Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money | Lex Fridman Podcast #276

Remember George Washington? You know how he died? Well-meaning physicians bled him to death. And this was the most important patient in the country, maybe in the history of the country, and it's, and we bled him to death trying to help him. So when you're actually inflating the money supply at 7% but you're calling it 2% because you wanna help the economy, you're literally bleeding the, uh, the free market to death. But the sad fact is George Washington went along with it 'cause he thought that they were gonna do him good, and the majority of, of, uh, the society, most companies, most, most conventional thinkers, you know, the working class, they go along with this because they think that, uh, someone has their best interest in mind. And the people that are bleeding them to death believe, they, they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective.

The following is a conversation with Michael Saylor, one of the most prominent and brilliant Bitcoin proponents in the world. He is the CEO of MicroStrategy, founder of Saylor Academy, graduate of MIT, and Michael is one of the most fascinating and rigorous thinkers I've ever gotten a chance to explore ideas with. He can effortlessly zoom out to the big perspectives of human civilization and human history and zoom back in to the technical details of blockchains, markets, governments, and financial systems. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Michael Saylor. Let's start with the big question of truth and wisdom. When advanced humans or aliens or AI systems, let's say five to 10 centuries from now, look back at Earth on this early 21st century, how much do you think they would say we understood about money and economics, or even about engineering, science, life, death, meaning, intelligence, consciousness, all the big, interesting questions?

I think they would, uh, probably give us a B-minus on engineering, on all the engineering things, the, the hard sciences.

A passing grade.

A pa- pa... Like, we're, we're doing okay. We're working our way through rockets and jets and electric cars and, uh, el- electricity transport systems and nuclear power and space flight and the like. And, you know, if you, if you look at the walls that, uh, grace the great court at MIT, it's full of all the great thinkers, and, and they're all pretty admirable, you know? Ne- if you could be with Newton or Gauss or Madame Curie or Einstein, you know, you would respect them. I would say they'd give us, like, a, a D-minus on economics. Like, uh, m- you know, an F-plus or a D-minus.

You, you see, I have an optimistic vision. First of all, optimistic vision of engineering, because everybody you've listed, not everybody but most people you've listed is just over the past couple of centuries, and maybe it stretches a little farther back. But mostly all the cool stuff we've done in engineering, the p- is the past couple of centuries.