YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Saylor

lines on the record: 260
first: 2022-04-14
most recent: 2022-04-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And the rise in the human condition is determined by those groups of people, those civilizations that were best at harnessing energy. And if you look at the Greek civilization, they built it around ports and seaports and water and created a trading network. The Romans were really good at harnessing all sorts of engineering. I mean, the aqueducts are a great example. Go to any big city, you travel through cities in the med, you find that the carrying capacity of the city or the island is 5,000 people without running water. And then if you can find a way to bring water to it increases by a factor of 10. And so human flourishing is really only possible through that channeling of energy that eventually takes the form of air power, right? I mean,”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engineering, harnessing energy and technique to make the world a better place than you found it. From the point that we actually started to play with fire, right, that was a big leap forward, harnessing the power of kinetic energy and missiles, another step forward. Every city built on water, why water? Well, water is bringing energy, right? If you actually... You actually put a turbine on a river or you capture a change in elevation of water, you've literally harnessed gravitational energy, but water is also bringing you food. It's also giving you a cheap form of getting rid of your waste. It's also giving you free transportation. You want to move one ton blocks around. You want to move them in water. I mean, the human story is really the story of engineering a better world.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think what distinguishes human beings from all the other creatures on the earth is Ability to engineer. We're engineers, right?”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The working class go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest at mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective and their understanding of energy and engineering and the economics that are at play is crippled by these mental models.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Single first thing, right? You show up after any action. I look at you, stop the bleeding because you're going to be dead in a matter of minutes. If you bleed out, so it strikes me as being ironic that Orthodox conventional wisdom was bleed the patient to death. And this was the most important patient in the country. Maybe in the history of the country, 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 want to help the economy, you're literally bleeding the free market to death. But the sad fact is George Washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good. And the majority of the society, most companies, most conventional thinkers.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The last thing in the world you would want to do to a sick person is bleed them, right? In the modern world, I think we understand that oxygen is carried by the blood cells. And if there's that phrase, right, triage phrase. What's the first thing you do in an injury? Stop the bleeding.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like the half life of the money is three to four years in Venezuela one year. So the United States dollar and the United States economic system was the most successful economic system in the last hundred years in the world. We won every war. We were the world superpower. Our currency lost 99.7% of its value. And that means horrifically every other currency lost everything. In essence, the other ones were 99.9 except for most that were 100% because they all completely failed. And, you know, you've got a mainstream economic community that thinks that inflation is a number and 2% is desirable. It's kind of like. You know, remember George Washington, you know how he died? Well meaning physicians bled him to death.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, two percent means you have a useful life of, you know, it's half-life of 35 years. Two percent is a half-life of 35 years. That's basically the half-life of money and gold. If I store your life force in gold under perfect circumstances, you have a useful life at 35 years. Zero percent is a useful life of forever. So 0% is immortal. 2% is 35 years average life expectancy. So the idea that you would think the life expectancy of the currency in the civilization should be 35 years instead of forever is kind of a silly notion. But the tragic notion is it was seven into 70 or 10 years. The money has had a half-life of 10 years except for the fact that in weak societies and in Argentina”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you went to them and you said, you know, do you think 2% inflation a year is good or bad? The majority would probably say, well, here it's good The majority of economists would say 2% inflation a year is good And of course, look at the ship next to us. What if I told you that the ship leaked 2% of its volume every something, right? The ship is rotting 2% a year. That means the useful life of the ship is 50 years. Now, ironically, that's true. Like a wooden ship had a 50 year to 100 year life, 100 would be long, 50 years. Not unlikely. So when we built ships out of wood, They had a useful life of about 50 years, and then they sunk, they rotted. There's nothing good about it, right? You build a ship out of steel, you know, and it's zero as opposed to 2% degradation. And how much better is zero percent versus 2%?”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, honestly, if you went to 100 people on the street and you asked them to define inflation, how many would say it's a vector tracking the change in price of every product service asset in the world over time? Not”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't appreciate that it's a bad thing and you think it's a good thing. So if housing prices are going up 20% year over year and I say this is great for the American public because most of them are homeowners, then I have misrepresented phenomena. Inflation is 20%, not 7%. And then I misrepresented it as being a positive rather than a negative. And people will stare at it and you could even show them their house on fire and they would perceive it as being great because it's warming them up and they're going to save on their heat costs.