it's interesting that you bring up fire, and it's almost as if we were using it to energize our strategies in the world, right? And I think, as you put it earlier, channeling energy through our intellect. And I think the one piece that maybe we didn't hit on as much is the intellect itself develops through trade and interaction, right? That's how we are more than the sum of our parts is by cooperation. And that's sort of at the kernel of all economics, right? We have these ideas, we swap them, they become better over time, and we get to energize better and better strategies.
- [25:43]
Michael Saylor
The phrase, right, you're playing with fire, be careful, you might get burned. What makes human beings unique is, as far as I can see, they're the only animal that plays with fire. And from the point we started to play with fire, we started to evolve at a very rapid rate. Genetically we evolved, intellectually we evolved, sociologically we evolved. And we talk about the fire of truth and the fire of faith. You know, it's like, or the keeper of the flame, you know, and the keeper of the flame really means something. If you have a city, village, a civilization, a tribe, and you've got a fire and it goes out, you might very well die. You don't want that fire to go out. I mean, bitcoin, and the bitcoin blockchain is a fire, we don't want it to go out either. We talk, you know, we talk about feeding the fire of bitcoin and we talk about feeding the fire of faith and simply being the keeper of the flame. It was an old idea thousands and thousands of years ago. I suspect it's the difference between life and death for humanity for a million years. And when you've got fire, you started the fire, it's all good. But now I want you to go back a hundred thousand years and be running around in 42 degree temperature while it's raining on you. Or what happens when it goes to 20 degrees? If it's cold and you're wet and the fire goes out, you're going to die. It's not an academic thing. It's a serious thing. Human beings harnessed fire, and it made all the difference. And then along comes the next set of thoughts, right? If you can harness fire, maybe you can develop a brain and maybe you'll live long enough to use it. A next observation is, you know, you ever wrestle around with a lion or a tiger or bear? Pick any animal that you wish to kill and you ever wrestle With a dog that weighs 80 pounds, not easy. Would you like to fight with one? How do you feel about fighting with 10? How do you feel about trying to run any of these things down? You know, I read about, you know, in runners world, right, Runners, they want to tell you about how humans were always made to run. You know, because ancient mankind chased its prey, it could run 20 miles a day or 30 miles a day. And we just run them down until they get tired. Okay, well, that's one idea. And maybe we did. But you ever try to catch something that's running away from you while you're hungry around dinner time? I don't really want to run for 20 hours straight until I tire it to death. I have a better idea, which is hit it with a missile. And by the way, I really mean literally missiles. I mean a sling, a primitive sling, or I mean an arrow. And then I think they found arrowheads that go back a hundred thousand years. They're old. Most people think of a slingshot and they think about the kids slingshot with the rubber band and the light the kids play with.
- [29:13]
Unknown
But this is more like David and Goliath sling, right?
- [29:18]
Michael Saylor
Yeah. If you study Roman history and you go back a thousand years before Rome, they had slingers. I mean, the Balearic Islands, like Ibiza, they were very famous for slingers. And if you read about them, what they'll say in the ancient text is, the natives of the Balearic Islands were raised from age 3. Before they could speak, they were raised to operate a sling. The sling is about 6 to 8ft long. It's made of animal fiber. And you know, you know, I throw a baseball and you've seen hi Alai, right? If I increase the lever at the end and if your arm was 12ft long, you generate some serious leverage, a whip action. So those slings give the average person the equivalent of a 10 foot long or 12 foot long, probably 10 foot long arm. And they practice with those for years. From age 3, you can imagine after 15 years of practicing, you get pretty good. And they weren't slinging little light stones or the shit that you pick up on the seashore. They're actually forming lead bullets. Everybody thinks, oh yeah, bullets are from guns. Well, they're not. I mean, people invented bullets thousands of years before guns. Guns were just the latest idea of putting bullets together with gunpowder. The lead bullets probably came along 10,000 BC and maybe more, maybe 100,000 BC. This is straightforward idea. If your life depended upon it, you would figure it out. And the Figuring out is you get yourself a very dense bullet, you put it in the sling. You ever seen a good pitcher? A good pitcher can place the ball, what, 90ft away, plus or minus 4 inches. Can a good pitcher hit you in the head if you're standing on the plate? Okay, now imagine someone that's pitching a one inch or half inch stone, bullet or bullet, a lead bullet from 50 yards away that can hit you in the head every time, because the Romans said they could. Okay, right now. So now think about. And this is how bad it is, right? We talk about this in a bit. But to make the point, these guys could stand 100 meters, 200 meters off, and from 200 meters off, they could actually hit an animal in the head or another human being in the head. And it didn't matter if they hit you in the head. If they hit you in a torso, they're gonna rupture your ribs and you're gonna. And you may have organ failure. There's even stories, you know, Livy, when he writes about the Second Punic War, he writes about Roman slingers and they sling so many of these things that they pretty much break all the bones of the Gauls beneath their armor. If they're wearing leather armor, their ribs are broken. And if they're not wearing leather armor and they get hit, just like getting hit with a bullet in your helmet, it may still give you a concussion. They're getting concussions. It was never a fair fight. Try taking your eight foot long spear and having a fair fight with a wolf or a pack of wolves. No. Right. A bear. No. Humanity wouldn't be here if we hunted or defended ourself using spears or using. I mean, these things, these short, close quarter swords and clubs. They're all very romantic and they film well in Hollywood movies, you know, and they're great gladiatorial combat because you've got the two adversaries that are in the same frame, right? But if you go back a million years, the adversaries were never in the same frame. If you made it this far and you were a human being, you mastered the art of death from above. Kill from a distance, and nobody knew that you were there. It's not a modern invention. Not only would you stand back 50 meters or 100 meters, you would stand up. And by the way, you would be up, you know, at the top of the hill, where you have gravity working for you. That gives you more range. You would be back. If you're really smart, Robert, like if I told you there's A bunch of whatever creatures on the plane and any one of them can eat you or trample you. Wouldn't you like to stand up 20ft on a cliff that they cannot run up? Stand up 20ft above them, wait for them to come by, blast them either with a sling or use a bow and arrow. And if you miss, what happens if you miss?
- [34:34]
Unknown
Just load up and go again, right?
- [34:36]
Michael Saylor
How many chances do you get.
- [34:40]
Robert Breedlove
Until.
- [34:41]
Michael Saylor
You run out of bullets right now, what happens if you walk down on the plane with your beautiful spear and sword, with all of your standing next to you and fight it out?
- [34:52]
Unknown
Risk of ruin. Can never, never take that on. I think this is very interesting and it also highlights another difference that we have from animals. I know that humans are one of the few animals that rely on visual acuity as their primary sense. I think it's humans and predatory birds. And then it also comes down to our dexterity, right? Our ability to handle and manipulate bow and arrow sling, these types of missile weapons just sort of highlights again, kind of the difference in us and everyone else. And those two things too are both intimately related with speech and thought and other tool making. So I think that's very interesting.
- [35:35]
Michael Saylor
You think about the idea of missiles, right? I need my eyes, I need my brain. I need to set up the kill zone. Oh, by the way, I left off one other observation, right? It's 500,000 years ago. You want to kill something, you're down, you're downwind from it, the sun is to your back, you're above it, and you have a missile. And hopefully you have a channel if you really want. But it's like you really want to live. That's you're going to go find that spot. You're going to say, at this point in the day, the sun is going to be to my back, the wind prevailing winds are going to be blowing in my face. I'm going to be 20ft up. Oh, there's a path up here. But guess what? I'm going to block that path because I don't want the bear running up to eat me once I start killing it, right? Then I'm going to make sure I got 100 missiles. And again, it's not a fair fight. And there's only two types of human beings. There's the type that figured that out, and that's your grandparents. And there's the type that were a bit sloppy about one of those things and they didn't like it, they're gone.
- [36:52]
Unknown
This all calls to mind Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War, I'm gonna paraphrase here, but he said terrain is the most important aspect of any battle. It's almost like the smart general only goes into battle essentially knowing that he's won based on these preparations, like you're describing, right? Sun at your back, wind at your back, high on the hill, undercover, plenty.
