Once BITten Podcast - Michael Saylor and Daniel Prince.

thanks michael um i would

i'd like to ask you a question actually

which i don't think i've heard you talk

too much

on and i've listened to a lot of the

other podcasts funnily enough actually

when we

when we first emailed each other you

said yeah i'd come on the show i've got

about another 10 hours worth of stuff to

talk about and since then i think you've

done about another

10 podcasts so i've been trying to think

of of different things to to talk about

and one thing that

i'd like to explain is

your your education platform sailor.org

and the reason i ask is because i've

taken my kids out of um mainstream

school state education

uh we traveled around the world with

them for two and a half years uh

three out of the four are now online

platform learning self-directed

education

caitlin who just met chooses to go to

the local college

and i think you have a quite unique take

on on education and

what that means and and where this is

headed so i'd love to get your thoughts

on that please

sure yeah it's a subject near and dear

to my heart

um i grew up in a military family

my father's a non-commissioned officer

and

when i graduated from high school i

think the sum

total of my family's life savings for

200 years would have covered the first

six weeks

of college at mit it's

it's it's expensive now to go to college

it's always been expensive it's getting

more expensive

but my recollection then was

the life savings of a middle-class

family would pay

for halfway through your first semester

and then you're bankrupt

and so i the only way i went to college

was i got a scholarship from the air

force

and i went as an rotc cadet you know i

joined the military

and it was that or i just couldn't go

there right and um

when i got there it was it was an

obscenely expensive education paid for

by the united states government and

i remember my first class was physics

and i'm sitting in a physics hall and

every freshman at mit goes through this

class

and it holds like 500 people

you know it's a 500 person lecture hall

so you can imagine sitting at the very

back row of a 500 person lecture hall

watching someone come out

and and scrape on a blackboard and the

guy

is about a hundred feet away from me

and we're sitting in the back and we're

scribbling down and we're trying to

follow the lectures and then we go back

to our

our dorm or fraternity or wherever you

live and then you study the books really

hard

and then you take a test once a week and

for the privilege of that

they charged somebody the u.s government

or individuals they charged them

about the amount that a middle class

person would save in three years

expensive now if you fast forward today

it occurred to me at some point that

well couldn't we just record that

and put it online on a website and let

people watch

the lecture online and today if you go

to sailor.org which is my

non-profit organization you can find the

same

physics teacher and the same lecture i

watched

for free and by the way it's not just

for free

it's better because it's a lot better to

to start and stop the video watch it at

your own rate

and then be up close and be able to zoom

in

and see what the guy was scribbling on

the whiteboard

so it's not just free but it's better

now if you think about

you think about this entire subject

deeply and let's take mathematics

well when did they invent algebra

it's like it's not a hundred years old

right it's not

isaac newton invented calculus in the

calculus of variations and he published

principia mathematica

and that was what 1776 or something

so that's like 90 of all the higher math

you're ever going to learn

one guy printed in the 18th century

but most people you know they get

through algebra and geometry algebra's

thousands of years old geometry is

thousands of years old right

so here's the question why is there a

copyright on that

like why why do you have to pay for a

textbook why do you have to pay for that

education

by the way why do you actually need 250

000 math

teachers to teach something which is 2

000 years old and there's only one way

to teach it

it's like you know you wouldn't hire 250

000 people or

what would it take if we wanted to play

beethoven's seventh symphony

in your living room with the full

orchestra

wouldn't it be prohibitively expensive

to provide music in such a fashion

like it seems kind of ridiculous right

like like no i'm not gonna hire 250

musicians to play beethoven's seventh

symphony as my technique to give the

middle class people music

it's i mean it's somewhere between silly

and moronic right i don't know what you

want to call it but

so why is it that the the federal

government

or or a university would hire someone to

teach algebra

or calculus or calculus of variations

or matrix algebra or thermodynamics

or physics right in fact if you look at