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the velocity of the money varies. I think the politicians, they don't really understand inflation and they don't understand economics, but you can't blame them because the economists don't understand economics because if they did, they would be creating multivariate computer simulations where they actually put in the price of every piece of housing in every city in the world, the full array of foods, and the full array of products and the full array of assets. And then on a monthly basis, they would publish all those results. And that's a high bandwidth requirement. And I think that people don't really want to embrace it. And also, the most pernicious thing. There's that phrase, you know, you can't tell people what to think, but you.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put the money in the stock market and you can trade it once a week. The settlement is T plus two. Maybe you get to two to one leverage. You might get to a money velocity of 100 a year in the stock market. You put your money into the crypto economy and these people are settling every four hours. If you're offshore, they're trading with 20x leverage. So if you settle every day and you trade with 20x leverage, you just went to 7,000.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, because money velocity is a scalar and inflation is a scalar, and we don't see 2% inflation yet, and the money velocity is low, and so it's okay if we print trillions of dollars. Well, the money velocity was immediate, right? The velocity of money through the crypto economy is 10,000 times faster. The velocity of money through the consumer economy. I think Nick pointed out when you spoke to him, he said it takes two months for a credit card transaction to settle. So, you want to spend a million dollars in the consumer economy, you can move it six times a year. You put a million dollars into gold. Gold will sit in a vault for a decade. Okay, so the velocity of money through gold is 0.1.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, they sort of fess up there's a problem, but they make it 95% loss over 100 years. What they don't do is realize it's a 99.7% loss over 80 years. So they will mismasure just the horrific extent of the monetary policy in pursuit of the foreign policy and the domestic policy, which they overestimate their budget and their means to accomplish their ends and they underestimate the cost and their oblivious to the horrific damage that they do to the civilization because the mental models that they use that are conventionally taught are wrong, right? The mental model that like it's okay. We can print all this money because the velocity of the money is low.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will attempt to do good and they will do it imperfectly and they will create oftentimes as much damage, more damage than the good they do. Most government policy will be iatrogenic. It will create more harm than good in the pursuit of it, but it is what it is. The secondary issue is they will unintentionally pay for it by expanding the currency supply without realizing that they're actually paying for it in a suboptimal fashion. They'll collapse their own currencies while they attempt to do good. The tertiary issue is they will mismasure how badly their collapse in the currency. So for example, if you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and look at the numbers printed by the Fed, they'll say, Oh, it looks like the dollar is lost 95% of its purchasing power over 100 years.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Government policy is inflationary. And another pernicious myth is inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena. You know, a famous quote by Milton Friedman, I believe. It's a monetary phenomenon that is inflation comes from expanding the currency supply. It's a nice phrase, and it's oftentimes quoted by people that are anti-inflation. But again, it just signifies a lack of appreciation of what the issue is. Inflation is, if I had a currency which was completely non-inflationary, if I never printed another dollar and if I eliminated fractional reserve banking from the face of the earth, we'd still have inflation. And we'd have inflation as long as we have government that is capable of pursuing any kind of policies that aren't. And them self inflationary, and generally they all are.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that What I could offer is constructive is. Inflation is completely misunderstood. It's a much bigger problem than we understand it to be. We need to introduce engineering and science techniques into economics if we want to further the human condition.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the significance of laser eyes is to focus on the thing that can make a difference. And if I look at the civilization, I would say. Half the problems in the civilization. Are due to the fact that our understanding of economics and money is defective. Half, 50%. I don't know. It's worth $500 trillion worth of problems. Money represents all the economic energy and the civilization. And it kind of equates to all the products, all the services and all the assets that we have and we're ever going to have. So that's half. The other half of the problems in the civilization are medical and military and political and philosophical and natural. And I think that there are a lot of different solutions to all those problems. And they're all honorable professions and they all merit a lifetime of consideration for the specialist. In all those areas.