- [37:13]
Michael Saylor
Of missiles, technologies that are dominating today. They're dominating because they're able to deliver force. Faster, harder, stronger, smarter. Like if you're going to dominate, how do you deliver force? Harder, faster, stronger, smarter. And I could think of a hundred examples in history and they all, you tend to see those things. So if it's got the characteristic that it can be made harder, it can be made smarter, it can be made stronger, it can be made faster, there's something compelling about it. That's why digital gold is thousands of times better than gold, because you've got all those dimensions to work on. That's why the natural creature, gold is a rock, a bear is a bear, a mastodon is a mastodon. They're not getting harder, faster, stronger, smarter. They're just doing what they do. Human beings are, but only because of innovation. And so missiles are just a tool, but they're illustrative. Fire is an energy network, an energy source. It's a battery, an energy source, and you can deliver it in a certain way. And then that takes us to hydraulics, which is, which is power from water. And water is a network. And we talk about elemental forces, fire and water, right. Well, you ever look at the ocean and what the ocean does, right, Wave action is incredible energy. But another source of energy is buoyancy. Right. I take you ever try to pick up a 2,000 pound weight and carry it on your back up a hill or just across? Put a 2,000 pound weight on a, you know, on a carriage, put it on the back of a donkey, drag it on skids. Problem, right, in this particular case, can't be solved with fire. We can't easily burn it. On the other hand, if you needed to move £2,000, you put it on a barge, you put it in the water and the water pushes back £2,000. And I can push it with one hand. The mastery of hydraulics is fascinating. I went to MIT. MIT's mascot is a beaver. And we have rings that have the beaver on them. And they talk about, why are you the beavers? And the answer is the beaver is nature's engineer. And the beaver is this, you know, near sighted, short waddling creature. It shows up, looks around, sees the water flowing, you know, and what. It can just be, I don't know, bobcat bait or whatever, bear dinner or it can do something about it. And what the beaver does is just pretty unbelievable. The beaver starts chopping down trees. But first the beaver figures out where to chop down the trees. Then the beaver chops down the trees. Then the beaver turns the trees into a dam. Then the beaver, you know, it channels the river into the dam, creates a pond, floods the pond. Or it's like it's reading the terrain. After it's got the pond, it creates a lodge in the middle of the pond with an entrance underwater. And then it creates its life in that lodge, that pond. Water. Water is elemental to life. And that pond creates a. Creates an elemental. It creates a vibrant ecosystem. And in that ecosystem, lots of things grow and lots of creatures benefit. I mean, the ecological diversity improves. And it's good for all the plant life. It's good for all the wildlife. People lament the loss of the beaver, screws up forest, and the beaver is just doing its thing. And if there's a. If there's a storm and the dam gets messed up, the beaver swims out in the middle of the thunderstorm or hurricane or whatever it is and fixes the dam. It's a very industrious creature. And you just kind of sit back and you're in awe and you think, well, how did a creature figure that out? And then what does that mean to humanity? Of course it means a lot to humanity. I've been all over the world and, like, I've been to the desert. I've been to Riyadh. I've been to uae. I've been to Singapore. I've been to Miami Beach. People think oil is money. They think oil is power. They think, you know, and let me tell you, oil is not. Oil is not. It's not really power. It's not wealth. Water is wealth. Water is the key to life. If I gave you $10 billion and as much land as you wanted in the desert, you can't create life. The cost for you to create a pond in the desert, the cost for you to actually create a park with oak trees. If I gave you $10 billion, you know, you would. And you lived in the desert, Robert, what would you do with the money? What's the first thing you would do?
- [43:12]
Unknown
Buy Bitcoin and exit the desert?
- [43:17]
Michael Saylor
Spoken like a progressive. What if you. So let's parse that. What if you didn't know about Bitcoin and I gave you the $10 billion. And you lived in the desert, I.
- [43:27]
Unknown
Guess you'd be looking for trading partners.
- [43:29]
Michael Saylor
With water, you'd exit the desert, right? So what do they do? You buy yourself a jet, you buy yourself a villa in the south of France, you buy yourself a yacht that floats in the Med, you know, and then you figure out how to live your life. Because the cost to grow a palm tree in the desert is 20,000 a year. You want 100 palm trees, it's $2 million a year to have 100 palm trees. You want 4 acres of grass in the desert. If you have 100 million a year for 10 acres of grass, by the way, you still can't have it. Even if you spend $100 million a year to put 10 acres of grass in the desert, the sandstorm comes and it wipes you out. Water is elemental to life. We underestimate how important it is until you start paying to create it. And yeah, you can stay alive in the desert, but a person making $50,000 a year, that lives, a city that has parks and rainfall and a temperature, a nice temperature, lives better than a billionaire in the desert. It's just that powerful. Now coming back to hydraulics. You know the hydraulics will generate power, right? I can harness running water running down a hill and create turbine and I can create a mill with that. That's interesting. Again, back to the hunter gatherer thing, people. If you dropped me a hundred thousand years ago and you said, okay, well Mike, use your brain, go hunt and gather, I'd be like, screw that, what would I do? I would go find a stream with a little bit of elevation, you know, mount, maybe a mountain stream that had fresh water because you can drink it. And I'd find a big enough one that had fish in it. And then I would find a point where I could divert the stream to create a pond. I mean, if the beaver can do it, I can probably do it. I would do some digging, I would divert the stream, I would create a lock, and at that point in the year when the salmon or whatever are running, I might just flip that lock and I would actually divert the stream into my pond and create myself. You know, maybe it's a hundred foot wide pond, maybe it's a 20 foot wide pond, maybe it's a 300 foot wide pond. Maybe I waste a lot of the water, I don't care. And, and I would let 500 of those little fishies get trapped in my pond. I'm not chasing after them with this dick like in Blue Lagoon. I'm not like there's no such thing as a fair fight. I'm not fishing with the hook. You know, my idea of fishing is with dynamite. I'm going to blow up everything in the lagoon and I'm going to walk and pick up the fish. But in the absence of dynamite, I'm just going to divert the water. What's the flow rate of water? How many fish swim by you? I want them all. Put them in the. In the pond. Then what do you think I'm going to do? I'm gonna go pull out one a day, and I'm gonna let the other fishies swim around. And if the winter comes and the pond freezes over, that's okay. I'm going to chip a little hole in the pond and I'm gonna walk out every day and I'm gonna reach it and grab my fish. My fish. And I'm not chasing after stuff. When you chase after stuff, you twist your ankle, and if you break your ankle, you're dying. Right? You chase after stuff, and then a wolf pack catches you from behind or you piss off an angry mastodon. So hydraulic power, it's the water life. It's gonna bring you something to drink, it's gonna bring you something to eat. Right. By the way, maybe if I'm. If I'm worried about the little creepy crawly creatures or whatever, I'm going to dig a trench around where I live and they're gonna have to cross the water to get to me. Maybe I'll use water. A moat, Right. You know, if I live on a seashore, I'm going to create a. I'm gonna find a natural tidal basin. And in that tidal basin, I'm gonna let creatures crawl in. You ever watch? Yeah, I went to Maine once. You ever watch Crabbers, right? Or actually Lobsterman?
- [48:19]
Unknown
I've seen it on TV some. Never in person, though.
- [48:22]
Michael Saylor
Okay, well, so if you don't know anything about lobstermen, you think, oh, well, these are guys out hunting lobster with a trap. Okay. When you go watch the lobster men operating, you realize they're not hunting lobster. They're not catching lobster, they're farming lobster. Big difference. They drop. They drop the trap and they'll create a trap. They'll put some. Some kind of herring or herring or something in the trap to what the lobster wants to eat. They drop it. They put 10 of those cages down. They wait. Lobsters are lazy. Lobsters crawl into the cage, they grab the food, they get stuck in the cage, they pull the trap up, they find a Big lobster, they keep that one. They find little lobsters, they throw them back in because they need them to keep growing. They're creating agriculture to feed the lobster. The lobster is living in happy lobster hotel its entire life. It's not so bad. Rob, if I said to you, I'm going to give you free room and board to age 70 and then I'm going to eat you. Not so compelling. Not so compelling. But if I said to you, Robert, I'm going to give you free room and board until you're 750 years old and then your life is going to end, or you can make it on your own and you'll suffer a horrific death being eaten up by a barracuda at age 35. You might think it's not so bad living in your lobster hotel 10 times longer than you would live naturally. It's not like these lobsters would have made it very far. They're liking it. They're domesticated lobsters. Right.
- [50:15]
Unknown
Nature tends to pursue the most energy efficient strategy available to it. Right. Whether you're the eagle dragging the baby goat off the cliff, or you're the lobster enjoying the lobster hotel, or you're the man diverting the stream to capture a bunch of salmon, you have a tendency to want to do the least but achieve the most. It's kind of the nature of productivity itself. I'm channeling energy and not wasting any in the process. Channeling it as efficiently and usefully as possible.
- [50:48]
Michael Saylor
The Pyramids got built 2000 years before Cleopatra and Caesar had. They haul it up there. And some of the most fascinating videos I've seen on YouTube are those YouTube videos that show how they build hydraulic elevators to move a 2 ton or 4 ton stone up up by floating it up a channel to the side of a pyramid. And I totally believe that's how they did it. They actually used hydraulics to construct the pyramids.
- [51:18]
Unknown
I haven't seen that, actually. I've always seen them rolling them on the logs. How are the hydraulics constructed?
