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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Michael Saylor – The Physics of Bitcoin (#110)

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Brian Keating

Physics, Natural Sciences, Science

4.71.1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 January 2021

⏱️ 104 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Michael J. Saylor is an American entrepreneur and business executive, who co-founded & leads MicroStrategy, a company that provides business intelligence, mobile software, and cloud-based services. Saylor, an MIT trained engineer, authored the 2012 book The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything. He is also the sole trustee of Saylor Academy ( www.saylor.org ), a provider of free online education. As of 2016, Saylor has been granted 31 patents and has 9 additional applications under review. We covered a ton of content in this interview including ‘the physics of money’, the purpose of wealth, and Michael’s philosophy of life. You won’t want to miss his philosophy of life. To get them, please join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php On MicroStrategy’s quarterly earnings conference call in July 2020, Saylor announced his intention for MicroStrategy to explore purchasing Bitcoin, gold, or other alternative assets instead of holding cash. The following month, MicroStrategy used $250 million from its cash stockpile to purchase 21,454 Bitcoin. MicroStrategy added $175 million of Bitcoin to its holdings in September 2020 and another $50 million in early December 2020. On December 11, 2020, MicroStrategy announced that it had sold $650 million in convertible senior notes, taking on debt to increase its Bitcoin holdings to over $1 billion worth. On December 21, 2020 MicroStrategy announced their total holdings include 70,470 bitcoins purchased for $1.125 billion at an average price of $15,964 per bitcoin. Saylor, who controls 70% of MicroStrategy’s shares, dismissed concerns by observers that the move is turning MicroStrategy into a Bitcoin investment firm or exchange-traded fund (ETF). In 1999, Saylor established The Saylor Foundation (later named Saylor Academy), of which he is the sole trustee. To support his goal of making free education available to all students, Saylor.org was launched in 2008 as the free education initiative of The Saylor Foundation. The site now offers roughly 100 college courses that are supported by free content from universities including MIT and Carnegie Mellon University, that students can access without having to pass through an admissions process 00:00:00 Introduction 00:04:00 The story of the book cover 00:07:35 What’s the next (6th?) technology wave? 00:10:55 The next megatrend: Virtualization 00:18:17 Why are there ridges on coins? 00:19:36 Where gold comes from, and can virtual currencies replace real ones? 00:22:22 Why gold as a currency standar? And what sets the price of oil? 00:36:20 Why is blockchain is so great now? 00:40:27 The Pandemic as a catalyst. 00:40:57 Risk management in science and all things.   Join My Mailing List (briankeating.com) to hear his answers to the Thrilling Three Questions What is in his ethical will? What would he put on your billion-year monument? What advice would he give to himself as a 20-year-old to have the courage to go ‘Into the Impossible’?   Watch my most popular videos: Jim Simons, the World’s Smartest Billionaire  Bill Perkins: DIE WITH ZERO:  Patr Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hi everybody I just finished a really long and wide-ranging conversation with Michael

0:05.2

Saylor who's been in the news a lot because of his really prescient forays into the world of

0:12.2

blockchain and Bitcoin specifically he's the chairman

0:15.9

founder president of micro strategy which is a technology company and its own right but has been very, very deep as an exponent,

0:26.5

proponent of blockchain not only for personal gains but really to improve the world as you'll hear about he

0:35.2

really wants to use his wealth that he's gaining to educate everybody on earth

0:41.3

for free that's really his mission. Sounds crazy, but I think he could do it.

0:46.2

And I like that he has an engineering approach to things. He thinks about things things he constantly references the second law

0:53.6

thermodynamics so he's got to be good in this physicist book we talked about a lot

0:58.1

of things including science fiction Arthur C. Clark what he put in his ethical will I think you're going to love it. Please leave a comment in the

1:05.8

section below. We're going to make our, you know, kind of investment pioneers playlist with Jim

1:11.1

Simons, Bill Perkins, Patrick Bet Devide, and now with Michael

1:15.8

Saylor he agreed to come back on a part two someday, so look forward to that

1:20.2

put comments for him in the future.

1:22.9

Please sit back, enjoy this next episode

1:27.0

of Into the Impossible with Michael Saylor.

1:29.2

And it made me think that maybe they should

1:30.5

be giving out Nobel Prizes instead of in gold like this one here, but in

1:34.6

Bitcoin, blockchain, now who knows, it could go down, who knows what's going to happen, this is not

1:40.5

investment advice, I wish I could buy a Bitcoin, but for now I'm taking his advice to at least investigate it and not view it with as much derision as I confess I did before. So enjoy this episode of the Into the

1:55.7

Impossible Podcast and like, comment, subscribe, do all those cool things that you're

1:59.3

supposed to do and it keeps the podcast going and add free. Otherwise I'm going to be doing stuff for like

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