all the mathematics and computer science

and

and engineering disciplines and then you

ask what are all the things you learn in

college

and then you say what do you what's

what's the portion of a college

education that

that can be decomposed into virtual

education and what's the portion that

requires physical education

well i get the country club aspects of

school like

sometimes you're actually paying for

school because you need someone to

babysit the kid

or you want to play tennis or you want

to meet people or you want to walk

through

you want to play golf or you want to

play intramural sports

or you need a place to live right there

there's that element

and then there's the element of learning

calculus

and now we get to this issue of um

if i hire a hundred thousand people to

teach calculus

are they all equivalent in quality or is

somebody better than somebody else

presumably in a bell curve there's

someone who's the best teacher and

someone that's the worst teacher and

everybody in the middle

you know and uh we only listened to

beethoven

or brahms or mozart right it was a

prices law

you know they said like there's five

this is jordan p i'm channeling children

jordan peterson

there's like five classical musicians

that are responsible for 50

of all music we listen to and

there's like five percent of their works

of that so

what's the idea behind sailor academy

the idea is why don't we just make

education

free for everybody forever and could you

well i can't make golf and ballet

lessons free for

every forever yoga is not you know i

can't quite

do some of these things but uh

jittered bug square dancing lessons and

and you know if you want to

like a laboratory maybe i can't quite

get that free

but anything that's virtually teachable

in theory you can decompose to the

textbook

the lecture the online examination

the the um the exercises

if you do that then you should be able

to upload it and if you upload it

you should be able to reduce the

variable cost from

what is it like it's it's two hundred

fifty thousand dollars of variable cost

for

a high-end college education in the

united states today

well shouldn't the variable cost be

reduced to the depreciation

on the computer and the electricity

yes so what is the real variable cost if

you wanted to learn

how if you wanted to learn math

shouldn't you be able to get a

mathematics degree for

about 97 in electricity

or maybe it's 19 of electricity instead

of 250

000 dollars so um

i started thinking about that and i

started this

more than a decade ago and the idea was

simply

create an online university now

i have one other observation on this

subject dan which is

if you want to cure cancer or invent a

fusion reactor

or go to mars or if you want to solve

the problem of global warming

whatever your problem is you want to

clean the oceans of the earth

all of the really difficult problems in

the world probably require

more than a high school education in

fact

if you think about school right high

school gets you to the point where you

can move through play to society

university undergrad gets you the point

where you recognize

knowledge exists everywhere a master's

degree gets you the point where you're a

master practitioner in some area given

given a set of tools and a phd

theoretically is defined as the point at

which you've mastered a body of

knowledge enough to make a seminal

contribution to the civilization

if you have a phd in biochemistry in

theory you're supposed to be able to

make a unique

contribution to the body of knowledge in

the human civilization

ergo you want to solve really difficult

problems you need to get to the graduate

postgraduate

phd level and last i checked there were

like

10 million phds in the world i mean

10 million to 20 million but i think it

was like 10 million

um and there's seven and a half billion

people in the world

so you want to make the world a better

place you need about a billion

phds well i mean what we really want

right

we don't really want 250 000 people to

teach algebra and calculus

and geometry what you want is a computer

to teach algebra

and calculus and geometry because the

computers first of all it's free

second of all it's on demand third of

all is probably better

much richer in every one which way you

know augmented with software tools right

like

you want to learn to build an airplane i

give you the lectures and i give you the

airplane simulator

and i give you the wind tunnel and you

design your airplane and the simulator

wind tunnel snaps the wings off and you

try it again

you don't kill anybody and eventually

you know how to design an airplane or at

least a nice glider

that makes sense so we can do that for a

million people for a nickel

right so i mean or or you can spend a

quarter million dollars at mit which is

the other

approach then it does take a rocket