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As the ambition of the government expands, so must the currency supply. You know, I could say the money supply, but let's say the currency supply. You can triple the number of pesos in the economy, but it doesn't triple the amount of manufacturing capacity in the set economy. And it doesn't triple the amount of assets in the economy. It just triples the pesos. So as you increase the currency supply, then the price of all those scarce, desirable things will tend to go up rapidly. And the confidence of all of the institutions, the corporations, and the individual actors and trading partners will collapse.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The phrase from Quine's Towards movie Unforgiven, where he says a man's got to know his limitations. I think that a lot of people overestimate what they can accomplish and experience in life causes you to reevaluate that. So, I mean, I've done a lot of things in my life and generally my mistakes were always my good ideas that I enthusiastically pursued. To the detriment of my great ideas that required 150% of my attention to prosper. So I think people pursue too many good ideas. They all sound good, but there's just a limit to what you can accomplish. And everybody underestimates the challenges of implementing an idea. And they always overestimate the benefits of the pursuit of that. And so I think it's an overconfidence that causes and over-exuberance in pursuit of policies.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you were told that you would lose 95% of your assets and 90% of everything you will be taken from you, you might reprioritize your thought about a given policy and you might not vote for that politician.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, you know, when you trace this, what you realize is the government never pays for all of its policies with taxes for pain.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you don't want to use oil or natural gas, you have to pay for it. If you don't want to manufacture semiconductors in China and you want to manufacture them in the US, you've got to pay for it. If I rebuild the entire supply chain in Pennsylvania and I hire a bunch of employees and then I unionize the employees, then not only am I idle the factory in the Far East, it goes to 50% capacity. So whatever it sells, it has to raise the price on. And then I drive up the cost of labor for every other manufacturer in the U.S. because I competing against them, right? I'm changing the conditions. So everything gets less efficient. Everything gets more expensive. And of course, the government couldn't really pay for its policies and its wars with taxes. We didn't pay for World War I with tax. We didn't pay for World War II with tax. We didn't pay for Vietnam with tax.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think policymakers are well intentioned, but generally all government policy is inflationary and it's inflammatory and inflationary. So what I mean by that is when you have a policy pursuing supply chain independence, if you have an energy policy, if you have a labor policy, if you have a trade policy, if you have any kind of foreign policy, a domestic policy, a manufacturing policy, every one of these medical policy, every one of these policies interferes with the free market and generally prevents some rational actor from doing it in a cheaper, more efficient way. So when you layer them on top of each other, they all have to be paid for. If you want to shut down the entire economy for a year, you have to. Pay for it, right? If you want to fight a war, you have to pay for it.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, properties don't make such good mediums of exchange. They make better stores of value and they have utility value if it's a ship or a house or a plane or a bushel of corn.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Currency is the asset we use to move monetary energy around, and you could use the dollar or you could use the peso or you could use the Bolivar.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so if I'm draining the energy, I'm draining the blood from your body. You can't perform. If you adiabatic lapse is when you go up an altitude, every thousand feet, you lose three degrees. You go 50,000 feet, you're 150 degrees colder than sea level. That's why you look at your instruments and instead of 80 degrees, you're minus 70 degrees. Why is the temperature falling? Temperatures falling because it's not a closed system, it's an open system as the air expands, the density falls, right? The energy per cubic, whatever, falls and therefore the temperature falls, right? The heat's falling out of the solution. When you're inflating, let's say you're inflating the currency supply by 6%, you're sucking 6% of the energy Of the fluid that the economy is using to.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to use a physical metaphor for you because you're the jiu-jitsu, right? You get 10 pints of blood in your body? And so before your next workout, I'm going to take one pint from you. You're going to go exercise, but you're one piece, you've lost 10% of your blood. You're not going to perform as well. It takes about one month for your body to replace the red blood platelets. So what if I tell you every month you got to show up and I'm going to bleed you?”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In aerospace engineering, you want to solve any problem, they start with the phrase assume an adiabatic system. And what that means is a closed system. I've got a container. And in that container, no air leaves and no air enters, no energy exits or enters. So it's a closed system.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Creates a massive inefficiency in the society, what I'll call an adiabatic lapse. What we're doing is we're bleeding. Civilization to death.