- [51:26]
Michael Saylor
You have a tube of, let's say you have a tube of water. If I put something in the bottom of the tube that's lighter than water with a float attached to it. I put a rock with a float. Maybe you take animal skins and you blow them up with air, it will float up the tube and pop out the back. All you got to do is have the tube be able to hold the integrity. I can't do it for a thousand feet, but I can do it for 20ft. It's like the Way a lock works in a canal. Like, I'm going into a lock, I close the gate, I flood the lock, it lifts the barge, I open the other locks, and I go out. So imagine a series of locks that I use to actually lift 100,000 tons of stone using water.
- [52:23]
Unknown
Wow.
- [52:24]
Michael Saylor
Yeah, that's, like, very, very interesting. Yeah, I think that that's how it was done. My opinion. But water can be used for farming, for fishing. It can be used for security, it can be used for sanitation. In fact, there's a. You know, without understanding water and the dynamics of water, there is no cradle of civilization in the Aegean or anywhere. I'll give you another interesting vignette. I go to Santorini, and Santorini's built up on this caldera, you know, looking.
- [52:59]
Unknown
Down on beautiful white city, right?
- [53:03]
Michael Saylor
Yeah, it's beautiful.
- [53:05]
Unknown
It's gorgeous. Yeah.
- [53:06]
Michael Saylor
Okay, well, in the 20th century, you can take the elevator up. So I take the elevator up from the port, and the city is 500ft above or some number of feet above. And then on the way back, I see donkey rides. And you can take a donkey up. You can take a donkey up to Santorini from the port or take a donkey down. I'm like, I was in my fitness craze, and I'm like, well, I'm not riding a donkey down, but I think I'll just walk down. I mean, what's the problem? I think I can walk. I don't need to take the sissy elevator. So I start walking down these steps, and the steps aren't terribly difficult. What do you think I see as I'm walking down the donkey steps?
- [53:54]
Unknown
Donkey do.
- [53:57]
Michael Saylor
How much of it do you think I see?
- [54:00]
Unknown
Probably more than you wanted to.
- [54:03]
Michael Saylor
A river.
- [54:05]
Robert Breedlove
Wow.
- [54:06]
Michael Saylor
A river of donkey excrement. Mind you, this is like three or four tourist donkeys taking down the occasional tourist. A river, donkey excrement. And you can hardly avoid it. You're hopping this way and that way. And then my brain starts working and I start thinking, hmm, what happens if there's a hundred times as many donkeys? And what happens if they're walking through a city? And what happens if it doesn't? How do you clear this stuff? It's not like they had hydraulic hoses and they could just clean. By the way, they're not clearing it. In the 21st century in Greece, it's a river of donkey crap. I mean, they haven't figured out how to clear it 3,000 years later. So let's go back 3,000 years and let's do the thought experiment. What's it like to live in a city using animal power to move stuff around.
- [55:08]
Unknown
The place to live?
- [55:12]
Michael Saylor
Awful, but also unsanitary. I mean, fly infested, typhus infested, typhoid, you know, germ infested. And then when it gets dry and this stuff desiccates and it blows through the air, you're going to be breathing it, smelling it, it's going, you know, it's just going to be awful. So you want to drink it and eat it. Okay? This is not just a matter of creature comfort. You're going to die. You can't actually bring together a bunch of human beings unless you work out the sanitation problem. And it was then and there that it daunted on me very viscerally. There's a reason why all the streets in Mykonos are so narrow that you can't get a, you can't get a horse or a cart through them. They're walking cities, by the way, there's a reason that ICUS and the equestrian class were the Roman knights. The knights were the equestrian class. And what it meant in ancient Rome was the top 1% or the top, you know, 0.1%. The nobles of Rome were the equestrian class. What it meant to be rich and powerful was you had the right to bring a horse into the city, nobody else. The problem was not they couldn't afford the horses. The problem is if they allowed anybody to bring a horse into the city, it would be so unsanitary as to render the city uninhabitable. So most ancient cities, if you wanted them to work, you would have to have them human powered. And now you've got this dilemma of how do you move goods around? Tell me, how do I move things around cleanly? I need a clean energy source that is not going to foul my sanitary system. It's not going to actually kill me. And of course, it's a boat, right? What do you want? You want 25 cities with ports on an inland sea, with at least a season, six to nine months a year, where you can cross from one point to another point without being dashed and killed on the rocks. So you need a fairly mild sea, but you have to have water. Because if you have the same 25 cities on land and you're going to use horse or animal power in order to move goods and services back and forth, it's just so dirty, right? So unsanitary that your civilization is probably not going to get off the ground.
- [58:04]
Unknown
So the Mediterranean was ideal for this.
- [58:06]
Michael Saylor
Sounds like the Mediterranean is the perfect ocean because you can oftentimes navigate without leaving the side of land. It's hard to get too lost. There's a lot of ports, very placid, relatively, and there's a lot of stops. If you look at all of these empires, the Phoenician Empire, the Roman Empire, the Venetian Empire, the British Empire, if you actually tour all the great ports in the Mediterranean, all the really good ones, the story goes something like this. Like maybe you go into Bonifacio in Corsica. Well, in a thousand ad, this was a Phoenician port. And then the Greek Empire came along and it was an Athenian port, 500. And then the Carthaginians kicked them out, and it was Carthaginian port. And then the Romans kicked them out and it was a Roman port. And then after the Romans fell, the Venetians took this over, this Venetian port, and then eventually it became a British port. You know, like, that's the story of Malta. That's the story of Corfu. That's the story of, you know, of lots of different ports in the Mediterranean. And the reason why is if you want to dominate the Mediterranean, you need to have a port within one or two days sail that you can hide in whenever the mistrals blow. And if you control that network of ports, when the weather goes bad, you go into the port and your ship doesn't get sunk. And if you don't, and you're like a week away from a port that's friendly and the weather gets bad, you get dashed against the rocks and you just die. And that's the end of it. And so these are all nautical networks, and they're all based upon terrain. And the Mediterranean was a good crucible for, for the, you know, the beginning of a civilization. And when you put together, you know, the incredible power of hydraulic transportation, and then you consider the consequences of not having it, you realize you can't really develop the economic density. We haven't touched much on agriculture. We could, but the general theme is the same, right? When I drop you and you find a fruit tree, you're not going to go, oh, duh, there's a fruit tree in this clearing. I'm going to walk 18 miles to the place where I can find a different fruit bush, and then I'm going to walk five miles back to the place where the fish are. You're going to actually pick up the fruit tree and plant like 100 fruit trees next to your fishing pond. Right? Right. You're not stupid like paleolithic man. There's every reason to believe they were smarter and stronger and tougher than we were. I mean.
- [61:04]
Unknown
Yeah, right. So this is a mess around. I think it's a great point that all of these inventions are leading towards increasing economic or energetic density, and that's what actually provided the bedrock on which to build a civilization. So maybe I'll try to give a quick overview and feel free to jump in if I'm missing. But started out with we can't handle an animal one on one, right? It's kind of our wits that make us who we are. Through our wits, we're able to communicate and coordinate with one another. One thing we didn't get into is kind of the Yuval Harari sapiens thesis where he says that man came to dominate the world because we can tell and believe stories like we're actually able to abstract, represent reality and symbols, and that's what gives us the ability to make tools and so on and so forth. But so with those strategies that are often cooperative, we've energized them with fire as kind of our base. I guess we're harnessing the energy of the world and ancient sunlight through using fire. And then the other interesting thing about fire is that it actually accelerated our own evolution, right? Our cognitive development was increased because we're able to liberate more calories from food and whatnot. And then also gave us the ability to make harder, stronger, better tools, I guess you would say too, in terms of metalworking. And then we could talk about. And actually, I think that's a great point too, is that mankind actually changes his own course of evolution through the conscious decisions we make. Like the tools we make in turn make us. Which I think is a really interesting point to touch on later as well, with. With money. And then we had missiles, right? So we could actually take advantage of our visual acuity, which is something unique to people and our dexterity, and actually hunt animals at a distance and hunt them on a terrain that was advantageous to us. And then we had to tap into water, right. Because we are water, first of all. Like humans are 70% water. We have to consume a lot of water very frequently. I think that's the quickest way to die, right? It's like oxygen. First we have to have that most frequently water. Second.
- [63:24]
Michael Saylor
Three minutes without air, three days without water, three months without food.
- [63:31]
Unknown
Exactly. And I've read too, that people going without water actually cry tears of blood. It's one of the symptoms that makes your eyes bleed. Just interesting. So not only is water clearly this life giving substance that we have to have access to fresh water and be able to implement it into our agricultural systems and whatnot, but it's also a tool for overcoming gravity. Right. So we could actually construct larger scale structures and conduct commerce kind of at scale. So I think that's a great first principles view on what makes us unique.