scientist to figure out the problem here

which is there's no way you can afford

what's it cost for a phd a billion

people

times it's a million dollars to get a

phd five maybe five hundred thousand on

a budget in the western world and uh

yeah let's just say 500 000

times a billion

how much is that right a thousand

billion is a trillion right

five hundred thousand is 500

trillion dollars a lot of money

so even if you had the 500 trillion

dollars right who's got you know

can we actually do it the old-fashioned

way with bricks and mortar's

institutions so the answer is no it's an

intellectually

bankrupt idea but it's kind of silly

idea right

like why in the world do i have to

actually pay that much money to learn

how many people do you know that you

went to school with the new more

mathematics than isaac newton

knew because i don't know many

right not many isaac newton

put it all in the public domain dan

200 years ago and yet right now the

impediment

is a bunch of gatekeepers people char

you know charging expensive money for

textbooks expensive courses

you know expensive certifications and

we're going to hold back all these

people because they don't have five

hundred thousand dollars to get a

master's or a phd in mathematics even

though

the information's in the public domain

and you could

argue well you can download principia

mathematica from google but

you know we want to augment it there's a

lot of ways to augment it

so the fundamental issue is

education's too expensive but it

shouldn't be

and we need a lot more of it and the

only way to get a lot more of it

is to a drive the variable cost to zero

and b create software

to teach people you know software can

people will say well i need to go do

this well

you're not really i mean you can like

create a you can create a virtual

simulation

what happens when a you know when a

four-year-old kid can create a bridge

in a simulation um

and then build a bigger one and a bigger

one and then apply an earthquake to it

and then blow a wind past it and hit it

with a cat5 storm and then watch it and

then change the material on it and

then drive cars over it and put trucks

on it and then have um

you know a really heavy truck smash it

and then rebuild the bridge the right

way and they can do that all

instead of watching netflix between ages

of four and eight

maybe maybe we'll find some real

emergent geniuses like the mozart's like

the gauss's like the isaac newtons of

the world

because we give them those kind of tools

i i wasn't going to mit without an air

force scholarship

i wasn't going and i wasn't getting

those lectures and there was no internet

and now you know i guess the best that

can be said is today you can kind of

bypass that and go to youtube but we

still don't have

um as much formalized structured

education as we need

so my passion around the sailor academy

and sailor.org is let's just

make uh education free to everybody

forever

and uh we're just biting off one thing

at a time

you know the the stem science technology

engineering courses are the easiest ones

undergraduate um

we first started doing that then we

started doing cross accreditation with

other universities

in the next 36 months we expect to get

to the point where we're a degree

granting university it'll flip to be the

sailor university and then anybody can

get a full degree

and we'll expand the the course

offerings

you know as as time and capability allow

that's the idea man i'm all in

i love it this is music to my ears i've

been beating the drama against like the

the education system for well since we

left it it wasn't until we left it and

looked at it from

you know an outsider looking in and from

first principles that you realize

what it is and what it's become and what

it was actually

ever meant to be and um you know just a

way to

organize society and uh create factory

workers or soldiers

and it's pretty much the same system

so what you're doing i think is

absolutely incredible and

this this ties in nicely actually to

what i wonder about because

i've been hearing you talk about the

virtual wave a lot and obviously your

your first book was the mobile wave so

one i'm

i'm getting thinking perhaps there's a a

new book coming out at some stage called

the virtual wave

but this idea of

everything going virtual and what you've

faced at microstrategy

pretty much going from brick and mortar

company to virtual company

in the course of days and taking on

brick and mortar educational system and

taking that virtual as well

where else are we going to go virtual

and and are you going to write another

book

you know um i wrote the mobile wave

and uh you know that i kind of laid out

a future which is a future where

apple amazon facebook and google

dematerialize everybody and

and uh i think i made 50 000 dollars

in royalties on that book and nobody

read it

[Laughter]

