Michael Saylor

It's like the keeper of the flame. The keeper of the flame really means something when you have a city, a village, a civilization, a tribe, and you've got a fire and it goes out, you might very well die. You don't want that fire to go out, at all. Bitcoin and the Bitcoin blockchain is a fire. We don't want it to go out either. We talk about feeding the fire of Bitcoin and we talk about feeding the fire of faith and simply being the keeper of the flame. It was an old idea thousands and thousands of years ago. I suspect it's the difference between life and death for humanity for a million years.

Michael Saylor: [You know] the phrase, "You're playing with fire — be careful you might get burned"? And what makes human beings unique is, as far as I can see, they're the only animal that plays with fire. And from the point we started to play with fire, we started to evolve at a very rapid rate. Genetically, intellectually, sociologically we evolved.

It's sort of life's way to take the most energy-efficient strategy, right? That's why the eagle drags the goat off a cliff and lets gravity do its work. Instead of trying to fight it out. And it's interesting that you bring up fire and it's almost as if we were using it to energize our strategies in the world. I think as you put it earlier, channeling energy through our intellect. I think the one piece that maybe we didn't hit on as much is the intellect itself developed through trade and interaction. That's how we are more than the sum of our parts is through our cooperation. And that's at the kernel of all economics, right? We have these ideas, we swap them, they become better over time, and we get to energize better and better strategies.

I see these discussions: "Well paleo-man, they're all hunter-gatherers and they're all just like walking around chasing after things that are running away from them." | doubt it. Like if I dropped you into 100,000 B.C., I don't think you would've - solo— chase after a bunch of stuff with four legs. I think you would start by finding a canyon and start a fire on one end and dig a trench on the other end and let a mastodon trip on it and break its neck.

So I'm gonna use the fire for all of those things and eventually for communicating, but once I figure that out, I can use it for hardening, right? I can cook things, I can harden the tip of a spear, I can use it to work metals - eventually we used it to work metals, and that ushered us from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Fire is intrinsic to all sorts of manufacturing processes.

It's critical for seeing. You channel your fire and you can light up a cave, a camp, a tent, you can light up anywhere. And with seeing comes communicating. You ever travel through the ancient world you see they have all these watchtowers. The Romans built watchtowers. You put a fire in the tower, you can see it for miles and miles away. You create a signal system. A certain presumptive arrogance or ignorance among modern men — we think kind of everything worth doing was done in the past 2,000 years or 3,000 years. I kind of figure 100,000 years ago, people were doing all of this stuff. We might not have the writings of it, but they were pretty smart.