- [64:13]
Michael Saylor
And we got to do all that to get to the Iron Age. And we come back to this issue of being harder, right. And being stronger. You know, we harness that fire and we start to work metals and we move into bronze and then we move into iron. And I think the Roman Empire is a great, it's a great model for the way that human beings interact with technology and the way that they interact with a competitive world and become both anti fragile and get harder, smarter, faster and stronger. And this same thing was going on in other parts of the world. But I'll focus upon Romans for a bit. You go read Livy's history of Rome and he writes about the Roman Republic had 700 good years, 700 years before it even went to empire. And we start with this idea of Roman politics. You've heard the phrase beware the ides of March and it refers to Julius Caesar. And you know, people think of it as oh well, that's when someone's going to kill Caesar. But it's really referring to the fact that for 700 years the Romans got together on March 15 and had an election every year. The Romans were the most organized of all of the civilizations we can find in the ancient world. And that's how they grew dominate. They were just organized. And one of their forms of organization is, and this is the thing of beauty, they're running a process where every year, March 15, they have their election. They appoint two consuls, they appoint all their officers, the consuls. Then they conduct about two weeks worth of religious ceremonies. They all worship, they appease the gods. They're getting psyched up, right? They're reminding themselves that they're unique, they're celebrating. Simultaneously, they raise an army, they train the army. We go from March 15th all the way through to May 1st, six weeks. And those six weeks they get organized, celebrate, get excited, wait for a good omen, and they're really getting ready. And then the campaigning season starts, May 1st. Everybody that knows anything about Europe and the Mediterranean knows the weather gets good on May 1. The problem before May 1, it rains, there's storms. If you set out to sea or you set out across terrain before that time period that the cold doesn't get you, the storm's gonna get you, or your ship's gonna sink or something. It's, you know, ultimately right. In the history of all these wars, more people die from natural causes than they die from bullets of the enemy or from the enemy. So the number one danger is nature's gonna kill you. So the Romans basically did summer campaignings. And so may 1st they start to campaign. That goes through June, July, August, September, all good months. If they're still fighting something, maybe around October, they wrap it up, they go into winter quarters. By November, November, December, January, maybe they have a November, but certainly December, January, February, that's winter. They're not doing anything because the, because the elements are a much bigger threat than the enemy is. And if you know anything about the Med, you know, you can't navigate the Med in the winter. Like, even in the modern day, it's. No one would, you know, want to go yachting in the Med in the winter. It's just not comfortable. You get storms, weather is very uncertain. So all this time they're resting, they're recuperating, they're regrouping, they're politicking. You can imagine they're discussing with each other who's most suited. That guy's long in the tooth, that guy's lost a step. This is the up and comer. You support me, I'll support you. They're working through that consensus back in Rome and they're remembering what it's like to be a Roman and then along comes March and then they decide who's going to do what and everybody gets, you know, you're going to be a tribune, you're going to be a consul, you're going to be a governor. Let's put in place the administration. And they're always rotating and they go and they do it again. And if they send off the best and the brightest and the guy takes an arrow in the back and he dies, well, next year there's another guy, you know, Scipio Africanus, you know, like one of the most famous Roman generals of all time. He rose to power, you know, in his early 20s, after all of his uncle and his father died in the Second Punic War. His entire family is getting wiped out. But there's always another Roman, always another Roman, always another one from a very early age. And so the political system had a certain elegance to it because it was tied to the calendar, it was tied to nature, it was a natural cycle. And it took into account the need of human beings to celebrate each other's successes. I go campaign, I come back, I get a triumph. It took into account their need to have a common faith. You know, the faith is critical. If we're not all Romans, and if we don't all believe the same thing, why are we going to die for each other? Faith mattered, but the weather mattered.
- [70:31]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah, right.
- [70:32]
Michael Saylor
And you know, it's like people don't realize they did it every year on March 15th because they're getting. They need. If I told you the weather's going to get good on May 1st and you need an army, when would you start?
- [70:45]
Unknown
Right, right, right.
- [70:47]
Michael Saylor
They're kind of. They're pretty smart. Seven years of it. That's the Roman way. And then they also took into account human motivation, which is everybody's got an ego, Everybody needs their turn. Nobody can hog all the power. So even if you were the greatest general this year, you got to give it up to someone else next year. And as long as they kept turning. And if I'm the second most powerful family and you're from the most powerful family, maybe I'll support you for console with an understanding that it's my turn next year.
- [71:21]
Unknown
Right.
- [71:22]
Michael Saylor
You know, and it's like we. And then maybe my family will fight and die for you because we have a chance at glory next year. But at the point where you take over and you tell me, well, you think you're gonna just keep the job for the next 62 years, at that point, the fabric of the civilization starts to break down because that equity and that citizenship and that sense that we're protecting the Roman way of life starts to degrade to. We're just helping somebody's dynasty. Screw them.
- [71:57]
Unknown
So the dynamism of the hierarchy keeps it revivified and fresh, and they're harmonized with nature. That's very interesting.
- [72:06]
Michael Saylor
Antifragile, right? Romans are antifragile. They're always going off to fight. Always, always, always. It's just the history of war after war after war after war. But they've got this, you know, like, typical CEO, right? You could be in a job 10 years, 20 years. I'm 55. I've been in my job for quite a while. But it's not uncommon for someone in modern day America to be doing a job and become CEO somewhere between age 40 and age 65. Not uncommon. In fact, the captain of a yacht will oftentimes be 40, and they'll. They'll stay as captain until they're 65. You might do the same job for 20 years, 25 years. I once took a tour of the US military and I was treated like a senator. And so it was a. It was an orientation tour. And they would take you to army base, a Navy base, an Air Force base, a Marine base, Camp Lejeune, Fort Hood, you know, etc. And one of the things they did is they took us onto an aircraft carrier, the John Stennis. And so I landed on an aircraft carrier, and then I got to tour the carrier, and then I got to meet the captain. The average age of the soldiers on the aircraft carrier is 19. Average age, 5,000 people in the aircraft carrier, 19. The officers are in their 20s, some in their early 30s. Do you know the oldest man or woman on the carrier, Robert? The oldest man. The old man is 41.
- [74:06]
Unknown
Wow.
- [74:07]
Michael Saylor
So I started talking to him. And the number two is 38. If you're the opera, you're the number two head of operations. It's an 18 month gig. And if you're the captain, it might be 36 months. And so I started talking. And this is a nuclear powered aircraft carrier. These guys can start a war. They start a war, like, it's like one twelfth of the firepower of the U.S. navy.
- [74:34]
Unknown
Right, right, right.
- [74:35]
Michael Saylor
Take down all but like three countries in a heartbeat, maybe. You could take down any country in a heartbeat. It's a pretty important job, Robert, right? Wouldn't you say?
- [74:44]
Unknown
Right, Absolutely.
- [74:47]
Michael Saylor
So I said to him, so tell me your path to get here. And he goes, well, you know, I went to the Naval Academy and, you know, I did this for a few years, and every one to three years I moved to a different command and I finally made it as a, you know, XO number two officer, like two years ago. And I got promoted, you know, six months ago. And I'll have this command for like 24 months or something. And I said, well, let me get this. So there's only like 12 of you, right? So you're one of the top 12 most talented officers in the entire Navy. Like, how many people in the Navy? Hundreds of thousands of people in the military. This is one of the 12 most important jobs in the United States military, bar none. I'm like, so in like, 12 more months, you're leaving? He goes, yeah, I'm leaving. Why wouldn't they want you to do this job for 20 years? Like, you could start World War Three. I mean, like, why would you take the risk of, like, changing and putting someone else in the job? What if they screw it up? You know, like, we don't do it, by the way, Robert, we don't do that in any other part of our economy. We don't actually put 40 year olds with term limits of 36 months in charge of cities, states, countries, company. We don't put them in charge of yachts. If you had a hundred foot pleasure craft, you wouldn't do it. You'd be like, I find one captain, I'm keeping the guy for 20 years. I'm not changing. You wouldn't actually do that with a person that like cooks your food or mow your lawn. So why do you think this guy's gotta go after 36 months? Any guesses? Because the answer is gonna blow your mind.
- [76:45]
Unknown
What jumps to mind is if he were to get paid off or corrupted or something. But I really don't know.