on the other hand you invest 50 million

dollars in those stocks you would have

made 10 to 20x your money so

so it's the lesson i learned but by the

way

i invested in the stocks made a lot of

money

right my company got the benefit of me

marketing the book

you know and i got 50 000 in royalties

and and

i made a promise to myself if this

happens again

i'm not going to write the book i'm

going to buy the thing

as much of it as i could possibly buy

and then i'll talk about it and so the

virtual wave is kind of an inversion of

that

you know i the company invested its 500

million dollars

in the virtual wave and in this case

it's virtual gold

or virtual monetary energy called

bitcoin

and uh i'll talk about it but nobody

wants to read books anymore at least

by the time they read the book it'll be

over

so you know authors don't really get the

rewards

you know you have to actually take

action so yeah

maybe one day i'll write the book but i

kind of rather think that people

they learn via uh

via youtube podcast and podcasts and

youtube videos and the like

so you're probably better off just to

take action and tweet about the thing

which is how i feel about that yeah

let's talk about the virtual wave i mean

the virtual wave is

is a fascinating

the mobile wave was the

dematerialization of a lot of

stuff that could touch a mobile device

the virtual wave is the

dematerialization dematerialization of a

bunch of other stuff

a bunch of people a bunch of processes a

bunch of products

and if we take let's take university or

education

you know the virtual wave has really

accelerated the dematerialization of

and the decomposition of it i don't

think people in the education business

even understand what's happened

because the first thing that happens is

you shut down the campuses and then

people start to go online and they

attend classes online

but if you think about it as soon as you

start to attend classes online you

realize that

you know maybe the platforms you're

using aren't right and maybe the teacher

you've got

doesn't teach very well online and then

you're you're sitting in a very slow

slot you know stodgy lecture

and then you go on youtube and you

realize you can get find a better

lecture online on youtube

from someone that isn't at your

university

so if i'm really going to learn

thermodynamics

you know online from my professor at mit

maybe i would better rather learn

thermodynamics online

from the person that won the nobel prize

or maybe i'd rather

go to the khan academy or may you know

or i'm going to study the history of

winston churchill

or or somebody like that maybe i'll just

go online and listen to the speech

myself

maybe i'll just go online and learn from

winston churchill himself

he gave a speech i might find that on

youtube

so it starts to screw with your your

views

when i talk to my executives i say you

know

you can now zoom anywhere at the speed

of light and you can bend time and space

so what are you going to do with that

power and the bending of time and space

twist it screws with people because they

don't right nobody everybody likes the

idea that oh i can stay home and zoom

somewhere

that's that's not that threatening okay

here's the threatening part

we used to have 40 hours worth of

meetings in person

and 75 of it was a presentation

and then we went virtual we found that

we could just ask people to record the

presentation

as a video and submit it in advance of

the meeting

and so now my 40 hours of meetings

became eight hours of meetings

and you know what happens if i give you

a two hour video of all my thoughts

you run at 150 speed no

when you're watching something for

entertainment you watch it at one hour

equals one hour

but when you're listening to someone for

educational purposes you listen to

one hour equals an hour and a half for

one hour equals two hours

so you speed listen because most people

talk

kind of slow and take a while to get to

the point and it drives you nuts

so you're immediately more productive

and then of course

they start telling you something you

already know so you skip

so when you're actually listening for

education you go twice as fast

and you might go four times as fast so

now it changes

your view which is why would i invite 25

people

to a meeting to listen to someone talk

for an hour i could just send 25 people

the video

and they can figure it out but half the

people already know the stuff before

they get the video they already know it

only three people in the meeting that

are learning anything

and so now you start saying well what if

i had the ability to learn

everything i wanted on demand at my

speed when i want to

and then the next thing is well why do i

got to learn from you

well in business what that means is

our 40 hours of meetings become four

hours of meetings

okay you had to con what am i going to

do with the rest of my time

okay i i want to suggest another

disturbing idea for you what if every

time you met with me

i already knew what you were going to

say before you opened your mouth