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's awful. I guess to be precise. It's the currency. I mean, money, I would say money is monetary energy or economic energy. And the economic energy has to find its way into a medium. So if you want to move it rapidly as a medium of exchange has to find its way into currency. But the money can also flow into property, like a house or gold. If the money flows into property, it'll probably hold its value much better. If the money flows into currency, if you had put a hundred thousand dollars in this house, you would have $305 return over ninety-two years. But if you would put the money $100,000 into a safe deposit box and buried it in the basement, you would have lost $99.7% of your wealth over the same time period. So the expansion of the currency”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now that gets you to start to ask a bunch of other fundamental questions and pay 3% interest and the money supply expands at 7 to 10% a year and I ended up making a 10% return on a billion dollar investment paying 3% interest. Is that fair And who suffered so that I could do that? In an environment where you're just inflating the money supply and you're holding the assets constant, it stands the reason that the price of all the assets is going to appreciate somewhat proportional to the money supply and the difference in asset appreciations is going to be a function of the scarce desirable quality of the assets and to what extent can I make more of them and to what extent are they truly limited in supply?”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure I'd go that far yet, but I would just say that If you had the human race doing stuff, And if you ask the question, how much more efficiently will we do the stuff next year than this year? Or what's the value of all of our innovations and inventions and investments in the past 12 months? You'd be hard pressed to say we get two percent better. Typical investor thinks they're 10% better every year. So if you look at what's going on, really when you're holding a million dollars of stocks and you're getting a 10% gain a year, you're really get a 7% expansion of the money supply. You're getting a 2% or 3% gain under best circumstances. And another way to say that is if the money supply stopped expanding at 7% a year, the S&P yield might be 3% and not 10%. It probably should be.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The money supply is expanding at 7% 100 years. If you actually talk to economists or you look at the economy and you ask the question, how fast does the economy grow in its entirety year over year? Generally about two to three percent. Like the sum total impact of all this technology and human ingenuity might get you a two and a half, three percent improvement a year.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“$30,500,000. So that's 92 years, 1930 or 2022. In 92 years, we've had 305x increase in price of the house. Now, if you actually calculate, you come to a conclusion that the inflation rate was approximately 6.5% a year. Every year 92 years okay and there's nobody nobody in government no conventional economists that would ever admit to an inflation rate of 7% a year in the US dollar over the last century now if you if you dig deeper I mean one guy that's done a great job working on this is Safety and Amos who wrote the book The Bitcoin Standard and he notes that on average it looks like the inflation rate and the money supply is about 7% a year all the way up to the year 2020. If you look at the SP index, which is a market basket of scarce desirable stocks, Returned about 10%. You talk to 10% a year for 100 years”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you took a survey of everybody on the street and you asked them, what are they thinking inflation was? What is it? You remember when Jerome Powell said our target's 2%, but we're not there. If you go around the corner, I have posted the deed to this house sold in nineteen thirty. And the number on that deed is $100,000, 1930. And if you go on Zill You get the Z estimate”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way to say it is a conventional view of inflation as CPI understates the human misery that's inflicted upon the working class and on mainstream companies. By the political class. And so it's a massive shift of wealth from the working class to the propertied class. It's a massive shift of power from the free market to the centrally governed or the controlled market. It's a massive shift to power from the people to the government. And maybe one more illustrative point here, Lexis Is uh, what do you think the inflation rate's been for the past hundred years?”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their first job that's saving money to buy a house, but it would be characterized as a benefit to society by a conventional economist who would say, well, asset values are higher because of interest rate fluctuation, and now the economy has got more wealth. And so that's. That's viewed as a benefit.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, the cost of social security went from a million dollars to $10 million. So if you wanted to work your entire life, save money, and then retire risk-free and live happily ever after on a $50,000 salary, live in on a beach in Mexico, wherever you want it to go, you had hyperinflation. The cost of your aspiration increased by a factor of 10 over the course of some amount of time. In fact, in that case, that was like over the course of about 12 years. As the inflation rate ground down the asset traded up, but the conventional view is, oh, that's not a problem because it's good that assets, it's good that the bond is highly priced because we own the bond. What's the problem with the inflation rate in housing being 19%? It's an awful problem for a 22-year-old that's starting.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, if I throw away an asset. Then I'm not on the hook to track the inflation rate for it. So what happens if I change the policy such that let's take the classic example, a million dollar bond at a 5% interest rate gives you $50,000 a year in risk-free income? You might retire on fifty thousand dollars a year in a low-cost jurisdiction. So the cost of Social Security or early retirement is one million dollars when the interest rate is five percent. During the crisis of March of 2020, the interest rate went on a 10 year bond went to 50 basis points. So now the cost of that bond is $10 million.