- [76:52]
Michael Saylor
That's not a bad idea. It's like, that's like the, the forest ranger principles. Like we rotate the forest rangers in order to keep anybody from bribing or corrupting a forest ranger so they don't misuse public national park resources. Brilliant idea, right? Bedrock of the forestry service and a great anti corruption technique. But that's not why I'm standing on the deck of this aircraft carrier talking to this guy who a lot of, you know, a lot of people think like he's just a junior executive, maybe we're ready to give him a whatever. And I said, so tell me again why you got to leave this job even though you're the best guy in the Navy to do it. You're obviously hyper talented. He goes, well, Michael, there's a lot of really, really good people coming out of the academy every year. And everybody needs their turn. Everybody needs their turn. Talking about a 21 year old lieutenant coming out of the Naval Academy saying, these people signed up to commit their life and their career and potentially sacrificed their life to be a Navy officer. And at the pinnacle is their hope that they can be the captain and have their own command. And at the pinnacle of that is captain of an aircraft carrier. And if you want people to love and fight and die and cherish your institution, you got to get out of the way and give them their chance. I mean, everybody needs their turn. And you start thinking maybe we overestimate ourselves, right? This is why again, a decentralized organism like bitcoin is superior to a company. Because as Charles de Gaulle said, right? Graveyards are full of the tombstones of indispensable men.
- [78:55]
Unknown
Right? Yeah, right.
- [78:57]
Robert Breedlove
It's like, this makes me think too, 100%.
- [79:02]
Unknown
This makes me think too, as A kid, there was this notion that anyone. I grew up in Tennessee, but anyone could be president. Anyone could be the American president. Now, that may be kind of silly and not actually the case, but that notion seemed to give people, at least kids, this motivation to really want to be patriotic and part and parcel for their country. So it seems like something about the possibility of achieving the highest level within an organism or organization sort of gives people maximal motivation or something like that.
- [79:40]
Michael Saylor
There was a time, like, there's a certain pride in being a naval officer. If you believe when they. When the head of a carrier looks at you, when you started your career and says, you know, one day you'll have your turn at this. You and I are comrades. You're as good as me. You're the future of the Navy. That's what will cause people to lay down and die for you, right?
- [80:05]
Unknown
That's inspiration.
- [80:08]
Michael Saylor
And that's what the Romans had in those 700 years, the height of the Republic. It's, you're a Roman first this year. Maybe you're, maybe you're under the command of, you know, your family's number one adversary, but next year that'll be your command, right? And that's the Roman way. And there's a certain submission to nature and to the will. The organism is greater than any one individual, any one family, and it's continually refreshing itself. We have to have a constant flow of new talent, new leadership. Someone drops the baton, someone else picks up the baton. That's what made the Romans great. They suffered no kings among to them, right? You look at the, the Second Punic War, and then I think maybe it was the Second Macedonian War. Eventually the Romans went to fight against like, I guess, Philip of Macedon. He was a king, and, and he had an awful son. And his, his one son got fighting with his other son and convinced the father to murder the second son. And then the father realized that he made a mistake because his first son lied to him, you know, and the father was a nutcase, crazy guy, and the son was kind of crazy, and it corrupted the entire society. And the Roman consul was just the most talented general. And he knew that. You know, the way it worked is his officers were from every other competing family in Rome. If that general was lazy, drunk, cowardly or stupid, it got reported back by the officer corps to Rome and to the Senate. And so they were slightly gossipy. But the point is, when you know that everybody's watching you and that you can be replaced and will be replaced next year, and your future is Uncertain. It brings out a higher degree of professionalism and that's the competition in the market. Just like you're a miner and they cut off your electricity while your mining rig stops and the mining shifts somewhere else.
- [82:30]
Unknown
Absolutely. That's the reason entrepreneurs in the free market are accountable to the preferences of their customers because they constantly face the existential threat of customers going elsewhere. Whereas the opposite would be true in a monopoly, right? The monopolist doesn't have to give two shits about his customers preferences because they have no other choice. So I think it's really interesting.
- [82:53]
Michael Saylor
So the Roman political system, it bred harder, stronger, faster, smarter individuals and it was no apologies about it from age 3, this is the way it is and Rome comes first and everybody else's interests are subjugated. And when you look at that, right, they started with that system, a good system, people Forget about it. 700 years as a republic, I mean, find me another republic. Lasted 700 years, conquered entire known worlds. Then you've got the Roman army and that tells a different story. I mean the Roman army takes us back to this issue of there was never such thing as a free fair fight. The Romans weren't fighting fair. They would have laughed at you. You know, like the Roman approach to this was to take, you know, my illustration of the slinger on the cliff and take it to a whole new level. The Romans manufactured, you know, ballista, they manufactured catapults and they manufactured every sword to be the same length, every shield to be the same size, every soldier took the same step, the same length. Everything was the same. You could be an 8 foot tall Goliath. And the Roman 5 foot 10 inch tall normal dude, right, is going to beat the crap out of you because you're not going to get within 12ft of him because you're going to take a spear in the gut from the 12 guys standing to his left and his right as you charge, right? There's no, there's no. In all of these time periods, all these wars and you read Livy and he describes them very in depth over and over again. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of battles. And they always consisted of. The Romans maneuvered to get to high ground. The Romans maneuvered to get the enemy out on the plain. The Romans unleashed the artillery onto the enemy while they stood and obliterated 10% of them. Then the Romans unleashed some more artillery. There's one story where the Roman army cornered the Gauls. The Gauls are on a mountaintop on a hillside and the Romans are below. They Just surround them, they stop, they start to pummel them and they rain down hell from above. Bullets, boulders, flame, napalm. And Livy writes, you know, before a Roman even took a step toward the enemy line, half of the Gauls were dead and 80% of them had been maimed or incapacitated from the bullets. And then the Romans start to move up and do something. It's like there's none of this, let's just charge into battle and fight it out with our sword, right? Never happened that way. It was always going to be find a way to get an advantage. And by the way, the technology is like, it's very critical, right? People think like the Romans had a military industrial complex, right? You're in dog. There's a way to do it, you're going to do it in a certain way. They had entire body language and an entire system of how you're going to act. You know, if you want something which is eye opening, there's this story of the Roman navy from the second, the first Punic War. The Carthaginians dominate the Mediterranean. The Romans are a land power. The Romans don't know anything about naval power. But this, it tells you a lot about the Roman psyche and the Roman intellect. The Romans are getting beat up by the Carthaginians because the Carthaginians control the ports and they have the fleet. The Romans have no fleet. One day a storm kicks up and the storm, the storm drives a Carthaginian ship, naval ship, into a Roman port. It's blown into the port by a bad mistral. The Romans capture it, they take it apart to try to figure out how the Carthaginians make their ships. You can't make this up. This is the most amazing thing in history. They find out that the Carthaginians make their ships from a kit from reusable standardized parts. And not only are all the parts standardized, the Carthaginians have labeled each part with the instructions of where it fits and the number of the part. The Romans deconstruct the entire thing, steal the entire blueprint. 90 days later they made 150 ships. You think these guys are screwing around, right? They're not screwing around. It's like everybody thinks, oh yeah, I'm going to take my time to figure this stuff out. No. War has a way. War has a way of quickening your activity. Bam. I'm losing. I find a ship. That's the DNA, that's the formula of the ship. Hundred and fifty ships. To make a long story short, the Romans win the first Punic War and they vanquished the Carthaginians and they become the naval power. And of course, it's not that the Romans invented everything. It's just the Romans stole every good idea from every civilization. From the Greeks, from the Carthaginians, from the. Whatever that they crushed. And because they lasted, we're able to read their histories. But, you know, it kind of blows your mind when you think that in 500, by the way, you think the Carthaginians invented that. Maybe they stole it from the Phoenicians.
- [89:08]
Unknown
Right?
- [89:10]
Michael Saylor
But yeah, 500 B.C. if you want to win wars, you don't just make ships and you don't just train hard and you don't just make. You don't make wagons. Right. Roman roads. The Romans had standardized parts. A standardized gauge for a wagon wheel. Every Roman wagon rolling on the road is carving ruts in the road. That gauge has to be standardized. You can't just make any wagon. You have to make it exactly the same.
- [89:41]
Unknown
Right.
- [89:41]
Michael Saylor
Okay. This is for all those people that believe, you know, that recoil in standardization. Well, that Roman. That Roman wagon gauge eventually became the standard width of a railroad track in Europe, and then eventually the standard width of a railroad track everywhere. So if you want to know how wide a Roman chariot was, or war chariot, or any chariot, just go stand on a railroad anywhere on Earth. The Romans gave that to you. And the reason why they did it that way is because if you build wagons with different gauges, they fall in the rut, they snap the axle, and that's death.
- [90:30]
Unknown
Yeah.
- [90:31]
Michael Saylor
So it's like. No, it's like Henry Ford said, you can have it any color as long as it's black. No, you can't have it any way you want it. You take what you can. By the way, it's not that every civilization figured this out. It's just that every civilization that insisted upon doing it a different way with different bells and whistles got crushed to death.
- [90:55]
Unknown
Right.