you know what would our meetings consist

of

like like let's say you work for me and

and you run engineering

and i already know everything you're

going to say

and every presentation before our

meeting starts

so the meeting starts like it used to be

very comforting like you

lecture me for 45 minutes and at the end

of the meeting i ask a couple questions

we talk

you get to warm up in the virtual wave

the meeting starts at 8am and it goes

like this click click how are you dan

i'm good

so dan why is it going to take you six

weeks to do that with four people why

can't you do it with two people in two

weeks and i don't really want that

feature

and you go well i i guess we could do

that and i said well so and if you do

this can we do this this and this like

well i thought so but i can't do it last

thing okay so let's do the first seven

things and do it in half the time with

half the people right

okay click 803 am meeting done

yes but what do i do like

like a three minute meeting

the only reason to have a meeting with

anybody anymore

is negotiation interrogation

collaboration

i'm gonna i'm gonna interrogate you and

collaborate a little bit and negotiate

and then we're going to settle and the

meeting's over

so why would anybody ever come to a

meeting that isn't going to be party to

the negotiation

so that 40 people in the meet in the

room that took 40 hours becomes like

four people

in 15 minutes and now what are you

supposed to do with yourself

now let's take that to education

well everybody got kicked out of school

well so the next thing is i gotta

educate you gotta educate your daughters

yourself so now you

you're not limited to what the teacher

at school can you know

you have a fourth grade teacher what's

the odds that they're the world's best

geometry teacher

not high what's the odds that they're

the best you know

history not high what's the odds that

they're kind of

average and and moderately mediocre in

every possible way

pretty high you know if they're the

world's best musician or world's best

mathematician or world's best teacher

they would do it in front of an audience

of 800 000 people right

and they are by the way on youtube or

somewhere

okay so it kind of sends you into this

interesting spiral which is

why did i just go and put together a

stack of things for my

family to learn and then why don't they

learn them at their own rate

right there's a that classic right

you're really going to

handcuff everybody to a desk and make

them listen for eight hours straight

and they're gonna get one hour of this

and one hour of this and one hour of

this and one hour of this

and if they're smarter than everybody

else in the class they get dumbed down

and if they're dumber or they're slower

than everybody in the class

they get left behind and if everybody in

the class goes exactly at the same rate

in a regimented fashion for 18 years or

for 12 years then you get to graduate

from high school

so what do we do we had a regimented

mediocre 12-year

slog which tests your um

fortitude and your patience and if

anybody gets out of control

we dose them with adderall you know give

them a prescription drug

so that doesn't make a lot of sense and

uh

what does make a lot of sense by the way

you want another interesting observation

dan since the virtual wave hit

if someone asked to meet with me i get

really irritated

at having someone present to me irl

like in real life or that's to say if

you're

presenting to me where one minute equals

one minute

and i don't have a stop start skip

button and a speed up button on you

it's really an imposition it makes me

impatient

like i'm very impatient now like

another way to say it is like you wanted

to spend two hours

of my monday talking to me about

something why didn't you submit the

video

in advance so that i could cover your

two hours in like 37 minutes

on a saturday afternoon so that i could

actually reclaim my time

during the working day to do something

useful i'm irritated that you're

forcing me to take 120 minutes

and think as slowly as you speak right

but it's everybody can listen

50 faster than you can talk everybody

yeah

try it go back on youtube pick anything

punch it up to 150 percent

okay so now don't you think i just gave

you a third of your life back

and by and so now let's take that to

school let's apply that to 16 years of

education

can you imagine putting a billion people

through 16 years

of 2000 hours of mediocre

regimented authoritarian

you know force-fed uh

lowest common denominator you know

dogma it's like it sounds like a recipe

for

brainwashed mediocrity or at least but

forget about the

you know your value your view as to

whether it's a better or worse way to

educate someone

doesn't it sound like an expensive way

to do it

it's like custom manufacturing

everything so

how about a better way to do it what if

i'd just

uploaded everything you wanted to know

is streaming on demand

from kindergarten all the way through

20th grade and then what if the parents

or you know maybe you want to homeschool

your children but maybe what you want to

