Michael Saylor tells Jordan Peterson why the dollar is collapsing and how Bitcoin offers a solution to preserve your wealth against rampant inflation.
Timestamp Overview
[00:00:00 - 00:07:43] The Frustrated CEO
- Michael Saylor explains that currencies have historically collapsed every 30-40 years, with even the “winning” US dollar losing 99.9% of its value over a century.
- He describes his 30-year journey building his software company, MicroStrategy, and the frustration of hitting a growth plateau.
- Despite trying every business strategy imaginable, his company struggled to grow against digital giants like Microsoft, becoming a “zombie company”—profitable but uninteresting to investors.
- He found that nine out of ten of his business ventures failed, forcing him to refocus on his core software business, which still faced immense challenges.
[00:07:43 - 00:15:16] Two Paths: Hard Work vs. Smart Investment
- Saylor contrasts his professional life with his personal financial life. Professionally, he worked thousands of hours a year for very slow growth.
- Personally, he spent about an hour a month investing in tech giants like Apple and Amazon, which he identified early on, and made a fortune.
- This created a frustrating paradox: his hard work barely moved the needle, while simple, insightful investments yielded massive returns.
- He understood that digital networks like Apple and Amazon created “winner-take-all” monopolies because they could deliver new features to a billion people instantly at almost no cost.
[00:15:16 - 00:26:02] The Mind of an Innovator
- Saylor credits his unique way of thinking to his childhood love of science fiction (Heinlein, Asimov), fantasy (Dungeons & Dragons), and a voracious reading habit.
- This background, combined with his MIT education in astronautics and system dynamics, allowed him to see the world as a complex system of interconnected parts.
- He explains that fantasy teaches you to imagine things that aren’t bound by physical laws, which is essential for creating in “cyberspace.”
- He uses powerful metaphors like “angels and demons” to explain complex digital concepts because simple, memorable images are more effective than long, technical explanations in an age of information overload.
[00:26:02 - 00:44:17] A Crisis and a Turning Point
- In March 2020, the world changed. COVID lockdowns destroyed “Main Street” businesses while Wall Street investors got richer due to government money printing and zero-percent interest rates.
- Saylor’s company, MicroStrategy, held $500 million in cash that was now earning 0% interest, effectively losing value every day due to inflation.
- His company was facing a “slow death” as its cash reserves dwindled and its top talent could be easily poached by remote-first tech giants.
- At age 55, facing this crisis, he decided he wasn’t going to “drift quietly out of history” and began searching for a way to fight back.
[00:44:17 - 01:02:20] The Search for Real Money
- Saylor realized he needed to convert his company’s cash into an asset that would hold its value.
- He dismissed buying stocks or real estate because their prices had been artificially inflated by the government’s monetary policy.
- He considered gold but saw its flaw: the supply of gold increases by about 2% every year, meaning it slowly loses its value over time.
- He asked himself: What if you could engineer a “perfect” version of gold? One that was weightless, easy to send anywhere, and had a fixed supply that could never be increased? This led him back to Bitcoin.
[01:02:20 - 01:27:26] Bitcoin: A Bank in Cyberspace
- Saylor explains that the official inflation number (CPI) is misleading. The real inflation rate, especially for assets you want to own (like a house), is much higher.
- He describes Bitcoin as the solution: a non-sovereign, digital property that is thermodynamically sound, meaning it’s a closed system that can’t be debased.
- He calls Bitcoin a “bank in cyberspace,” run by a global network of computers that don’t need to trust each other, making it incredibly secure and resilient.
- He argues that Bitcoin is an ideology of truth and self-sovereignty made real through software, allowing people to preserve the value of their life’s work without fear of corruption or inflation.
Notable Quotes
Currency Collapse
On average, the currency collapses every 30 to 40 years in most political jurisdictions for all of human history.
Michael Saylor @saylor
The US Dollar
The winning currency of the 20th century, the best currency in the world, lost 99.9% of its value. That's a winner.
Michael Saylor @saylor
Inflation
Your storehouse of value, whatever it is, is going to be deflated terribly during your lifetime.
Jordan Peterson @jordanbpeterson
Entrepreneurship
How do you make money in the tech world? You invest in something everybody needs, nobody can stop. And very few people understand.
Michael Saylor @saylor
Bitcoin's Security
If God's not going to set up Divine Bank and solve all your monetary problem, what's the second best idea?
Michael Saylor @saylor
Personal Ambition
I just thought, is this all there is? There's got to be more. I wanted to change the world.
Michael Saylor @saylor
The Nature of Money
I need a liquid fungible asset which will store my economic energy for an indefinite period of time. So what is money? I'm looking for money.
Michael Saylor @saylor
Digital Monopolies
Apple's going to be the most valuable company in the world because it's the first time one company could deliver a feature to a billion people overnight.
Michael Saylor @saylor
The Bitcoin Standard
If God offered you that kind of divine bank... and you were sitting in Argentina when the currency was collapsing to zero... you'd take it.