- [90:57]
Michael Saylor
There's an analogy to this in the bitcoin world, too, when you come up with a different feature and a different. It's like it would just be 10% better, you know, if you made your wagon 10% wider, it would hold 20% more and you would need 10% less and your transaction cost would be less in your.
- [91:18]
Unknown
I think it's better. It points towards path dependence too. Right. Like the fact that a technology already took a certain path, it kind of has an inertia. Right. An inertia that's carried the width of the gauge of a wagon wheel to the width of a modern rail. And I thought it was interesting too how you pointed to the civilizations that went out. The Romans or the Carthaginians are the ones that studied their history, right? So they're actually gleaning insights from civilizations that had come before them. Which again kind of harkens back to that Yuval Harari concept of our ability to abstract our learnings into symbols like language and whatnot, and then pass them from generation to generation, such that the most successful strategies take advantage of the collective learnings up until that point, versus trying to just do something from scratch on your own. Like we all stand on the shoulders of giants, so to speak.
- [92:15]
Michael Saylor
Those roads were the logistics network of the Roman Empire. And if you can move goods and services, if you can move armies faster inside your borders, then your enemies can move inside their borders, then you're going to win. You've got a major, major advantage. And of course, if everybody lays down a railroad track that's a certain width and you come up with an idea for a car that's got a different width, who are you going to sell it to? People talk about protocols being important. Well, TCPIP wasn't the first protocol. Roman Rhodes probably weren't the first protocol either. But the point is, protocols matter and it's arrogant. I'm sure that the Egyptians had protocols to build those pyramids. Standard size and standard widths and standard weights and measures. Those protocols matter heck of a lot. And if you don't have them, it's impossible people to cooperate. So money, we've talked about money a lot as being essential for civilization to cooperate and allowing us to specialize. But all these other logistics protocols or military protocols are in their own way equally important. And I'll make one last point on just Roman engineering and aqueducts, right? The Romans understood the importance of hydraulics and they took it to a new level. They actually created aqueducts that would bring water from up to 70 miles away to a given city. A lot of coastal towns on the med that are not inhabitable. I mean the, the natural economic density is really a function of the amount of water per year. If the amount of water per year is based on rainwater, maybe you can have 500 people live in the city. If you bring the aqueduct, it goes to 5,000 or 50,000. And so the economic density requires the hydraulic flow for sanitation just to keep everybody alive. And so engineering the roads, engineering the aqueducts, it's the rails upon which the entire Iron age civilization was built. And Romans, if anything, they're engineers and they elevated engineering above all. And what is engineering? I mean, well, I'm an engineer. I think engineering is an incredibly honorable, ethical, life affirming profession. The basic credo of the engineer is I look at nature and I look at the circumstances that I'm surrounded by. And I use my intellect and every material and technique at hand in order to construct a better world for everyone and everything that I love. That's the credo. I'm not going to be a victim of circumstance. I'm going to actually change my circumstances with my intellect. And that might mean build a bridge, it might mean build an aqueduct, it might mean build a road, it might mean build a ship, whatever it is. Just like the beaver builds the dam, the engineer builds the world. You know, look at any city where you take the bridge down and try to figure out how life changes. And it's pretty consequential. So, you know, if we just, if we just leave, I'll leave you with one more vignette on Rome and then we'll move on, I think, to the Dark Ages. I have a holding company. The holding company is called Alcantara. And Alcantara is based upon something I saw in Alcantara, Spain. It's a Roman bridge. It stood for 2000 years. And if you go underneath that bridge, you'll find a Roman inscription in Latin where the Roman engineer, whose name is Julius Locker, said, quote, this bridge will stand for all time, unquote. They took their engineering seriously.
- [97:04]
Unknown
Right? Yeah. This I recall from Taleb's writing that the architects of, I actually think the Roman aqueducts there was a. To give the architects skin in the game, so to speak, that he would be required himself or even with his family at times to stand beneath the aqueduct as the scaffolding was removed. Right. So he knew it was his life and possibly his family's life on the line should his architectural abilities be incompetent. Right. So these people took. Again, it's a protocol, Right? It's a protocol and an incentive or a disincentive to malperformance for that architect to take his profession very seriously. I think too, another thing that came to mind is you're talking about Rome as being incipient to all these civilizational technologies and protocols we use. What ultimately led to the downfall of Rome was their monetary protocol being compromised. It was the debasement of the coin, I think started with Nero and eventually led to the forking into the East Roman Empire.
- [98:17]
Michael Saylor
And their political protocols. Compromise.
- [98:21]
Unknown
Yeah.
- [98:21]
Michael Saylor
A series of civil wars, Caesar's being the most famous, but a series of civil wars where the political protocols broke down even before the monetary protocols broke down. But you can see they're all related, right? At some point, the integrity of the society broke down. And when they lost their integrity across all these areas, the collapse of the political system begat the collapse of the military system, the religion. How do you maintain your patriotism in Rome when one Roman army is fighting another Roman army?
- [99:01]
Unknown
Right. Was there an inflection point that you recall that sort of led to all these protocols being compromised?
- [99:09]
Michael Saylor
You know, around 50 B.C. it all started going bad. Maybe I'll come back to it. A whole series of wars in Julius Caesar's youth, you know, and the rise of a series of strongmen and the weakening of the Roman Republic. Taleb, I think, makes great points in his books about, you know, how it's the death penalty in Babylon if you screwed with weights and measures, you know, or, you know, if you're a builder and your house collapses, right? You know, somehow your own family dies. They're definitely great skin in the point games, and they just skin in the game points. Sorry. And they just remind you that. That in a society the respects natural law, nature is not going to pity you. And she's not listening for excuses. You know, I know this is not quite relevant, but I can't help it but state it. The richest man in China a year or two years ago, was out on summer vacation in the south of France. The guy's worth 20, 30 billion dollars. And he decided to take a selfie or get a photo. And he stood up on a rock wall at some ancient ruin in the south of France. And while they were taking the photo, he slipped and fell off the side of the wall and plunge 50ft to his death. And again, somewhat emblematic of the point. It doesn't matter if you have an army of lawyers and a billion dollars of clout. In that last two seconds of his life, you know, he was punished by violating the law of gravity with a death sentence.
- [101:22]
Unknown
That's right.
- [101:25]
Michael Saylor
You know, gravity doesn't care who you are. Nature doesn't care. It doesn't. The richest man in China out of a billion people, and he was sentenced to immediate death, no appeal, in a split second for being careless. And when the society. When society forms all of these appeals and excuses and. And they let everybody off the hook, you know, it's like, well, if you make a market in accepting excuses and lawsuits, you're gonna get a lot of Lawsuits and a lot of excuses.
- [102:00]
Unknown
Right?
- [102:01]
Michael Saylor
Yeah.
- [102:03]
Unknown
This is. And then too big to fail institutions. Right. We're interrupting this evolutionary impulse. We're not learning at a business and civilizational level when we preserve institutions artificially.
- [102:20]
Michael Saylor
Yeah. I'm very persuaded by all of the points made by Taleb and also by the paleo theorist about the importance of pain in life. Pain is a natural teacher, and you can learn a lot of things via pain. Right. You try to pick up a chair the wrong way, you. You do something, you know, the wrong fashion, and the pain is a feedback and it's information. And when you try to cut off the pain flow through anesthetics or steroid shots or cortisone or QE or QE or an appeal or lawyer or a bribe or however it is, you avoid paying the price, the consequences for your misstep. Right. It's try to suspend gravity. Well, good luck with that.
- [103:20]
Unknown
Right, right, right.
- [103:22]
Michael Saylor
If you could have suspended gravity, you know, for a billion dollars in that one second, how much other screwy stuff would have happened everywhere else in the world while that gravity was suspended?
- [103:33]
Unknown
Exactly.
- [103:34]
Michael Saylor
The damage would have been maybe a million times worse.
- [103:37]
Robert Breedlove
Yeah.
- [103:39]
Michael Saylor
Gravity is key.
- [103:40]
Unknown
There's a good reason you can't compromise nature's protocols. Right. And we should mirror that through natural law.
- [103:49]
Michael Saylor
That would be the healthy approach. Right. That's the Paleo theory. That's the theory of antifragility, that's the theory of Austrian economics and capitalism properly understood, and Darwinian evolution and natural equilibrium.