do is gather

with the neighborhood group if you want

your children to be together for social

reasons

maybe the emergence of a of a village or

neighborhood school system where there's

one tutor and that one tutor guides the

children and if you've got

a daughter that's going to actually get

through calculus of variations by age 14

fine let her go that fast if you have

you know someone that wants to learn

civil engineering

you know i i went to school you were

allowed to learn

uh latin or spanish

i think maybe french french or latin or

spanish those were your three choices

okay so like what was the odds i was

going to master russian or chinese it

was like

i wasn't getting that now you think

about it today and you think

well why can't we just give everyone the

ability to learn everything

for free whenever they want and the

answer is well we can

so i think you've got three

three things in the education

establishment right now that are vying

contending with each other

on one hand you've got the mission of

educating

and you can take um what is this like a

trillion dollar

your industry something it's some

god-awful expensive

thing you can take that and collapse

that by a factor of a thousand or ten

thousand

like if the united states government

invested a million a billion or two

a few billion dollars a year they could

upload all of the courseware in just

about everything

you could imagine and maintain it every

year for like

0.1 of the amount of money we spend on

education

so the production of education until

actually

that's a problem that can be solved

technically and the second

problem you have is the certification

regulation

you know of education it's like you know

i used to meet with people and i go

you know we can teach all these courses

in uh in virginia you know we could like

provide free education uh for all the

nurses in virginia on 75

of their courses and the person's like

well that's good we're not going to give

that to west virginia are we

we don't want them to have it like well

but you know but

okay i'm about to say well you know we

can actually give it to pakistan

and india and the world and they're

angry that we're going to give it to

west virginia

because we only want to do that in

virginia because

we can't have people from other states

getting the benefit of that

so there's an entire education

establishment that wants to control

uh control uh this by certification and

registration and licensing

that's a political problem it's not a

technical problem at all

you have to actually find somebody that

wants to educate the world

most of what we have is all about uh

creating scarcity and the credentials

right we all know about digital scarcity

there's a lot of creative scarcity of

educational credentials in order to hold

prices up

and then the third part of education

right is is the

is the country club nursery school

babysitter

you know bricks and mortar aspect that's

just in loco parentis

you know from k through 20 you know

something to do that's not going to be

solved

quickly and easily by technology what

happened this year is

people had to stop and reassess their

views on education

now um you asked about virtual wave i

just

i think this is just rippling like a

wave through everything the real

question is to what degree can you

virtualize and de-materialize the

product or the service

and and it's a cultural issue

as well as a political issue more so

than a technical issue

but i rather think i i think when the

dust settles

when the dust settles i think uh people

are going to realize

that a lot of concepts are obsolete

and they need to be reformed in in a

different fashion because of the virtual

wave

the way especially the concept of local

for example i said uh i say to people

the definition of local is you speak my

language

and you're in my time zone like you're

awake

in my time zone we're local right now

as long as you speak fluent english

and you're awake and and to the extent

that

you're not awake and you can't speak my

language then you're different

so if i redefine that then what's the

point of having local schools and local

universities and local businesses and

local

practitioners like like a local doctor

if you know at some point local

accountants

local service providers all that's

bending

and this you know when that happens the

second thing that happens is you start

to ask the question what can be

automated and what requires a person

and the third thing that happens is

it totally breaks down all the labor

barriers because

why can't i you know have the labor

coming from

eastern europe and then why couldn't it

come from any jurisdiction and what if i

don't know what the jurisdiction is and

and so you you've got a massive um

heat exchange heat a balancing

of of energies where instead of hiring a

why do i want to hire a 250 000 a year

accountant

if i can find someone that speaks

english that knows accounting

that costs 25 000 a year that lives

somewhere else as long as they're

if you work the lake late shift in

europe