Michael Saylor @saylor
Parental Faith
My mother believed it, she believed in me, she imbued it in me, and for whatever, if your parents think that about you, they program you and it works.
Michael Saylor @saylor
Misleading Statistics
You can't tell people what to think, but you can tell them what to think about. And so I want you to think that inflation is CPI. It's not.
Michael Saylor @saylor
Bitcoin's Ideology
Bitcoin's based upon engineering principles, mathematical soundness, consistency, integrity, truth.
Michael Saylor @saylor
Questions & Answers
Question 1: What pivotal event caused Michael Saylor to invest in Bitcoin?
Answer: The crisis of March 2020 was the pivotal event. Saylor explained that COVID-19 lockdown policies, combined with the Federal Reserve’s decision to cut interest rates to zero, created a disastrous economic environment for his company, MicroStrategy. The company’s $500 million cash reserve was becoming a “melting ice cube” due to inflation, and Wall Street’s recovery while Main Street suffered felt fundamentally unjust. This “war on currency” forced him to find a non-sovereign store of value to protect his company’s assets, leading him to an intense study and eventual adoption of Bitcoin.
Question 2: Why does Saylor believe conventional assets like gold or stocks were not good investments in 2020?
Answer: Saylor stated that by the time he was looking for an asset to buy in mid-2020, stocks and real estate had already been massively inflated by the Federal Reserve’s zero-interest-rate policy, making them poor entry points. He considered gold but concluded it was an imperfect store of value because its supply inflates by about 2% annually due to mining. Over a century, this inflation significantly erodes its value. He was looking for a “perfected” version of gold, which he ultimately found in Bitcoin’s finite supply.
Question 3: How does Saylor explain the concept of inflation to a general audience?
Answer: Saylor argues that thinking of inflation as a single number, like the Consumer Price Index (CPI), is wrong. He describes inflation as a “vector,” meaning there are thousands of different inflation rates for every product and asset, and these rates change constantly and differ by location. He asserts that the government promotes the CPI to make inflation seem low, but the real inflation for desirable assets like property in major cities is much higher, closer to 7% or more annually, which halves the value of your money every decade.
Question 4: How does Saylor address concerns about Bitcoin being hacked or shut down?
Answer: Saylor explains that Bitcoin is not just a piece of software but an ideology, a protocol, and a network. He compares its resilience to that of the English language or base-10 mathematics—they are protocols that persist even if individual applications fail. He describes the network as a “fault-tolerant, shared-nothing, mission-critical, nuclear-hardened system” because it is decentralized across thousands of computers worldwide. An attack on one part of the network, or a new technology like quantum computing, would not destroy the whole system, as the protocol could be upgraded by the community to defend against new threats.
People and Organizations Mentioned
- Michael Saylor: The guest, a billionaire entrepreneur, CEO of MicroStrategy, and a prominent Bitcoin evangelist. He explains his journey to adopting a Bitcoin standard for his company.
- Jordan Peterson: The host of the podcast, a clinical psychologist, author, and cultural commentator.
- MicroStrategy: Michael Saylor’s enterprise software company, which he founded in 1989. It was the first publicly traded company to adopt Bitcoin as its primary treasury reserve asset.
- Microsoft: A multinational technology corporation. Saylor mentioned competing against Microsoft as a major challenge for MicroStrategy’s growth.
- Angel.com, Alarm.com, Voice.com, Strategy.com, Hope.com: Domain names and businesses Saylor started during his “expansionary era.” Alarm.com was spun off and became a multi-billion dollar company.
- Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook (Magnificent 7): Tech giants Saylor invested in personally, which generated massive returns and highlighted the “winner-take-all” nature of the digital economy.
- Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov: Known as the “Big Three” of science fiction. Saylor credits their work as a major influence on his thinking and ambition.
- MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): A prestigious research university where Saylor studied aeronautical and astronautical engineering.
- Jay Forrester: A pioneering American computer engineer and systems scientist, mentioned as the founder of the System Dynamics school of thought at MIT.
- Thomas Kuhn: An American physicist and philosopher of science who introduced the concept of the “paradigm shift” in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
- Jerome Powell: The 16th Chair of the Federal Reserve. Saylor mentioned his 2020 decision to cut interest rates to zero as a key catalyst for his move into Bitcoin.
- Andreas Antonopoulos: A prominent Bitcoin advocate, author, and educator. Saylor mentioned watching his work to learn about cryptocurrencies.
- Satoshi Nakamoto: The pseudonymous person or group who created Bitcoin.
- John Harrison: An 18th-century English clockmaker who solved the problem of calculating longitude at sea by creating a hyper-accurate clock (the marine chronometer). Saylor uses him as an example of brilliant, practical engineering.
- Eric Weiss: A crypto entrepreneur and investor who Saylor credits as the person who prompted his deep dive into Bitcoin. In 2020, Saylor asked Weiss, “Tell me about that Bitcoin thing again,” a conversation that started his journey down the “rabbit hole.” Weiss is the founder and CIO of the Bitcoin Investment Group (BIG) and a long-time friend of Michael Saylor.