- [104:15]
Robert Breedlove
So how awesome was that? Right. Michael's incredible. He's very deeply knowledgeable about all things history, tech, and energy. I hope you found that conversation as fascinating as I did. And I got a lot of fresh insights talking to Michael. And I love the initial introduction of. There's never been such thing as a fear of fight. Right. So it's as if everything in nature is always trying to sharpen its strategy to figure out a better, faster, cheaper way of doing things, namely getting food, reproducing, things like that. So I thought that was really interesting, and there's a nice corollary there between sort of ecological strategies that an animal might use and a business strategy. That's the nature of innovation as well. So I came to see evolution, evolution and innovation as things that are very closely connected. You know, evolution being kind of the organic form of innovation, or innovation being the inorganic form of evolution, which I thought was super fascinating. And, you know, it's fascinating to me that thinking is what makes us the apex predator. Right. It's our ability to run these simulations of future action, right? We can actually spin up avatars and other elements of a situation and think through them before we actually execute. And we can also communicate about it with one another so we can out coordinate other animals, right? So even though we may not have the most vicious physical appendages in the world, it's our wits that make us men, that allow us to out compete and be dominant, frankly, the dominant species in the world. So I thought that was super interesting. And on that same vein, another changed my own worldview was how Michael describes that human beings, as far as he could tell, are the only animal that play with fire. And, and by harnessing fire and harnessing energy, we're actually channeling energy across our intellect. That's another way to think about it is that we create these idea structures in the world. And the visualization I have in my mind is almost like a magnetic field. If you've ever seen a diagram of a magnetic field, there are these field lines that emanate out and circle back from kind of the north pole to the south pole. It's almost as if we can project this intellectual magnetic field lines into the world and then actually channel energy through them to create things and do things, right? These are the weapons we use, these are the structures we build. These are even like a boat, right? We, we figured out how to reconstruct the raw materials of nature in accordance with an established intellectual pattern, such that that boat now has buoyancy, right? And we can move ourselves without friction across water. So this is a super interesting new way to look at the world. And as he went into the three primal technologies basically, that helped us build everything around us are fire, missiles and hydraulics. And fire serves as, you know, the prime energy network for humanity. And one thing I've long thought about, which is really interesting, is that it's not. It's common for us to think of energy and different forms, right? Like we think of gravitational energy versus kinetic versus heat energy, all these different forms of energy. But if you really zoom out, I think every bit of energy that we harness on the planet is essentially solar energy, right? So like even hydrocarbons, which are very popular today, like oil, natural gas, which combusting these hydrocarbons. But what they actually are, what the hydrocarbons actually are, is ancient sunlight that's fallen on the earth, right? It fed and formed this biological matter, you know, plants, plants that fed the herbivores and the herbivores that fed the omnivores and carnivores. And all this energy capture basically dies and decomposes and, and that's what becomes these layers, these sedimented layers of hydrocarbons, of oil and whatnot. So in a way, any form of energy we tap, even if we think it's gravitational energy, I mean, I guess the Earth does exert its own gravitational energy to some degree, but a lot of it's coming from its rotation around the sun, right? So most of the energy, if not all we harness in the world is actually a form of solar energy. Like the sun is truly our divine Father, if you want to call it that, or our cosmic Father, I guess. And I guess the one other caveat to that might be starlight. You know, it contributes a small amount of energy to the world, but for all intents and purposes, all energy is solar. And I think that was a really, just an interesting way to look at things. And when we harness fire, right, we have this force that has, it's a self generating form of energy. So once we figured out how to spark the fire and control it, we had a form of energy that could just expand and produce and generate itself, right? And we use this for a lot of purposes to clearly how he described clearing a forest with fire, thought that was very interesting, super efficient way to clear a path of predators, of obstacles. You know, fire is really good at that. And then it also, it improved visibility for us at night, right? Like because night was our worst enemy before fire. Like when darkness fell, we were essentially neutered. You know, we're visual creatures. Humans rely on their visual acuity as their primary sense. So under the COVID of darkness, we've lost this primary sense organ. And fire allowed us to re establish that, right? We could actually use it to wield off predators. We could use it to set up camp. It just improved visibility for us in more hours of the day. And it's a great example too, I think, of how our conscious decisions and what we construct and the things we use can actually shape us. We can actually co evolve with our conscious decisions. An example of this would be specific to fire is candlelight. So, so again, before we could harness fire reliably, we didn't really have illumination after the sun went down, right? So candlelight gave us all this newfound time to stay up late, reading, studying, planning, all these things that help make us more intelligent over time created this feedback loop where we discovered fire. And all of a sudden fire allowed us, gave us all this found time or discovered time to continually expand our intellectual horizons even further. Another thing was cooking Cooking's so fascinating that harnessing fire to cook, we're actually pre digesting our food. So we liberated nutrients more easily, right? We reduced the metabolic load on the body to break down food. And by doing that, we freed up resources internally that were reallocated to cognitive development. So by figuring out fire, we were able to break down food more easily, pre digest it, and then we freed up energy to become smarter, right? And figure out more ways to channel that energy across our intellect. So that was just like mind blowing. And then finally, the fire based signaling systems he referred to, right? With watchtowers, flashing signal fires and whatnot. It was actually that's like the original telecommunication network where we could project our intellect farther and faster into the world, right. We further increased that core human capability of collaboration because now we didn't need to be within earshot of each other. We could be at long distance, right? Just, just to be able to see a signal fire from even miles away. We could communicate certain information, especially when we developed codes, right? Like a Morse code. You could, you could use my signal. Fire allowed us to send information at the speed of light essentially over a relatively, relatively short distance today, but at the time a relatively long distance. And then the second stone age technology that was really impactful were missiles. I thought this was super cool because I've never even thought of missiles on the same level as fire or water. But it's such a great point because again, back to that original point of there's never been a fair fight in the universe. So the way humans can out compete in nature is by engaging in predetermined unfair fights, right? Like we need to engage in conflict, that we know we have an asymmetric advantage so we can preserve ourselves clearly and that we can, we can obtain the most food energy for the lowest energy expenditure, right? So like, like his analogy, do you want to go wrestle with a lion or a bear or do you want to hit it with a sling or an arrow from 100 yards away, right. There's much less energy exerted for a much higher outcome of energy consumption in the form of food. And the slings and arrows, like giving us the power to deliver force faster, harder and stronger. Super interesting stuff. And then giving us the ability to really develop the element of surprise in battle, right. The advantage to be able to select from where we're going to start the engagement, right, from high ground, ideally with the sun at our back, with the wind in our face, downwind, whatever it may be. It gave human beings the optionality to select when and where they would engage their prey and just really interesting stuff, you know, like I thought it was so cool. And then that, you know, back to the whole Sun Tzu thing of terrain being the primary element in any battle, right? So a bear is probably the most dominant terrestrial creature. Whereas say in the ocean, say it's a great white shark or something, the bear is going to whip the shark on land and the shark's going to destroy the bear in the water. So it's all about the terrain, right? The terrain is the first order of consideration in any battle. And by using missile technology, it lets the aggressor choose the terrain. So I just thought that was, that was super interesting, really cool stuff. And then the third one, we talked about hydraulics and I thought a lot about water and how clearly influential and impactful it is on our development. And you know, we are water, right? We're constituted of 70% water. The old adage, I think you three minutes without oxygen, three days without water, three months without food, you're dead. So water is very important to have all the time. But I hadn't, other than boats and buoyancy in general, I hadn't really thought about the use of, of hydraulics and channeling gravitational energy. I thought it was really cool how he brought up the great pyramids actually at least theoretically being partially constructed using hydraulics that they would drill these long tubes or trenches and use the buoyancy of water, its polarity acting as a result resistant to gravity. And they would use that to move, to overcome gravity essentially and move these giant blocks that otherwise couldn't, that we just simply could not. And that led to the construction of, you know, like the great pyramids and these other monumental constructions that we simply could not have completed using raw human power, right? We again had to use our intellect and channel energy across it to accomplish greater feats than we could using just our God given capabilities here or our physical capabilities. And I love the analogy, you know, about the beaver being nature's engineer. I thought it's just so fascinating that it's not like humans do have this ability to channel energy across the intellect. And we have the highest order of it clearly. But there's something in nature too where, you know, the beaver is a great example that he's actually, he's eating these trees that says food. And then it's also, he's constructing an environment for himself that's conducive to reproduction, right? He builds his little fort blocks, the river creates an entrance under the water and then he has a safe place to mate and raise children. It's as if nature has this impulse to become smarter, right? So although there is this big distinction between man and animal, it just pointed to me that there's also a continuum, right? Even like I think of a squirrel that maybe buries nuts for the winter, he's kind of engaging in a form of delayed gratification. He's not necessarily behaving like an economist per se, but he's sort of a little bit closer than like a purely predatory animal that maybe just eats whenever it can, or a bird that builds a nest. You know, all these things that nature really is making best use of the gifts that Earth bears. And I think on that continuum, humanity is just at the far, far, far end, right? And that's why we're so dominant. And I love the example too, talking about the mode of water as an effective defensive technology. I think this points to a lot of history. This when, say, America forked off of Great Britain, it was the mote of water, right, the Atlantic Ocean, that made it so difficult for England to continue to project its dominion onto America. And that's what led to the Revolutionary War, right. And led to American independence. And there's been a lot of writing. I read a book called the next 100 years that made a pretty emphatic case for North America's geographic situation where we have the Atlantic on one side, Pacific on the other. All of this coastal access makes us a great trading partner with both east and West. It gives us a massive military advantage in that we can deploy military assets and into both moats, if you will, very easily. And I just, I thought that was super interesting, that whole discussion. And then, you know, when he got into the discussion of the Mediterranean a little bit, how it was actually the cities around the Mediterranean, because it was kind of the perfect trading ground, a place to move goods and services across water with super low energy, right? Because again, the description of trying to push a block by hand versus putting on a boat, you can push it with one hand, right? It. Once we gain the frictionless or near frictionlessness of water, all of a sudden the utility of energy becomes super high, right? We can, we can accomplish great results with very small effort. And so these cities that dotted the inside of the Mediterranean, this created a super energy efficient network of trade, right? And that's what became kind of the cradle of civilization, right? That's where civilization first picked up because there was so much, so much economic density resulted from the low energy requirements of trade within the Mediterranean. So I just thought it was super fascinating that again, back to the terrain being primary to any battle, even if it's an economic battle. Right? That's just very, very good stuff. And then we got into the Romans and how they conquered the western world. And the insight for me there was that they, because of the civilizing force of trade and the interdependency they had, the Romans actually became dominant due to their self organization, right? They were the most organized group of humans up to that point in history. History. And that's why they became so wealthy and they became so imperial. Right. They created so much wealth and civilization in and around that cradle that they actually started to expand outwards and they developed methods of doing this in accordance with the seasons, right? So they would go out and they'll military campaign in the summer and they would come back and have their election processes in the winter or whatever the exact timing was. And then they would repeat the whole thing again in the following year. And then they also adapted this seasonal ebb and flow into their political structure, right? So they were giving everyone their chance, right. To make sure that the high hierarchy that constituted their civilization was being constantly revivified with the most competent people. So they would, you know, shut off this, this leader and let someone else be elected and all of that. That thought and political structure is what underpins Western civilization today, right. That is, that is the origin of the democratic process as we know it today. So just so fascinating to me how deeply connected we are to history and this, the other thing that came out to me was it was the ancient Romans that realized the value in establishing a common protocol.