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know your entertainment quota for the year to be eight Netflix streaming concerts, and now they don't cost $2,000. They cost nothing, and there is no inflation, but you don't get your concerts, right? So the problem starts with continually changing the definition of the market basket. But in my opinion, that's not the biggest problem. The more egregious problem is the fundamental idea that assets aren't products or services. Assets can't be inflated.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty much. I guess my criticism of economists is rather than embracing inflation based upon its fundamental idea, which is the rate at which the price of things go up, right? They've been captured by mainstream conventional thinking to immediately equate inflation to the government issued CPI or government issued PCE or government issued PPI measure, which was never the rate at which things go up. It's simply the rate at which a synthetic basket of products and services the government wishes to track go up. Now the problem with that is two big things. One thing is the government gets to create the market basket and so they keep changing what's in the basket over time. So, I mean, if I keep trying, if I said three years ago you should go see 10 concerts a year and the concert tickets now cost $200 each. Now it's $2,000 a year to go see concerts. Now I'm in charge of calculating inflation so I redefine”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They define a synthetic metric, right? I mean, I'm going to say you should have a thousand square foot apartment and you should have a used car and you should eat, you know, three hamburgers a week. Now, 10 years go by and the apartment costs more, I could adjust the market basket by, you know, they call them hedonic adjustments. I could decide that it used to be in 1970 needed a thousand square feet, but in the year 2020, you only need 700 square feet because we've miniaturized televisions and we've got more efficient electric appliances because things have collapsed into the iPhone. You just don't need as much space. So now I, you know, it may be that the apartment costs 50% more, but after the hedonic adjustment, there is no inflation because I just downgraded the expectation of what a normal person should have.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The conventional economic world, you would treat inflation as the rate of increase in price of a market basket of a consumer products defined by a government agency”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, that means that the value of a long dated bond immediately inflates. So the bond market had hyperinflation within minutes of these financial decisions. The asset market had hyperinflation. We had what you call a K-shaped recovery, what we affectionately call a K-shaped recovery. Main Street shut down. Wall Street recovered all within six weeks. The inflation was in the assets, like in the stocks, in the bonds. You know, if you look today, you see that typical house, according to the K. Schiller Index today, is up 19.2% year over year. So if you're a first-time home buyer, the inflation rate is 19%. The formal CPI announced a 7.9%. You can pretty much create any inflation rate you want by constructing a market basket, a weighted basket of products or services or assets that yield you the answer. I think”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An opportunity for sure, right? You know, if we take, for example, during the pandemic, the response of the political apparatus was to lower interest rates to zero and to start buying assets, in essence, printing money. And the defense was there's no inflation. But of course, you had one part of the economy where it was locked down, so it was illegal to buy anything. It was either illegal or it was impractical. So it would be impossible for demand to manifest. So, of course, there is no inflation. On the other hand, there was instantaneous immediate inflation in another part of the economy. For example, You lower the interest rates to zero. One point we saw the swap rate on the 30-year note go to 72 basis points.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wouldn't it be refreshing if somebody for once published a table of the change in price of every product, every service, and every asset in every place over time?”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most classical economics, it's always taught with linear models, you know, fairly simplistic, linear models. And oftentimes, I'm really shocked today that the entire mainstream dialogue of economics has been captured by scalar arithmetic. For example, if you read any article in the New York Times of the Wall Street Journal, right? They just refer to it, there's an inflation number or the CPI or the inflation rate is X. And if you look at all the historic studies of the impact of inflation, generally they're all based upon the idea that inflation equals CPI, and then they try to extrapolate from that, and you just get nowhere with it.”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know when I sit at my tea I studied system dynamics. You know, they taught at the Sloan School. It was developed by J. Forrester, who was an extraordinary computer scientist. When we've created models of economic behavior, they were all multidimensional non-linear models. So if you want to describe how anything works in the real world, you have to start with the concept of feedback. If I double the price of something demand will fall and attempts to create supply will increase and there will be a delay before the capacity increases. There will be an instant demand change and there'll be rippling effects throughout every other segment of the economy downstream and upstream of such thing. So it's kind of common sense, but most economic”
2022-04-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #276 – Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Inflation, and the Future of Money · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source