it's the same as working the normal

shift in the us

and so that means somebody in lithuania

is just as local as someone in new

jersey

if they speak english and they want to

download new jersey tax code

and uh that i think that's going to

ripple through everything

and a lot of things and there's good to

it and there's bad to it and the

you know the implications a lot of

people haven't quite grasped yet but

they're

but they're happening pretty rapidly

so rapidly and you are clearly at the

forefront of this

and what what kind of blows me away

and many of the other bitcoin bitcoiners

in the space

that have um seen you

like uh come into bitcoin understand it

like the way you understand it and the

way that you tweet about it

and um very so far deep down the rabbit

hole that was such a quick

fall down to to grasp all of those it's

taking me like

five years like just to try and piece

all this together so either your your

mind is just

rapid and it just gets all of these

things and puts the uh pieces of the

puzzle together

or i don't know this like

this virtual wave that you're talking

about the bitcoin way that you're

talking about you

you've been ceo of microstrategy for 31

32 years

but is that right yeah since 1989

right and now i i'm just wondering

what do the people around you what do

they see

what what do they like all of a sudden

we were doing business

one way 30 years of doing business and

slight iterations and now all of a

sudden

completely on its head and i've heard

you say before

you're the kind of ceo that would never

even

think about remote work now you've

flipped that on the head

and you see the virtual wave clearer

than anyone

you can talk about it clearer than

anyone you've gone

so balls deep into bitcoin that's just

absolutely

mind-boggling what are people around you

that they must just see like this

completely different person

or are you prone to these kind of

u-turns before

well first of all the job of the ceo is

is to guide the organization and to

react

to changes in the environment so it's no

different than the job of every leader

of every organization right now and and

what you have is some people

taking decisive action there's plenty of

them i'm not the only one

i i'm i'm probably an obvious one in

bitcoin i'm not the only one in bitcoin

there are a lot of other very decisive

movers in bitcoin

you know stone ridge is a very decisive

mover in bitcoin

you know what jack dorsey is doing at

square is very decisive in bitcoin

you know what paypal is doing is very

disappointing in bitcoin so

there's a lot of decisiveness going on

um

i you should give yourself credit dan i

i pointed this out to dan hell too you

know so you took five years to figure it

out but

i had you i had five years of you

figuring out to accelerate me

right the basis of crypto

is this idea of proof of work and and

the idea of proof of work is

you exerted an obscene amount of time

and energy

or obscene amount of energy and and

encryption power

in order to solve a problem which then

it's very

it's a billion times quicker for every

other node

to validate that you solved the problem

that you did the work

so the asymmetry is the secret to how

the network

works and and so how do

things spread in time like for example

i'm an engineer i'm not a sci

newton you want geniuses newton

einstein mozart beethoven

they extracted stuff from the ether

that you couldn't do in a million years

that i couldn't do in a million years

if i tried a billions i couldn't do it i

mean

for thousands of years humanity worked

without the calculus of variations in

calculus

and newton that one guy probably

contributed 90

of everything around us that one person

looked up and extracted

so much physics astrophysics

now took him a lot of work or a lot of

something

how about every single math student that

came along after him how long did it

take them to figure out that calculus

was useful

like you think it's hard for me to

figure out that calculus is useful

no an engineer figures it out i'm an

engineer i'm a very pr

i'm not um an engineer is not um

dogmatic or or or um

well religiously against

things that work i give you a chip

i give you a math i give you a component

i give you steel

okay it's not by the way is it hard to

figure out

that steel's a good thing not really is

it

how hard is it to build the building

with steel

it takes some effort do you want a steel

building

yeah if i gave you 500 million dollars

and i said build a big building would

you use steel

yeah now could you invent

steel could you create the first steel

factor steel refinery that's hard

right steel refineries blow up they kill

everybody

right we could spend 10 000 years trying

to work that out that's

if you ever studied you know metallurgy

right materials

when you get to the part where you're

studying steel

it's pretty intense and they give you

all these um

thick books thousand pages steam

tables you know and and uh

you know what's the right amount of

carbon to mix into

you know into iron to get steel very

complicated