- [124:42]
Michael Saylor
Right?
- [124:43]
Robert Breedlove
So protocol being a means of interaction or a form of interaction or a mode of interaction like language or a rule set that we both abide by. And when those rules are consensually adopted and firm, right. It gives us the ability to make a lot of things irrelevant. We can kind of trust the rule set, trust that we're both going to play by the rules and we just focus on playing the game. Whereas if the rules are messy and we don't know how, if this person is going to follow the rules next year or not, or if the rules are going to change next year or not, we can't plan. We don't gain that ability to have a deeper time horizon or a lower time preference because the rules are mushy, right. We can't trust one another as well. So there's a connection there between the firmness of the rule set and the development of interpersonal trust. And the proliferation of civilization, right? Which we could think of civilization as essentially being a lower aggregate time preference for the civilization. The lower their time preference becomes, the more civilized they are. And these things find their peak expression in arts and culture and morals. All of these things. So really interesting to me how all, all of that just built itself in layers, right from the energy efficiency and economic density afforded by the Mediterranean built into this civilization, built into this political structure, built into this military structure. It's just really changing the way I saw all of that. Such a history lesson for me and that to too these common protocols. He told the story of the gentleman on the aircraft carrier that the potential for everyone needs their turn. It's an amazingly potent motivational force for everyone in the civilization. And again, how I relate to that is as a kid there was this notion that anyone could become person president in school. And maybe that was just a silly, it is a silly thing. But just the thought of that as a kid seemed to be motivational. Kids are like, oh yeah, I'll be president one day and so I'll get good grades and try hard at sport and be good and eat my vegetables, whatever it is. It's like because there is this incredibly high aspirational goal, you are incentivized and even entrench intrinsically. It's an extrinsic motivation. But you find, I think through that you find an intrinsic motivation to be your best and highest, most competent self. So I thought that was really interesting that the Romans zeroed in on that so long ago. And then two they, you know, he told the story of the Romans discovering the wrecked ship and then they reverse engineered it and then a few months later they built, you know, a whole fleet of these things. So it goes back to that concept of to never have, to never be shameful to emulate. Right? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattering, I guess. But in a more pragmatic sense, if there is a solution out there that works better than what you have, you can't really be afraid to copy it and reproduce it. I mean, that's sort of what the markets are designed to do, right? Which gets into why things like intellectual property are bogus. Because you can't own an idea necessarily, right? You can satisfy wants to the highest degree or at the lowest cost, and that's how you'll be successful in the marketplace. But the idea of owning an idea gets us more really on that slippery slope toward totalitarianism where things like numbers could be made illegal or certain words could be owned like, it just doesn't make sense. So thought it was interesting that the Romans really pressed their military advantage by readily copying ideas from either their enemies or from their forebears. And the other thing there about protocols, you know, we mentioned that they laid out these political protocols, but it's as if by standardizing, right, we were talking about, I think, the width of the wheel, which has actually been carried over to the width of a rail track today by standardizing under these common structural protocols, political protocols, again, firm rule sets, that they were able to increase their efficiency tremendously, right? So their productivity and output just exploded. And you can think about this even with, like home construction, right? If by standardizing to one type of screw or a few types of screws for different purposes, you can produce all of these things at a huge economy of scale, right? So you can produce these screws at a very low cost, which would increase the total output of new homes or whatever you're constructing with the screws, versus if everyone did their own custom screw, nothing would be interchangeable. It would be hard to produce these things at scale, everything. It would localize the economy for screws, which would drastically restrict productivity. So I love, I love this interesting connection between protocol standardization and economic output and prosperity. Thought that was super fascinating. And then, you know, this one really blew me away. The credo of the engineer, as Saylor referred to as someone that looks at their surroundings and then that makes use of their intellect and all the materials available to them to construct a better world. I mean, how beautiful is that? It's poetic. And it seems to me, I think he said at one point to engineer is divine. It's so interesting to me that that's what we are. We are creative creatures by definition. Like as an example, ask yourself, what is the purpose of a hand? What is the purpose of your hand? It's a really hard question to answer because the hand is by definition multi purpose, right? It can do so many different things. It can grip, it can grab, it can punch, we can write, we can type, we can think. I mean, all these different things we can signal to one another. The hand is itself. We're equipped with these ultra multipurpose tools. And I think in terms of humanity trying to channel energy across their intellect, that it is, the hand is kind of the primary output of that. That intent, which I thought was just really, really kind of a different way to see things for me. And then finally he got into natural law, which we could define as the pursuit of, or the right to liberty, property and life. So the right to be free, right to freely experiment and explore, so long as you do not tread on the freedom of others. The right to property, which is property, is not the asset itself. I'll talk about this a lot, but property is the relationship between the individual that spends time investing and recreating or making an asset and that asset. So if I go out and spend my time building a boat, a system with sound property rights would say that I have exclusive rights to that boat, the area that I invested my time and energy, the thing that I spend my time and energy to create, I have exclusive rights to that object that I can, then I can actually trade those rights with other self sovereign people. And that's the flywheel of economic activity.
- [133:08]
Unknown
Right.
- [133:08]
Robert Breedlove
So we can each specialize in a craft, but we can reliably go into the market and obtain other things of value.
- [133:14]
Unknown
Right.
- [133:14]
Robert Breedlove
We could trade our own craft for other things and satisfy all of our wants, but still just have a narrow scope of specialization that allows us to become super adept at that particular area. But that adeptness benefits everyone because we're trading it into the marketplace. Right? So making the point that societies that deeply respected natural law tend to succeed, they tend to out compete because they are voluntary games, Right. If we respect natural law, we respect people's right to life, to liberty and to property, then all of a sudden they willingly embrace that society and they work for it and they'll die for it. Right? That's what even the principles America was founded upon are these principles essentially. Clearly we've drifted a lot since. But that is, that is at the bedrock of Western civilization. And then at the opposite end of the spectrum when you, as I would say, America probably is much more closer to today, when you make a market for appeals and excuses, you're likely to get a lot more of both. Right? So as Cicero put this really succinctly, he said, the more laws, the less justice. So I think beautiful how the Romans embraced natural law, implemented it into their society, into their culture, and that became the heritage that's pouring forth to us and forming the sediment of Western civilization. And I think it's incumbent upon us to study this and see how far we've drifted from where say America was, was founded in 1776 to where we are today. How much the state has actually become antithetical to this entire process. We have this super over regulated environment, you know, a vast proliferation of complex laws and you know, a commensurate downfall injustice worldwide. So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. I thought it was just mind blowing. And we're just getting started, so I'll see you back. Back to the next one.